We start our day with packing, relaxing and making sure we have everything as we have a very long 48H in front of us. At 11.00 we take the taxi to Seoul station from which we will leave to the airport tonight.
Our main challenge is finding storage lockers which will fit all our luggage. This is an unachievable challenge as all lockers are occupied while we were still standing in line, the downside of taking an easy morning. There are many people with even more luggage swarming the locker stations hoping one will be freed up.
We continue downstairs to the metro hoping there will be free ones there. Sadly they are all occupied too. But we spot a luggage service next to the lockers, so we decide to leave our heaviest bags there since you have to pay per item. But when we’re finished and think about the stuff we still have to carry we decide to leave the rest to, let’s pay a little extra on our last day. Sadly a huge queue has formed in this one minute of thinking and repacking, so we loose another 20 minutes waiting in line. When we’re finally done and ready to start our last day, it’s already lunch time.
Finding lunch when you’re hungry is always a challenge, so we end up in a food court with thousands of options, the first floor we explore are high end restaurants, not what we are interested in, the next floor is better and we get vegetable noodles and bimbimbap.
At 13.00 it’s time to start our sightseeing a first this trip. We go back to the first palace and visit the palace museum which we skipped since it’s one of the few things open on Monday. It explains in detail all the court etiquettes and traditions so we learn a lot of what use to take place in all the palaces we have seen before and what it takes to be a king (“hyo”: be a ruler and a parent figure).
We take the metro to a shrine, it’s open today but by tour only, the first tour which leaves is a Korean tour but they won’t sell us tickets for this one, we would have to wait an hour for the English language tour and since the main building is also closed for reconstruction we decide to skip it and head to the next thing on our list.
We got free tickets for the Lotte Sky Tower, the highest building in Korea, some 600+ meters high. It lies in the suburbs next to all the other Lotte attraction parcs, shopping malls and whatever more they have. Korea is a country run by big conglomerates, Lotte being one of them, we got our tickets for free when we rented our car at Lotte rent a car.
When we finally make it after an half hour metro ride we are told that the tickets expired on 30 April, even before we got them on 6 May. Customer service is not existent so we leave the place and take the 30 minute metro back to the city center.
We finalise the day with a shopping spree to get the final souvenirs for the home front in an underground mall, market and Korean supermarket. It’s always a challenge not to buy too much junk, but a nice local gesture that we can still carry in our luggage.
It’s already 18:30, so time for dinner. Walking back to the station we pass some Korean restaurants serving steamed tofu and bimbimbab. As Olga still has not gotten enoufgh bimbimbab (she had it for lunch and dinner almost every day), we’re happy.
It’s a nice walk back to the station via an elevated pavement that offers nice views on the busy city in blue hour. As we still have some time to spare and Cleo wants a final sugar rush of the holiday, we celebrate the final minutes of our sabbatical in front of Seoul train station, eating ice cream. We had a fantastic adventure and looking back at it, we would not change a single thing. It was an endless dream to explore new worlds together every single day and bond as a family. To see Zeno imitate everything and learn dozen of new words a day (hap, lik, vogel, auto, op, open, dicht, weg, ja, bye bye, etc) and count to 40 or more with Cleo when we take stairs.
Then, it’s time to get our luggage again and go to the airport train. Our plane leaves at 1:00 tonight and it will take 13H to get to the transfer in Addis Ababa.
(There are only children’s pictures today as Tim’s camera was packed so our real pictures were not available when publishing this blog)
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