Walking up to the Seoul Tower

We got up this morning about 7am, though I stayed in bed for a bit longer while Moccle had a shower. I had a shower too, and then we went down for breakfast.

The 'restaurant' was just a small room with three tables in it, each with two chairs, and a table with some food on it. The table had on it: Two toasters and some bread; A big pot of rice stuff (was quite liquid); 2 pot/trays of weird stuff that I guess you have with the rice soup stuff; basket of margarine/jam packet things. There was also a fridge, which had 'fruit juice' (seemed to be fizzy drinks) in it.

There was two ladies sitting at one table, and older bloke at another table, and a young bloke at the other table, all Koreans I think.

After breakfast we walked up the hill to Seoul Tower, which was quite tiring, as it's a lot of steps. When we were partway up, but not too far from the top, we stopped at a place where there was a couple of drinks vending machines, and also a fridge with drinks in it. We bought some drinks from the fridge, and had to pay an old lady there who was in charge of it.

When we got to the tower, we bought some tickets to the observatory, which were 7000 Won each. We had to wait in a queue for quite a while to get the elevator up to the observatory, then when we wanted to come back down again, we had to wait in a queue for ages for the elevator back down. The view from the observatory was great though.

When we came back down, we walked around the bit at the bottom of the tower, and the fence there was covered in locks that had love messages written on them or attached to them. You could get good views from there as well.

We started walking back down the hill, but by a road instead of steps. Partway down we came to a park, which was filled with exercise machines, weights etc. There was an old bloke kicking his foot above his head on a pole things, and some kids playing on some of the other machines. We had also seen one of these parks on the way up (but not accessible from where we were at the time), it seems they have them instead of playgrounds.

Further down the hill was a path going off away from the road, so we went down that, which seemed to just be a path going up the mountain through the forest. When we realised it was going back up the mountain, we turned round and went back until we got back to the road down the mountain.

When we got to the bottom of the mountain, we had to try and find the way to somewhere to eat, since it was now about 3pm, and we hadn't had any lunch. I was hoping we'd be able to find a shop in a park so we could eat lunch in a park. We did find a park, but it didn't have any shops (other than a closed down one) in it. However, it did have a couple of blokes playing a weird game, with a crowd watching them. They had a small board with some pieces on it, and a rectangle split into two marked out on the floor with chalk. One bloke would throw 4 bits of something (they looked like fat white dominoes, but instead of spots, one side white, and the other side brown) into the other bloke's half of the rectangle. Someone did tell me what it was called, but I can't remember. Bing something I think. Further on there were blokes sitting on benches, one on each end of the bench, playing what looked like checkers, but might have been something different. Then a bit further on there was some kids playing badminton in an open area of the park.

Eventually we got back to the hotel about 5pm, still without having had anything to eat (though I wasn't hungry). I copied all my pics to one of the hard drives I'd bought with me, which took absolutely ages, then we went out again about 9pm to try and find somewhere to eat. We did find a district that had a lot of restaurants, so after wandering about for a bit we eventually settled on one that had the English descriptions of some meals and also their names in romanised language, so we just to had to remember what the name of the one we wanted was. It was totally hot, really burns your lips and mouth, though the actual taste was nice. The waiter puts the Dakgalbi in a big metal bowl that's on the table, then turns the heat on under the bowl (the table has a built in cooking hob), then comes back every so often and stirs it round until it's cooked. It cost 13,500 Won, and was a decent meal for both of us. We couldn't eat it all though, as it was just too hot (spicy).

When we got back to the hotel, I wrote the blog post for what we did on the first of October.

Food
Breakfast: Slice of toast with strawberry jam; cup of fizzy grape drink.
Dinner: Dakgalbi; Kimchi; salad; Macaroni (or something similar); weird slices of something green; soup with seaweed and carrot in it.
Supper: Boost; cup of Maxwell house coffee mix original.