Joann and I were up just after 10am and had breakfast in our kitchen. We left home at 11:30am and headed back to Insadong. We are getting to know this area and continue to love it. We looked in a few jewellry stores but nothing caught our eyes.
We ventured into Tapgol Park (Pagoda Park) as the gates were open. We had wanted to go in before but the gates were closed. It is a lovely little park in Insadong. The park is where the Korean Independence movement of 1919 started.
Here is the pagoda for which the park is named. It is very old (1400's) and it is contained in a glass room - we speculated that it was to prevent further erosion of the engraving on it.
This reminded me a bit of Central Park, a lovely park with skyscrapers in the background.
I love these pinky red flowering trees. I am holding my bag of "Skin Food" products. This is the Korean body shop and the products are great. They are very clever. When you enter the store, they give you a sample of their products. When you buy something, they give you a few more products. This seems so generous - the problem is the products are fabulous and whenever we try one of the samples, we want to go back and buy the product.
Joann is conspicuously also sporting a "Skin Food" bag.
Here is the lady who sold us our pottery. She didn't notice me taking her picture as she is busy watching her TV.
I wanted to go to a traditional tea house and Joann humoured me. This is actually the Tea Museum! There must have been 100 different teas on the menu. Each one had different flavours and promised to heal different things. Joann ordered a persimmon tea. She was given the instructions to let her tea steep for 2 minutes. Joann's tea had a nice mild flavour.
I ordered lotus leaf tea ($7). This is not to be confused with the lotus tea ($50) that contains an actual lotus flower that opens when the hot water is poured over it. My tea needed only 1 minute of steeping. My tea was quite mild but very good.
It was 3:30pm and we hadn't had lunch so we decided to order this green tea waffle with bananas and blueberry jam. It was accompanied by real Canadian maple syrup! Yes, the waffle is great and it was delicious.
Here is the man who makes designs out of clothepin wires!
Joann and I thought this place looked so nice. We were very thirsty and dropped in for a drink. We were desperate for a cold beer. They wouldn't serve us if we didn't order food and we were still full from the waffle so we left. Later, we were told that it is common here to refuse service without food - Joann and I had not experienced this. We went across the road to a nice bar and had a cold beer!
I find the streets here very interesting. There will be some stores, a few restaurants, and then there will be a small door with a small garage-like setting that must be someone's private space. This is very intriguing to me.
Joann and I saw these sculptures in a small green space as we were walking. I have seen some wonderful sculptures that I would love to bring home. Joann suggested that we could probably buy big hunks of rock back home and make something like this ourselves. I will keep you posted on our progress.
At about 7:30pm, we decided to come back to our place and eat and do laundry. We went to the neighbourhood chicken place. We had spicy chicken. We had eaten here before and I found the chicken to be quite spicy then. Today it didn't seem very spicy and we speculated as to whether the chicken was less spicy or I was getting used to the spicy food here.
We came back and put in two loads of laundry. We then used some skin food products including facial masks - I will spare you the photos! Once our faces were clean and feeling fabulous, we went to check the laundry. We are not sure what happened, one load was still dry and the other load had washed but not spun dry so it was sopping wet. Not being able to read the dirctions on the machine (in Korean only), we decided to start the machines over again. The wash cycle takes 125 minutes so we set the alarms to get up at midnight to get the laundry and went to bed. All went well at midnight and we have clean clothes.
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