Day 16 and our final full day in Seoul before we make our way to Incheon tomorrow morning. Our initial itinerary today was for us to visit Hangang River and the winter festivities in the area, including letting the kids do snow sledging. However, an announcement from the festival web site updated that sledging would only be available on 24 Dec onwards in view again of the relatively warmer winter this year. Bummer: as we’d be flying back home on that date.
Still, we decided to head to the river to take a look, and also visit a couple of malls near it. We’ve gone over Han river several times now in Seoul getting from place to place. According to the Wikipedia entry, there are only a handful of major cities in the world where the a large river goes through it, essentially dividing the city into two. Seoul is one of them, and the south side of the city across the river lies the Yeouido area, and where the city’s most prestigious financial and business institutions are. And it showed in our exploration of the area later in the morning after lunch: outside the malls, the district was actually fairly quiet and devoid of noisy groups of tourists dragging their luggage cases around, as we routinely saw in Myeongdong.
There is a Christmas market setup in the Yeouido Hangang Park, but it was not operating yet so early on Sunday morning at just past 10AM. We returned to the area later in the mid-afternoon to see the market in full swing.
Pictures!
We made our way towards The Hyundai Seoul shopping mall shortly as there wasn’t much to see in the morning then. Continued in the next post!