Korea Trip - Interesting observations

~ Autumn ~

It is Autumn season when we visited Seoul. Temp is around 10 to 20 deg C. Very lovely weather, cooling and windy in the evening. Just nice for the kids and myself. In the day, we only wear a long sleeve top and jean with an extra sweater to put on when the night falls. For levin, he is very comfortable with only short sleeve top in the day and some night too. Plus for the whole weeks, the kids did not sweat at all. haha unlike back at home, their hairs are always smelly and wet.

~ Subway ~

The subway network is definitely much more complex then ours in Singapore.

Fortunately it has many signage and direction boards in both english and chinese which makes it rather easy to use. There is one interchange station which we walked abt 12 min to the other platform to take only 1, 2 stops. (levin was complaining we should have took taxi to save all the walking).

~ The Koreans ~

The koreans are like Japanese in some ways. They dont talk loudly or eat in the subway, the man wore jacket to work and the ladies wear very trendily, they dont litter or split on the floor.

They are very helpful and friendly too. In our short 6 days in Korea, there are 3 occasions where they offered help in direction without we asking first (maybe we looked very blur and lost haha). On one occasion, the man could not even speak english and need to use his reading glasses when I shown him the map :) On another occasion when we are queueing for the cable car, there was this man who bought a big pack of crackers and start distributing them to the children include yy. YY dropped some on the floor while eating them. Before I could response to do anything. That man picked up the pieces on the floor and threw into the nearby dustbin. wow ! first class citizen, dont u agree ?

~ Dustbin ~

Not too sure why but we do get to see such dustbin the subway station and parks where we visited. of course most of their bins have different compartments for different type of wastes such as paper, plastic for recycle purpose.

~ toilet ~

The toilet seat at the Hanwha condo Socko has a control panel on the side. It was the first time yy came across such a toilet seat. He tried it and insisted that I took a pic of it to show janice.

~ Lockers ~

There are rows of locker everywhere, big and small. They are available at the subway station, shopping complex, place of interest including the entrances of lotte world and seoul grand park. At the COEX Aquarium, there is even locker to deposit one's pet. In fact we did use it once at the seoul grand park for our jacket. Kind of convenient, I feel.

~ Shopping ~

The stores we visited most frequent and spent the most are those local cosmetic shops like etude house, the face shop and missha. Spent more than $300 on these products and mostly are masks. They are generally at least 50% cheaper. However one interesting observation is the range they are selling is different from the local range we have in Singapore.

~ for loading and unloading only or illegal parking ~

If you see carefully, u will notice that the lorry actually drove up the pathway when they park along the roadside. It was a bit confusing especially their road and walking path are of the same light shade unlike in Singapore.

~ If I am to visit korea again ~

I will stay at Seoul Tower Guesthouse again, visit the Namsangol earlier, go for the other hiking tracks at Soraksan, visit Namdaemun to see the morning market, go to their supermarket to see their daily food items, allocate more shopping time for clothing, go to Nami island, better still go during winter to experience the snowing and sking. Last but not least, eat at the many restaurants along myeongdong street.