I am Raintea: Myeongdong & Cheonggyecheon Stream

We stayed at Hill House Hotel booked through Hotels.com. Besides the location, the bathtub was one of the main reasons for booking it. Guess my surprise when we were told the information on the website was wrong, and there would not be a bathtub in the room after all... It was not the best solution, but Hotels.com gave us a 10% discount as an apology. Well, at least, the hotel provides free green tea every day.

The surrounding environment was pretty nice, though it was about eight minutes uphill task when we need to head back to the hotel.

The first night when we landed, we ate some really nice chicken at a seeming-family-restaurant. It was a little pricey in our opinion but it was nice enough for us to want to go back and had the something else from the same place. That was the time when we realised something... I checked the traveling dates to make sure it would not be too chilling but I never check if there was any national holidays. Yup, we went right smack into their Harvest Festival... We arrived on 28th Sep evening and the festival started on 29th Sep and last through to 1st Oct, and we were leaving on 2nd.

Except for touristy spots like Myeongdong and Nandamum markets which were opened, many of the shops were closed during this period. I was totally devastated when we went over to Dongdaemum Shopping Mall and Gwangjang market the next day and realised that it would be closed the entire period. I wanted to get some fabric during this trip as well, and that was the reason for the huge luggage that we brought along for this trip. We usually travel pretty light, and this was the first trip that we really lugged something huge.

Well, I still count myself lucky to find a couple of vendors at Gwangjang market who stayed open during this period. Instead of a totally nil buy, I bought two really nice fabric at reasonable price. Hubby did the haggling, haha! Amazing considering that we both do not speak their language!

We walked around Dongdaemum and came to Cheonggyecheon Stream. It was really nice to find a stream in the middle of the city. We saw a stage, Wall of Culture and many rest stops for people to stop and rest.

We walked along the stream for about 30 to 45 min; there were people feeding the ducks in the stream; we saw fishes too. Lucky for us, the weather was cooling and it was good for walking and photographing. The people walking around were mostly south Koreans, and we guessed the national holiday was a chance for the people living in the outskirt to visit Seoul.

Except for the first day when we had our dinner late and unpacked for the night, we were almost at Myeongdong and Nandamum markets every day. It was fun to walk around the markets, just wondering around, enjoying the weather, looking at pretty things and, oh, the constant snacking!

Myeongdong has more shops, and it felt more upmarket as some of the stuffs were really expensive! Nice to look but we did very little shopping. By the end of the second day, we had to ration our money when we realised we were spending so much of money on food!

The night-Myeongdong was more vibrant with the lights around. It was cooler too, though the day-Myeongdong was not that hot. Quite a number of the cosmetics sales ladies and men were fluent in Chinese or they were Chinese. And man, were they brave! Many of these prettily dressed sales personnel had no qualms about shouting at the top of the lungs to get people to walk into their stores for the free gifts that came with purchase. Most of the sales personnels were well mannered, which made shopping and browsing a lot more comfortable.

We finally called it a night and started to stroll back to the hotel. Hubby was really not used to the walking though he did no complaining. On our way back to the hotel, we saw Seoul Tower in shimmering beautiful neon light.