Insadong Shopping

We had heard about Insadong, a shopping area in Seoul, and knew that we wanted to go. We took the subway down there. After walking around town for about 30min (I'll post those pictures separately) we finally found it. I don't know how we missed it because it was a huge street with TONs of people.

Insadong is sort of a tourist shopping area. Of course, all of the tourist were either other Koreans (from other parts of the country) or other Asians. We saw maybe about 10 other Westerners.

But the crazy part was how much attention we got. Not because of Damien and I, but because of the kids. We never, in our entire week in Korea, saw another Caucasian child. Seriously, we were like stars. People were taking pictures of us. Lots of people. As we walked down the street people in front of us were walking backwards taking our picture. It was insane. I think we got so much attention here because most of the tourists were from other parts of the country where Westerners visited even less often.

We also got a lot of questions about where we were from. This surprised me, although it shouldn't. I guess I thought people would assume we were from the US, but actually we got a lot more people asking if we were from Canada.

Insadong was so cool. There were people out cooking yummy food and selling all sorts of fun stuff. Although, we soon realized how touristy it was because we started seeing the same things over and over. Regardless, it was fun. The kids enjoyed it for a while but quickly got bored. We ended up carrying them on our shoulders which got us even more attention.

A shot of the crowd. There were SO many people!

There was this fun little band playing a little music. Lots of people were standing around watching. There was also a random older man from the crowd by the band dancing and clapping his hands.
Suddenly you heard a scuffle and some yelling and one of the band members pulling the guy aside. It was very stange. A police man even got involved. Obviously, we had no idea what they were saying, but it was definitely a little intense.

We had promised the kids ice cream and were lucky to find a store right there on the street. The traditional thing was ice cream on crushed ice. It was really good.


Some food they were selling that we were not feeling brave enough to try.
A shop with Hanboks. A hanbok is a traditional Korean dress. It is something special a child wears on their first birthday and then on certain occasions for the rest of their life. We bought one at this shop, but then Sora's foster mom gave us one too. Oh, well. At least they are very different from each other.


Little souvenirs.


Taking a break from walking around for a quick snack.
Trying some of the awesome food. These were like little sweet pancakes with some sort of nut filling. Yum!