More of the same of Korea - March and April 2024 - Page 9

The underground route still contains the piano staircase, which encourages you to jump 8 or 9 stairs at a time to play various tunes. Over 13 people have died attempting moonlight sonata here.

I was relieved that the underground display of tools and light bulbs remains. I am still in a bit of shock from yesterday when they took away my stance duck on Namsan.

There are lots of eclectic stores along the underground journey.

Among the areas of stores dedicated to various things is an entire section of old camera shops.

There are also parts without shops, just liminal space. Apparently liminal is not a real word despite being supremely popular lately.

The last section of underground is dedicated to shops full of places that make sporting clothes with your local teams logo on them.

I exited the underground at Dongdaemun design plaza, this child was chasing pigeons. I thought the photo would be better than it is.

A lot of shiny metal, and unusable internal space.

The roof does however have grass.

In addition to the metal, there is also a huge amount of polished concrete.

Last one.

My journey now crossed my beloved drain, lined on both sides with clothing manufacturers.

The gate in the middle of the road signals the start of the journey up the hill.

A very Japanese style thin apartment building.

One side of Hyehwa is shopping and restaurant streets marketed to University students.

The other side is all the theatres and art galleries. Also related to nearby arts universities.

However, there is Jami the Hong. I know for a fact the Hong in Hong Kong means 'fragrant' so basically this place is called Jami the smell.

While we are on about smells, you might recall a few weeks ago I showed a take your own photo place with reviews about how the place really captured the fragrance? Well apparently, there are places in Korea that capture your fragrance? This seems obscene.

One of the streets on the theatre side of Hyehwa.

The main theatres (since 1981) are a network of these red brick buildings.

It was now time to wander up Naksan for the view. It has a theatre too.

A view, without wall.

Now for some wall shots. Still pollution free today, check out the mountains.

That is the direction I had come from... largely underground.

Some more wall.

Alongside the wall are a lot of retro style hipster cafes.

Descending the last part of the wall, and I am back at the gate in the road and the Dongdaemun plaza, ready to head back underground.

For my last shot of this day, I once again crossed my favourite drain, which also has clothing manufacturers on both sides in this direction too.

Here is Namdaemun market, the local fabric market. It is mostly underground and I am amazed it has never burnt down (up?) yet.

A bit more market.

These are parking buildings Korean style. You place your trust in the machinations of the car stacker, and hope it does not get stuck for any reason, which generally requires a controlled implosion to bring the car chimney down.

To cross over to Seoul station I took the overpass, which is more interesting after dark.

Good view.

You can get a view of the overpass from a view point on the overpass.

Now for some Yongsan station experience. Here is the view from the station entrance.

The roof garden is multi levelled. Good times can be had here still, but it was better with dinosaurs.

The food court is fantastic. 20 good places to choose from, and a lot of places to sit.

However, I opted against the food court and instead went to a vegan restaurant. My choice that drew me in, 'soft tofu from hell'. It was pretty delicious. They were generous with the bread.

Ring appreciation time.

I was here minding my own business when a criminal monk from one of the warring monk gangs decided to try and scam me for a karma fix.

I was going to walk back, but it started raining. This is Namdaemun market again, where the roads are lined with fabric.

At this point of the short walk back to my hotel from the local station, I realised I had made the correct choice in not walking back from Yongsan.
Like I said above, tomorrow is a hiking day (the last one!), with a possible weather forced late start.

The Korean weather service predicted the rain would stop at 10am. They were exactly right. This road looks strangely familiar...

Walking up the road in the above pic, I stopped at a convenience store for my supplies and thought that looked really familiar too, then I got to this gate and realised, hang on, I have done this hike before. I spotted this mountain range a couple of days back, searched for it on my site, could not find it. Refer to the huge rant above for a more thorough explanation as to how that occurred.

There are a lot of military bases all over this mountain. I heard the rifle range live fire drills going most of the day. Also there are public toilets.

Lets start with a silvery view of still wet leaves and clouds. There will be a lot of view shots today.

The path was less rocky than most trails. Sandy but not slippery. I think the rain makes sand less slippery.

Much of the trail has barbed wire to keep you out of the real military base, but I suspect the whole mountain used to be a base because there are probably 6 or so abandoned pill boxes to hide in.

Some more low down view.

Mid hike, and if you feel like doing the steering wheel exercises, Buramsan has you covered.

Sand, and trees. Also photo 1000! It has been a few trips since I hit 1000 photos on a trip.

Great clear views today, so I will go overboard, more so than usual.

Giant rocky peaks coming up soon.

Eventually, all trails become rocky.

This is today's helicopter landing pad. The last one of this trip. After here you go down a bit before going up to the main peak.

And now the fun starts. Rocks that require concentration to safely ascend. Thankfully not slippery.

You can see the pins hammered into the rock to assist. Also other people.

Very near the top now.

Nice cloud. If you squint and look into the trees you can see a brown mobile phone tower.

Very steep. Today's hike was probably the most technically challenging of the whole trip.

A view with trees and rocks.

There is the summit, with the Korean flag. BTW, in South Korea, they never refer to it as 'South' Korea, just Korea.

So many great views.

That is the direction from where I had come.

Maybe the best view of the day, so many to choose from.

I will now go over all those rocks and then down. There are a lot of ropes and pegs hammered into rocks involved. You can see the train station half way up the left edge of this photo. It is from there that I took a photo of today's hike on my way to my previous hike 2 days ago, when I changed trains at that station.

