Can you believe it? we only have 2days left in this trip. This is officially the 12th day of the Plus 3 program and the end of our stay in Korea. After getting very accustomed to the lifestyle here, I’m getting very sad about living this all behind. It feels like I’ve been living a fantasy and now I am returning to reality.
Our first stop for the day was the Hanok villages. This trip was actually scheduled on Saturday, but since the weather wasn’t convenient and we were all tired, we decided to reschedule everything to today. The hanok villages are essentially a residential area in Seoul which is made up of traditional houses called hanok. Since it is a both a residential area and a touristic attraction, visitors are required to stay quiet in order not to disturb the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. Also the visiting hours were from 10:30 am to about 6 pm, these times were set so that they can accommodate both tourists and locals.
The setting and infrastructure of these houses is very unique. Most of them are made of wood, and their roofs are also wooden but have the shape of the top of the palace, and temples we visited. They also have little tile designs all over them to give them a little color and beautify them. We spent about an hour walking round this village and taking pictures of the beautiful temple.
Our next stop was the Jogyesa Temple. Buddha’s birthday this year was scheduled on the 15th of May, which is why we were visiting the temple. Before our visit, Professor Yun told us to dress casually but not in shorts or crop tops because we were going to a temple, which is a religious place of worship. When we arrived the temple, it was a lot more packed than when we first visited. There was a ceremony going on at the very front of the temple, where I could see monks sitting down and listening to a speaker. The temple was also very colourful because of the lanterns and the flowers which they offered to their guests as they got in.
After our visit to the temple, our next stop was the Coex mall, which was one of the biggest malls in Korea. As we got to the Coex mall, our tour guide Kay took us to the Starfield library, which is a very aesthetic and popular library in Seoul. It had over 100 bookshelves and more than a million books all around. The set up of the library was very unique and I could see a lot of people taking pictures around it. It also had an escalator to go to higher floors and explore more books. After the library, we were given about 2 hours to go round the mall and scout for more things we wan to buy . After our shopping spree we met again at library, and departed for the hotel. Most of our evenings where spent working on our presentations and rounding up with our souvenir buying