NYPsit Hallym 2016!: Chuseok weekend (Week 3)

Hello everyone! Classes this week only had Monday and Tuesday. Everyone is preparing for Chuseok!

Chuseok (추석) is Korea's longest holiday. It is a major harvest festival and a three-day long holiday in Korea. It's a combination of our Moon cake festival, Grave visiting and Chinese new year.
During Chuseok, they pray and thank their ancestors for the good harvest. On the table, only freshly harvested crops are used - freshest rice, newly plucked apples.
It is also the time for families to get together and talk about their year. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

So, we got our Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and weekends off!
Of course, with such a long holiday, we didn't want to spend all of them up in the mountains.
We went to SEOUL!

Train to Yongsan (lol)

The train ride took us about an hour to get to Yongsan station directly from Chuncheon station. We then took a taxi to our Airbnb which was located just about 10 minutes walk away from Seoul station.

We had allocated seats on the train but were all being split up. I guess everyone is going home for Chuseok.

Yongsan Station!

We spent quite some time looking for the taxi stand when we reached Yongsan. We didn't understand where the arrows were pointing towards. But, we got it.

And here comes the legendary....

REAL MYEONGDONG!

It's like a really really really gigantic Orchard Road with tons of small roads to walk into, with more shops in between. They have all kinds of stores, from H&M to Innisfree, to Shoe stores, to Jewellery shops to Mask stores. It feels like anything and everything can be found here in Myeongdong.

This is definitely the real deal.
We managed to (kinda) finish walking between all the alleys and around Myeongdong.

There was just so many things to look at and so many shops to enter we took a solid 2 days to walk around.

Everyone says Korea is all about the street food. They all smell great everytime we walk pass the stores. They sell a wide array of delicacies. Strawberry mochi, sausages, Ice cream Taiyaki, dried squid, fruit juice, even glass noodles!
It was really hard to just watch when all of the food smells so good.

This was our dinner for the first day >

Why would you open two same stores side by side?
Why not? It's Myeongdong!

Here are some of the street delicacies we tried!

ice cream waffle

strawberry mochi

sausage with cheese sticks

All the food was making us hungry all the time we were walking around even though we had dinner earlier.

It's okay to "dabao".
Just buy everything.

Sneaked a wefie with their cute caps

that Brown is HUGE!

We also found the Line store in Myeongdong!

We went there on Thursday but since it was Chuseok, the store was closed.
We went back the next day, on Friday, and hurrah! It's open!

Line seems to be everybody's favourite. The store was packed with customers, and many people queued up just to have a picture with Brown (picture on the left).

We bought bags full of gifts and little line goods for ourselves.
They were just too cute, we couldn't resist!!
We'd probably buy everything if we had the money to.

Oh! YG!

That night, we went to Lotte Mart, which was near our Airbnb. It's like our NTUC just that it's probably much bigger, with more customers.

Edible fish

They had rows and rows of snacks, even beauty stores like Etude House and Innisfree inside! The beauty stores are smaller, like a pop up store instead of a real physical one but it's the same thing.

It had Toys' R Us, MUJI and Uniqlo on the second floor, and even a pet shop!

not edible fish

they look like mochis

There was a parrot on the lady's hand when we walked pass. It was really cute.

They had fishes, hamsters, snails, beetles, hedgehogs, guinea pigs and birds on sale.

On Saturday, we went to a raccoon cafe in Yongsan!

We had to order to be seated!

Yes, raccoons. There were 2 black-grey raccoons and 1 all white raccoon.
The main attraction? A small little corgi pup in the store!
Just kidding. But the corgi pup was really cute.

yes, they let visitors do this

The chocolate cake was really delicious and was only for 5000Won (SGD $4.50).

How rare.
We dont have raccoon cafes in Singapore, do we? It's not everyday you get to see raccoons.

They were really cute and fat. We also didn't know that raccoons could climb.

fattest

fat

After the cafe, we went back to being 2000% tourist.

Seoul Tower!

Before we went up to the tower, we stopped to watch them perform! It's a kind of traditional performance. The photo on the left was the first. It was very entertaining. It was an uproar as they played the drums while they performed. The photo on the right is a performance for the king back in the Tang(?) Dynasty. It's a martial arts and swordsmanship performance. They sliced bamboo sticks right in front of our face.

Island is lost in the horizon!

Up on the highest floor, they had an array of glass panels with the names of countries and cities in that direction.
We walked down the aisle and managed to find Singapore!

No, we couldn't see Singapore from where we were (lol).