Day 5: Waujeongsa Temple, Hwaseong Fortress & Starfield Library

This day was a full day trip south of Seoul to Suwon, one of the adjoining towns that pretty much serve as feeder satellites to the main city.

First stop was Waujeongsa Temple. This is a relatively modern temple dedicated to reunification. The monk who founded it still lives there. Once out of the minibus we were left to navigate the site ourselves. There were bits of information but not much. It had a giant budha, a thousand budha vale (each one carved differently) and a giant bell, all the things you can expect. It was a bit hilly and there were obviously hiking trails off into the woods and hills behind. After about 40 minutes we drove to the next stop, Hwaseong Fortress. This is an ancient set of city walls and military fort for the town that used to be here. Except it sort of isn't. Everything in it has been reconstructed more or less from scratch. The guide was explaining things as if it was all original, but at each station there were plaques in Korean and English that explained more about the history and reconstruction. You could have bought an audio guide and probably had a better tour. The guide was nice enough, but he was a retired guy (still fitter than me as this tour is over 15k steps) not a guide who explains more than you would get anywhere else.

Also discovered that two of the people on the tour were Air France cabin crew and were learning to read and speak Korean (amongst presumably now many other languages). Air France still fly directly to Seoul from Paris unlike BA. It was quite a friendly group in general with a lot of people interacting with each other rather than just sticking in their groups, so I didn't feel isolated even though I was the only single on the tour.

After here the next stop is Starfield Library. This caused me some confusion because when I looked it up on the map before hand I thought it was in Gangnam, so I had planned to jump ship and head to the nearby Lotte Tower from there. But in fact there are two Starfield Libraries, and we went to the one in Suwon instead. It's just a library in a big standard mall, except that it displays the books over five floors of open plan space. It's quite impressive, but probably not worth a trip on its own.

The guide was supposed to have booked us somewhere to go for lunch, but it was closed so we were all left to our own devices to sort out food. The food court was packed. As a single there was no way it would work, you needed to find seats and leave someone there to keep them while you went to order food. A few others in the group managed it, but I went to a 7-11 and ate in the back of the shop. They have special areas for this and even special stacking devices for your empty pot noodle containers It's tiny and not a place to hang out, but ideal for a single who wants to get some food, eat it and leave - like the workers in the shops and mall maintenance etc. Also picked up a packet of fried squid snacks. These turned out not to be some sort of squid flavoured puffy crisp, but actual squid cut into strips and coated. Chewy but nice.

On the drive back to Seoul we were taken to a seaweed centre. There was a small museum about the making of dried seaweed flakes. We got to make our own gimbap (seaweed and rice) rolls and were offered the opportunity to purchase large packs of seaweed. There was also a room where you could dress up in hanbok (traditional Korean dress) and take pictures of each other. Needless to say I did not partake. It felt like those forced visits to the gift shop on other tours and like them was presented as an integral and important part of the trip, but really I would have been better off without it.

We got dropped off back where we started at Myeongdong metro station about 5pm.

Having intended to go to the Lotte Tower originally I decided I would do that anyway even though it is now a bit of a treck, half an hour on the subway to get there. Once you do get there, the tower is reached through yet another huge mall complex. The ticket booth was open and I got a ticket. After I paid the lady in the office said "Oh did I mention about the wait? It's 40 minutes". No she had not mentioned it. So off to the queue I go. It's a series of rooms like sections of a ghost train where they have made some effort to put in visuals and 'experiences' to make it feel like it is part of the experience rather than what it is which is a series of holding cells. It was dark nighttime when I got to the observation platform. There's actually not much interesting to see from the tower unlike in Shanghai. There are no other nearby skyscrapers as this is in an outlying district. It's pretty tall though I think the tallest building in South Korea. In the summer you can go on a rope walk between the two prongs at the top. It was closed for the winter when I was there.

It was quite late by the time I got back to the room, so just time to get ready for the next day...

Waujeongsa Temple




Hwaseong Fortress




Starfield library


Views from Lotte Tower