Reid Main

After exploring Lotte World Mall for over nine hours yesterday we found ourselves pretty burned out this morning. Rather than visit any other major attractions that could take up an entire day, we decided to play things by ear. Even after we spent all that time in Lotte World Mall we actually didn't do a single bit of shopping. So why not start the day there and see where it takes us? We fueled up at Cafe Mamas again, got our usual coffees at Blue Bottle, and took Line 2 back to Jamsil station.

I don't wanna spend too much time on the stores we visited because they really weren't anything special. But I do want to call out a particularly cool Toys "R" Us that had a massive selection of Tomica cars which I used as an excuse to buy some for my nephew's birthday.

While crossing a skywalk connecting two parts of the mall we looked down and saw something peculiar in a public park. An inflatable 60 foot tall pink bear wearing a birthday cap. Upon closer inspection we determined that the bear was named Bellygom and everyone was celebrating his birthday. Naturally there was a pop-up store in the park selling Bellygom merchandise which Elsie immediately proceeded to ransack.

By now it was approaching 2:30pm and the only other thing in the area that we had considered visiting was the Olympic Park, a 20 minute walk away. I will readily admit that I did not read up much on the Olympic Park and figured it would be a quick visit. But one of my greatest regrets of this trip will be not planning an entire day around visiting this park. Seriously, it was so beautiful and so vast. The tops of the hills gave some of the most picturesque views of the Seoul skyline. The sprawling fields and trees would have provided ample space for a picnic. We unfortunately only managed to spend a little over an hour here and probably explored 1/10th of the whole park.

With our legs starting to fail us we walked back to Lotte World Mall and took the subway home. Not wanting to venture out again we decided to try one of the restaurants in our hotel where I got some bulgogi and rice cooked in a stone pot. We turned in early to recharge our batteries and prepare for our last full day in Seoul.