Day 83: Christmas Shopping

Ella had shown me a few cool things that she had bought in Insadong a couple of days ago and I decided I wanted to go to the street to buy some Christmas gifts. We walked around for a bit and I found a cool shop that had scratch postcards of Namsan Tower and Osaka Castle. There was also a cute mini plant shop that I bought a couple items at. We also got green tea and red bean bread to snack on.

After shopping we walked to a stationary store I had found online that was nearby. Unfortunately, the store must have moved or gone out of business because we couldn't find it. We did find a bookstore and some other fun stores though so the trip wasn't wasted!

I had also noticed a stream and market near the store that I wanted to look at. We walked down to Cheonggyecheon stream and found so many Christmas lights! It was really pretty and surprising. I just wanted to go to walk along the stream and I hadn't known there would be a Christmas display so it made it even more exciting. We wandered along the stream until we made it to Gwangjang market.

I love walking through the markets in Korea. I have been to several and I still find them very interesting to look through. There are so many different stalls/stores and the food is amazing. They sell lots of foods that I have never seen in Canada (like pig heads). We arrived around 6 pm so the majority of the market was closing down, but the middle area with all the food was still open. Both of us were pretty hungry at this point so we stopped by a pancake and fried food place for dinner. We had a huge pile of Korean pancakes, which I think are made mostly from potato but also have other things like vegetables and seafood in them.

It took us forever to eat the pancakes because there were so many and they were really big! Ella accidentally dropped kimchi on me halfway through the meal and neither of us could figure out where the napkins were. One of the guys sitting beside us started to laugh and then he pointed up behind Ella's head where there was a huge tube of napkins. I hadn't even noticed it even though it was right in my line of sight... oops!

Hope everyone is doing well,

Emily

(December 17, 2018)