Welcome back! My day started off with a visit to the Seoul city hall, which is in the downtown area of Seoul. We had a tour planned for the day, but first we had some free time to explore the area around the city hall. I decided to take a look at the area beneath the hall, called the Seoul Gallery. It featured a bunch of fun things to explore. There was a gift shop, a model room of the entire city of Seoul, and different versions of Hetchi, Seoul’s mascot. They had a huge Lego Hetchi and a big stuffed Hetchi. It was fun to look through each of the rooms and see what they had there.
While we were downstairs, we also saw a robot that drives around with a big screen on it asking people if they need help. I haven’t seen any of those robots before, so we watched them for a little while as it drove around.
Once the tour started, we walked around the halls of the Seoul City Hall and listened to our tour guide talk about the history of the government. She was this really sweet older lady who walked really quickly and gave us a piece of candy when we stopped to take a break. We even took a look at the vertical gardens that made up a large part of the lobby in the city hall.
On the way to our next activity, the Arisu water purification center, we stopped to get lunch. We went to a Vietnamese place and got Pho, which was delicious. Then, we went to Arisu. Arisu is Seoul’s provider of tap water, which has a large purification center. Many people in Korea do not believe that the tap water is safe to drink in Seoul, but it actually is, and Arisu works to show that to them. I learned a lot about the process of purifying water, which is not something I originally thought would be interesting, but there is more that goes into the process than I thought. There are numerous steps that the water has to take for it’s purification, all the way from large stone filters to chemical filters.
As a part of our “Welcome Dinner,” even though we are already on day 3, we went to a K BBQ place. We got to try so many different dishes, like really good kimchi pancakes. Normally, at these places you get to cook the food yourself, but I think they didn’t trust us, so the waiters helped us cook our food. This was my first time doing Korean BBQ, but I will definitely want to go back in the future as it was a lot of fun!
Finally, some other people and I went to walk around Myeongdong Street to look at all of the shops. The streets all look very aesthetic with the neon signs and lights everywhere. For almost anything you can think of, there is definitely a shop on that street with what you are looking for. That’s a wrap on my day, but I’ll see you next time!