Probably the last selfie. Nowhere was really stance suitable today.

I took a different path down compared to last time. It was rockier. Very fun.

Really very steep. I needed both hands and went down backwards.

There are still more rocks to appreciate.

Then the path became very damp for a while.

This was really the only slippery part of today's journey.

Nice light with the dark clouds and almost sunshine on the distant mountains. I have climbed all those mountains previously, including in the first week of this trip at Suraksan. I just had a look at that post from April 2, and it is amazing how much greener everything is now compared to 22 days ago.

And still more rocks to go down.

2nd to last view shot of this trip (maybe).

OK, final view shot from a HIKING day of this trip.

And this is where I exited Buramsan mountain natural park (as I found out it is definitely called). No farms today, just high rises.
No more hiking, sad trombone.

This is the post office. Blinding reflections lighting up the whole road.

It was about here that I decided not to go up to the tower again.

Instead I wandered around the road at the bottom of Namsan park and checked out the streets below.

The streets here are indeed very interesting.

Back to Myeongdong, and it is still busy.

I found a very nice underground bookshop. There are often not a lot of actual books for sale in book shops in Asian countries.

And since I had already had an ice cream, a small dinner was what I was after. Eggplant risotto. Not bad, small serve like I wanted. I really wanted the Taiwanese beef noodle soup in the Lotte food court, but securing a seat there seemed like I might need to win a fight.
Tomorrow is not a hiking day. It is the last full day in Korea. I have no plan!

First I swung past my beloved drain. I was wearing shorts even though it was only 8c, probably the coldest morning of the entire trip.

Until the 1960's there was an entire tram network. It was ripped out to make way for cars under American influence.

Here is the gate to Gyeonghuigung Palace. I will not be typing that again. This entire place is a complete re-creation. I will explain why shortly.

The grounds are very nice.

Not a single other person around.

There were signs explaining that it was rebuilt in the 60's, the original buildings were dismantled by the Japanese in about 1910 and repurposed in various places as Japanese temples. So there you go, Japanese temples are in fact, Korean.

New looking because, Japan.

Out the back there is a famous rock, it says it is a natural fountain. I saw no evidence of this.

My journey south took me past the main Seoul station. A photo of the old part was requested. Here is the best I can do from this side of the road.

Now for the war memorial. Those people in the foreground are part of a Chinese tour group. I found that interesting.

As soon as you enter the main entrance, you get this makeshift Dokdo island display. Korea and Japan are currently technically at war over this random rock.

I mentioned when I visited Incheon recently about General MacArthur smoking a pipe as he rode a horse into battle. Well here is the actual pipe.

This is one third of the memorial building, with an old boat.

These may look like models, but they are full sized real aircraft.

Yes.

It is not all about the Korean war, there is info about modern stuff too.

I do not know what this is, maybe it is actually made in Korea. Strange that it had a room dedicated to it.

There is also pre Korean war stuff, like cannons, but also swords and funny hats.

A mustang.

Outside the museum proper is the military theme park area. I did not really remember the inside from my previous visit, but I definitely remember this bit. Also, blue sky has returned.

First I will check out some helicopters. The Apache is too popular so they had to lift it off the ground.

A Phantom. They are huge.

I cannot remember exactly what this one is.

The Phantom is bigger than expected, where as the B52 is much smaller than I thought. I remembered I thought the same thing last time.

There is also a boat, with bullet holes. Full of kids playing on it.

And just to round out this bizarre experience of children playing on historic war vehicles, they have added cartoon characters to pose with the B52.
OK that is enough war for today. It is coincidentally Anzac day too.

Konkuk university is far enough out of town that the subway is elevated, so yeah, not really a subway then.

This is the university side of the road, the other side is apparently a Chinatown of sorts, but it is a bit hard to tell.

The sun was setting, also, pollution came back.

There is a cinema nearby, and a few of these popcorn shops around. I wonder if you can buy popcorn from here and take it into the movie? I presume people do that with tea drinks in giant plastic cups, because I have never seen a person without one at all times. Presumably when you go to the mounding ceremony when someone dies, you stand around with some sort of tea drink in one hand and a smoke in the other?

More photos into the sun.

I tried earlier today to get into the Lotte basement at the branch near my hotel for lunch. Once again there were so many people there that the chances of me getting a seat on my own were zero. Here at Konkuk there is also a Lotte department store, but it is also joined to an Emart, and there is an entire underground street full of restaurants.

My mission to find a reasonably expensive restaurant that would take cash ended at the Japanese chain of Saboten. I normally don't go for Tonkatsu, but the advertised special was just a small pork schnitzel with spicy beef udon. There is a whole etiquette guide to eating here, which involves grinding your own sesame seeds. Anyway, it cost about $15 Australian, and they took cash, so I got to use some of my remaining Korean Won.

There are 50 or more stalls along here featuring fortune tellers, palm readers, tea leaf readers, tarot card readers. Weird.

Starting to get dark now. It gets dark later and later here, almost as if it is about to be summer.

Lots of neon.

I have ranted about the take your own photo and pay for it studios a few times. This one features a camera inside a dummy dryer. You pay for this. There are 20 pay to have your photos stored on our servers to be harvested for your biometric information places on this street alone.

Last one from Konkuk, this one has the train line going above. I waited for a train to come but you cannot see it from this angle.

And for the last pic this evening, just a random corner near my hotel to prove that I was out after dark! A rare thing indeed.