The day started with heading back over to the financial area to visit two of the three remaining palaces that are spread out right in the heart of Seoul. The first was the Jongmo Shrine, which actually is a Confucian temple, but located right below the more noted Changdeokgung Palace grounds. The Jongmo Shrine is more like an actual park with a lot of tree cover, that happens to have a few temples strewn around. The only real negative I encountered was that the main building is going through some refurbishment so the facade was covered.
After that was a quick stop for about the most homely meal I've had - at the Jongmo Kalguksa (noodles), which was down a few alleys. The place is definitely known and popular, as when I got there around 12:15, there was already a short line, and by the time I left aroudn 1pm there was a fairly lengthy line. The place has a relatively short menu of either dumplings (large, giant tasty dumplings) or noodle soup or a combination, of which I got the combination, About two minutes later I was given a giant bowl of hand-cut noodles (potato based, if I understood the translation correctly) with three dumplings floating in there, one bowl of kimchi and was eating and slurping away. I'm sure there are many places in the bowels of Seoul like this one, but for whatever reason this one has resonated well and the food was quite good.
The next stop was the Changdeokgung Palace, which sites about one km to the East of the Gyeongdukgong. I found fairly little why some Joseon kings chose one over the other to use as their grounds. The Gyeongdukgong felt a bit more regal, but the Changdeokgung is more known for the beauty of the surrounding grounds. They have a 'Secret Garden' tour for half the grounds that due to covid is only open to tour groups, so that was a bummer, but even then the area was really nice. There were about 5-6 palace buildings and courtyards to go through, but these had ponds, trees, hills adn flowers built in and around them.
The star is probably the Changgyeongung Palace, which is an offshot right off one side of teh Changdeokgung, that houses its own palace complex and a really nice, large lake with an island in the middle, and a arboreum at its center. If there's a way to try to describe the difference between the two park/palace complexes, the Gyeongdukgong is a Palace Complex in a park, this one was a park that had palace buildigns in it.
After leaving all that behind, I strolled around Insadong a while, this being noted as a consumer-focused shopping district, befit with many pedestrian only streets. The northern part of the district was more interesting, with cool little boutiques, and a art and craft emporium named Ssazingil at its center with four winding floors of little stalls and shops, all local artists and jewelers. The atmosphere in that part of Insadong was lovely, and actually what I was looking for to score some interesting souvenirs. Further south in Insadong is a bit more commercial and tourist focused. There were a handful of clear tourist trap type shops but with those excepted, the area is still good as a place to get souvenirs and knick-knacks to commemorate your time in Korea.
It was after some perusing and purchasing (nothing major, still leaving some souvenir shopping for tomorrow, my last day in Korea) that I went on a tour of parts of the city that now seemed far more reachable due to the fact that Uber was workable. First was the the DDP (Dongdaemun Design Plaza) a part art-museum, part art-exhibition, part-park all wrapped into a modernistic winding glass structure that sits central in the very trendy art-forward area of Dongdaemun. The building is fascinatingly built and has a lot of angles and scupltures to make it just a really pleasant place to walk around. It had one of the more enticing art stores in the center, but I avoided as nothing really screamed Korean when looking at it vs it just being a lot of really cool stuff.
From the DDP, I really took advantage of Uber and went over to the South of the River part of Seoul (where Gangnam sits) and further East into the area that houses the Lotte World Tower, the sixth tallest building in the World. Much like the place I'm starting to really compare Seoul to (Taipei), the Lotte World Tower is almost laughably taller than any other building around it, or in Seoul as a whole (except for a CN Tower-type structure at its center). The building is massively tall, and next to it is a standard mall - that had an adorable Pokemon festival going on - alongside a mall with all high end stores (the types that make you queue up for no real reason), and an amusement park. Other than these buildings, I'm not sure what else would bring you to this part of Seoul. It seems a lot more sterile than the rest of the city, but it was worht the trip to get a view of the Lotte World Tower. Somehow, even at 31, seeing really tall buildings still gives me a kick. Especially in this case when nothing around it is even 30% as tall, so you do get fully unencumbered views of the building.
Fro my daily craft brewery stop, I ventured away from Mysterlee, to the Amazing Brew Co Taproom. It wasn't my first choice, but nothing seems more impacted by Chuseok more than breweries closing for multiple days in a row. Amazing had a really nice set-up and a crap town of options for stuff on tap. My worry whenever I see a place like this is that they got for quantity over quality, but the three beers I sampled were all pretty decent hazy IPAs or Weisses. In the end, I think Mysterlee is probably higher quality, but it was good to try another place out and Amazing Brewing was still good. It's sad I'm not going to be able to see more than these two and I'll do a new one tomorrow, but so far Korea has really impressed in terms of beer quality.
For dinner and the night activities, I wanted to explore the one area of Seoul nightlife that I hadn't yet - Gangnam. Now, it is not a weekend so it would be a bit easier to do so - I'm sure all three of the places I went to would have required waits on a weekend situation. For dinner, I initially wanted to go to Ichie, which is a noted Izakaya restaurant in Gangnam that isn't super expensive. Thinking that there may be a wait, I scrolled around on Google maps looking for some backup options, to which I found a lot of upscale korean bbq joints. Some were full out tasting menu types (e.g. $150+), while some were more traditional, but offer higher quality, dry-aged, premium meats. In the end I went to one of those, named Uga, which was as it presented - a place that offered dry-aged ribeye korean bbq, where the server does all the grilling for you, along with cutting up the beautifully marbled meat into various types and sizes. It was all a bit fascinating, and very, very tasty. If anything, the size of that and the fried kimchi rice side, was all a bit too big. I wasn't going to let one bite of that meat go to waste though.
A couiple blocks away from Uga, on what on this Monday evening seemed like a dead street, are two underground speakeasy style cocktail bars of well repute. These places are gtenerally packed but given it was the start of a week after a long weekend, they were less so and they were both great in their own way. My favorite of the two is Alice, which is loosely themed as an Alice in Wonderland bar, undergorund with a staircase of flowers to lead you. They had giant comfy chairs at the bar, where you can pick between 20 special cocktails, or a larger list of "traditional" cocktails. I stayed with the special ones, organized into four sets of four by season, that were all crazy in their presentation and tasty in their execution. My favorite was either the first which was a whiskey based cocktail made of soybean paste, or the third with had IPA foam, and a little bird ornament on the side with chocolate eggs. Again, whimsical was the nature and given the inspiration, it fit.
The other was Le Chamber, which is behind a bookcase where you have to push the book entitled 'Le Chamber' to take you to a dark, dimly lit but audacious bar. It is more classic speakeasy side. The drinks were less whimsical, but probably more alcohol-forward in their delicacy and concoction. They had some interesting ideas and a really great setting, but if there's any drawback to Le Chamber is that there is nothing really unique about it. The place is just a well run speakeasy. You may say the Alice in Wonderland gimmick is just that, a gimmick, but it gives some uniqueness. My dinner tomorrow at Mingles is in Gangnam, and with me not being able to have a late night with the flight to Bangkok the next morning, I expect I'll be back to one of these two hoping they have the space.
