Today we decided to explore Gangnam. It was a 45 min subway ride to the area and I found out that the area is huge! The interesting thing about being here for me is that I just follow James wherever we go. I have no idea what direction we are going in, or what the street names are. I usually do a little more research but decided to leave that all in his hands.
And I digress...back to Gangnam. The area was made famous by the PSY song, but the music video was at Gangnam station. We decided to make that our last stop for the day. We started at Samseong station (yes, Samsung) and checked out the Coex mall. James read the description and told me it was Seoul's largest mall. Once we got there and walked around a bit, we both thought it was nothing special. Then we found out it was Seoul's largest underground mall....big whoop. We got out of there quick style and went to look for the Korean Buddhist temple called Bongeunsa Temple which was supposedly across the street.
Well, we walked in the wrong direction and found ourselves at a casino. This casino only allowed foreigners in which is pretty genius. (Something else to note about the Samseong station is that it also has Seoul's World Trade Center and a giant convention center. There were a lot of foreigners around.) We ended up staying there for at least an hour with James playing several hands of Blackjack. I don't know what it is with that boy and Blackjack but he loves it.
Once we headed in the right direction to the temple, it was very easy to find. It was like being transported to the rural countryside which was very cool. The temple offers an overnight temple stay for meditation and to see how the monks live. It was weird for me to see a Korean Buddhist temple because most Koreans I know are Christian and I associate the Buddhist temple with funerals and Vietnamese school from when I was a kid.
We left the temple and decided to walk to the fancy shop area of Gangnam (aka the Rodeo drive). It was luckily only a mile and we knew we were there once we saw designer shops that were 3 stories high at least. Each of the buildings had a cool design and structure. I think my favorite was the Omega store.
This road with the designer shops was also called Kpop Star Road. It had statues of a bunny (?) that were dressed like different Kpop stars. At the end of the road was a giant statue dressed like PSY. At the end of the road was the Galleria which had very high end shops and a fancy schmancy food court.
We ended up walking around more and went to the back side streets because James had found some shops to visit. What was weird was that there were apartment complexes right next to the super nice Galleria that looked very very ghetto.
Later that day James made a very interesting observation to me. I think he's a genius.
The way that Seoul is laid out is very different from San Francisco. In San Francisco, each neighborhood is known to be nice or not etc and all the houses generally look similar in each neighborhood. In Seoul, you can visually see the wealth disparity. People in the city usually live in high rises or in 3-4 story buildings called villas. The high rises are seen as nicer and show a price tag with that association. The villas are seen as not as nice and are much cheaper. The streets are also very narrow in Seoul. We were walking down some narrow streets and had to move to the side for cars to pass through. James made that observation that even that is showing the wealth disparity - you're on foot and I'm in a car so you need to get out of my way.
Crazy....
To say the least I didn't have the best impression of Gangnam. We didn't make it to the station but plan to go back to check it out. We are also going to check out two smaller neighborhoods in the Gangnam area that have turned more hipster. Excited for that!
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