Time for a bit more of a summary of whats going on. On Monday the aim was to explore the War Memorial here in Seoul and check out the main museum there was only one problem, both of these places are closed on Mondays and we didn’t find that out till we arrived at the memorial. On a lighter note though the outdoor exhibits at the memorial were still available so we had a look at those. From there on I headed to the Seoul N Tower (Basically the TV tower on top of the mountain in the middle of Seoul). To get up to the N Tower I took the cable car which is a short (but quite uphill) walk from the station. The cable car is 8,000 Korean Won for a round trip and it doesn’t include any entry to the tower itself. Entry to the tower is an extra 8,000 Won for the observation level and there’s other packages that include food in the various floors and so on. I’ve included some photos from the view and it is quite nice, 8,000 Won nice though I’m not sure, there isn’t much else up there and very little information on what you might be looking at. After the tower I headed on to Jongmyo Shrine to see if I could get in with one of the last tours (access is via tours only), turns out I missed the last one by 10 minutes when I arrived.
After this I moved onto the Changdeok-gung Palace which has an amazing secret garden area as I got there though, closed! Turns out Monday isn’t the best day in Seoul if you don’t plan before hand.
On Tuesday with a bit more planning I headed out to Changdeok-gung and joined one of the guided tours in English of the secret garden section. It’s a rather long tour of about 90 minutes and can also be done in Chinese or Korean. It’s a simple 3km long walk around the closed off area of the grounds which the old kings used as their private area where access was by invitation only. I highly recommend the tour as its quite interesting and a lovely place to check out. If tours aren’t your cup of tea though the grounds can be roamed without a group in the summer months on a certain day of the week (not sure which one it is).
As usual there’s some photos below. We didn’t get up to much last night or today as we’re heading out of here tomorrow. We are off to the baseball tonight though so that should be fun!
