We are back to our international digital nomad life — this time, in Asia! We left Dallas on Monday and arrived in Seoul on Tuesday evening around 10:30pm Korean Standard Time (KST). We took a 40 minute Uber ride to our hotel near the Insa-Dong neighborhood in Seoul (which was inexpensive compared to an American Uber ride) We probably would have tried to take the train which is supposed to be pretty easy but our two huge bags and no sleep for 24 hours made the decision for us.
We stayed at The Garden Hotel — a modest guest house that had good reviews on Booking.com — it was clean and had great wifi but our room was very small. Also, Korean bathrooms are similar to some of the bathrooms we’ve experienced in Italy and Greece — one big room with a drain in the floor. We jokingly call it the shower adventure. With a little pre-planning you can get a shower in and it will be dry-ish before you have to use the bathroom again but it’s always a head-scratcher for us westerners.
We were awake early thanks to jet lag… and tried to seek out some coffee by wandering down to the Insa-Dong neighborhood. We couldn’t find an open cafe…(don’t Koreans drink coffee in the mornings???) We found a local coffee shop chain on a busy street — Mega Coffee! The Americanos were HUGE, 24oz in bright yellow cups (this place is Mega-branded in yellow everything) and Jess ordered a hot dog wrapped in puff pastry dough for breakfast. We sat and caught up on emails and enjoyed their K-pop-style commercials running on the monitors.
Caffeinated and ready to go, we only had one major attraction on our list for the day — Gyeongbokhung Palace.
Gyeongbokhung Palace
We had a really fun time wandering around the temple grounds — a huge space with access to just explore the palace, with the exception of inside the buildings. An interesting note about all the people you see in costume — these are called Hanbok. When we entered we saw signs with arrows pointing one way for “hanbok” and “tickets” the other way… what are hanbok? We just bought our tickets and finally put it together when we asked some women wearing these costumes to take our photo in one of the doorways (seen above, thank you!). I asked about their outfits and they told us you could rent them locally and the rental package included entrance to the palace. They had Australian accents and after learning they were rentals I noticed that there were many non-Koreans wearing these costumes as well. It certainly made the experience unique — seeing traditional Korean attire adds to the photos and the historical context of the palace.
Insa-Dong
After the temple we went back to the Insa-dong neighborhood to find lunch. We were wandering around a beautiful little street with art galleries when we stopped to watch two women making dumplings through a window. We looked at the restaurant entrance and saw that this dumpling place had a number of Michelin stars. A quick review of the menu and we were in the door. We were at the Gaeseong Dumpling House and the food was delicious.
Coffee at beautiful art and plants cafe near hotel
Ikseon-Dong
For dinner, we wandered into the Ikseon-dong neighborhood in search of Pork Belly & Beer. Sometimes we look at google or social media for ideas on where to eat or what to eat, but sometimes we just walk and look for restaurants where the food looks good and go for it. This was one of those. Ikseon-dong is a beautiful neighborhood of traditional Korean buildings, narrow alleyways, and quaint restaurants, bars, boutiques and cafés. Exploring was really fun, we had no idea about this neighborhood and so I’m really glad we found it — it was an experience I’d recommend to anyone who visits Seoul.
We came across a café that made Soufflé pancakes — we really have to stop window-shopping for food, but we couldn’t resist because there was honeycomb on display as one of the ingredients. They made each soufflé pancake to order so it took about 25 minutes to get our dessert. We sipped our orange essence tea and enjoyed the cozy atmosphere and the beautiful surroundings, observing the people around us, young people on dates, friends conversing over coffee. When our pancake arrived it was fluffy and delicious — the crunchy topping was a type of biscuit or cookie which was a nice contrast to the spongy soufflé, whipped cream, and honeycomb.
I got more video than photos in Ikseon-Dong, and even those don’t do a great job of showing Ikseon but I came across the blog below which will provide a good overview of how unique it is! Plus it has really nice photos of Ikseon-Dong:
Insa-Dong (Near our Hotel)
Breakfast — we were lulled in by a cozy minimal cafe which turned out to be an Abalone Porridge Restaurant — savory rice porridge with abalone. The flavor reminded me of genmaicha, the green tea with toasted rice if you’ve ever had that. It was rich and filling — the top was sprinkled with what looked like toasted rice or sesame (?) and crumbled seaweed (provided for a salty condiment atop the porridge along with nutty sesame seeds (?)). The combination of the banchan for pickled fermented tart and spicy goodness was really delicious and perfect on this cold and rainy day! Here’s a link to a recipe for Abalone Porridge. I had to google it so I could figure out why the color was such a deep green! Hint: it’s not seaweed….
We Ubered to Gimpo Airport and got there earlier than we could check in so we had a chance to check out some of the airport food. In our experiences it’s common to order through a large monitor, convenient if it has an option for english, but it usually will have photos of the food as well. The food exceeded our expectations — we ordered Kimchi with tofu and pork and an egg on top. It was delicious and the rice in Korea is unique as well, it’s a shorter grain and almost sticky like we might expect to be used to for sushi. But it holds it’s shape and has a bit of toothiness. We were impressed again at the quality and presentation of the meal, also very inexpensive considering what we’re used to paying for food at the airport.
Another interesting note is that South Korea is taking measures to reduce food and packaging waste — the food in the photo above is served in non-takeaway dishes. When we got through to the terminal we ordered coffee and a croissant hot dog (hot dogs are definitely a THING here!) and the guy asked if I was going to drink the coffee in the dining area. I said yes, and he said he couldn’t give me the coffee in a to-go cup and they didn’t have non-to-go cups… so I asked if I could get it in my contigo thermos bottle instead. I appreciate this but when I got back with my bottle he poured it out of the paper cup into the thermos then threw the cup away. 😦
The flight to Jeju Island was a little over an hour and was cloudy most of the way so we couldn’t see much, but we were able to see the coast as we flew into the airport on the north side of the island!
I tried my hand at a few Instagram reels to show all the amazing things a bit better for friends and family in an entertaining little snack. I got pretty frustrated trying to crop and resize video … I hate having to choose between vertical and horizontal formats but learned a lot in the process (and tried to LET IT GO).
Sending Love & Rocks 