First thing in morning was to grab some wrapped food from the convenience stall as we want to head out early to the Gyeongbokgung Palace before 10Am, just in time for the guard changing ceremony.
OMG…look at the crowd!
It was pretty easy to go there by subway to either Gyeongbokgung Exit 5 (Line 3) or Gwanghwamun Exit 2 (Line 5).
The guard changing ceremony:
The palace is just a beautiful place! Pictures always speak a thousand words!
I am quite intrigued by this, Not sure how it works
I saw this sun dial looking thing and I was trying to figure out the characters on the dial itself to see if I can make sense of it. Unfortunately, I am still as clueless as now.
The gardens are beautiful enough to give a nice backdrop:
We headed out of the palace to walk around the park nearby as le fiance was quite interested in flowers. He is more of a flower person than I am and kept taking pictures of the flowers while I wandered aimlessly around to read up the history of Korea and description of the statues that were located at the park itself.
It was nearly 11am when we decided to start walking to our planned lunch venue which is the famous Tosokchon (토속촌)! I am pretty kiasu so I want to go there earlier to avoid the lunch queue so we reached there about 11.30Am with no queue in sight. It was quite hilarious because we keep finding our way by expecting to see a long queue when we actually walked past it. If you are coming by subway, you can get off at Gyeongbokgung station Exit 2 (Line 3) and Walk straight about 200m before turning left onto Jahamun-ro 5-gil Road. Tosokchon will be just ahead on the left.
We ordered just the normal Ginseng chicken for both of us. And quite disappointingly, we did not feel any “wow” factor and we were wondering why is it so expensive yet so bland. After we came back to Singapore, a friend mentioned that we supposed to pour ginseng wine into the soup so that it will be delicious.
The two cups of ginseng wine that we totally missed out!
But we don’t remember any wine given to us so we looked back at the photo…to our horror, there were 2 cups of wine! We didn’t even drink it! URGH…the agony! The waitress didn’t mentioned anything either 🙁 So according to my friend’s advice, pour the wine in the soup!
Next stop is to look for cherry blossoms! We went a week later than the blooming week so most of the trees were quite bare. Hence, we decided to try going to Yeongdeungpo Yeouido spring flower festival which is near National Assembly subway (Line 9) where we walked one round around the National Assembly Building.
Thankfully, there were rows of cherry blossoms that were still at their peak! Along the route, we enjoy the scenery and take pictures mainly. There are some hardcore photographers who will actually shake the tree branches to bring the petals down while taking pictures/videos too! Food pushcarts were also quite common, selling mostly the same varieties.
He loved cuttlefish so we got 2 which sold 2 for 5000 won. Bad choice as the cuttlefish was too hard and tasteless for our liking and pretty pricey for that kind of quality. As I was still sick, I was banned from getting other food as most are fried so we just walk around slowly until we reach the end of the route.
Next stop in the evening was to stop at Namdaemun Market which is at Hoehyeon Station Exit 5 (Line 4). Well, we were quite disappointed because it was nothing much to see and since we were not much of a shopper, we just scroll around quickly and bought some bread for next day photo shoot snack (which taste horrible and had to throw away the rest). We headed back early to rest after dinner, which was just simple ramen at a stall near our accommodation, since we have to wake up early to head to the venue at Wondong to meet the photographer.
Day 3 will be the photo shoot day which I am so tempted to wait until after my wedding to blog about it because I didn’t want to show wedding photos as spoilers. I’ll probably change my mind and blog it on my next korea post, but will only show those that will not appear in my album. I shall see how it goes!
One last picture before calling a day:
I love this scenery!
Much loves <3
