Ewha Campus Complex

Ewha Campus Complex (이화여자대학교) is one of my favorite architectures here in Seoul. Built by Dominique Perrault, this grand complex certainly left quite an impression for first time, even returning visitors. The modern campus complex is nothing like I've seen before anywhere else in this city. It is also interesting to see, even when they have this very modern building structure, they're still preserving the old 19th-century gothic brick buildings surrounding the top part of the complex.

Sharing the shots I took during winter, that particular day was pretty cold. So not a lot of people were crowding the place, only the locals who were braving the cold weather, I assumed. We got there right before sunset, and it was my first time too coming to the campus at that time of day. Seeing how the sunlight hit the vertical structure of the stainless metal was certainly a new experience.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

---

Homilbat (호밀밭)

First time I visited this place was last year when I came to Seoul for traveling. It's supposed to be one of the best bingsu places in Seoul, so I thought it's worth a visit since I was visiting Ehwa University area anyway. Little did I know that even during lunch time on a weekday, the place was packed. There were quite a long line when I got there and since I was pressed on time, I ended up not going to the place. So now, a year later, after I moved here I got plenty of opportunities to go back and try this place. This is one of my favorite bingsu places so far. I like the milky type of bingsu so eating their milk bingsu with fresh fruit is just perfect. Their home-made rice cake and red bean are good too. I noticed here some people ordered one for each person, but I think ordering one to share between two people is enough :)

---

Seoul Day 5: Shopping at Hongdae

After the Trickeye Museum, we stopped by the Hello Kitty Cafe since it’s nearby. I have to say that the place has a little too much pink for me. But it was still fun visiting the place. When we got there, it was still pretty early so the place wasn’t crowded. We took our seats on the second floor where we noticed there’re two guys sitting at two tables away from us (I didn’t know that guys like this kinda place). We ordered a couple of different thing that were hello-kitty decorated. The food was just okay, nothing too special.

Afterwards, we pretty much just walked around the area and did some shopping. 

We encountered the information guys—guys who wear read attire carrying maps and helped tourists to find their way. They’re pretty helpful actually on pointing where we should go in English. We got a map of the area from them, and interestingly, you would think that the map will be in English, right? Nope. It’s in Chinese. We couldn’t read it, but at least they have the buildings and landmarks in there. So it was useful.

Stopped for another coffee break, or I should say mainly we just wanna get away from the sun for a little while. We were gonna try this one patbingsu place that I heard is pretty good, but the line was so long. So we opted for the Twosome Place again instead.

We stopped by Ehwa’s Univeristy Campus in the afternoon. Their building is very cool. I’m impressed by the architecture.

Afterwards, we grabbed dinner in a restaurant in the area that I have no idea what the name of the restaurant was.

After dinner we shopped a little bit more and decided to call it a night. When we were trying to make our way back to the subway, the area was filled-packed with people. I heard that Hongdae is pretty lively at night, but I didn’t think it would be that packed. There was literally no space between me and the person around me—that’s in front, behind, and besides me. We were walking practically side by side with people around us. I would’ve taken a picture of this but, as I said, there’s barely any room to move, let alone for me to open my camera bag. One interesting thing though, even though it was super packed, nobody was pushing. People were just lining up in a very orderly fashion, which impressed me. Later, I found out that apparently there was some kind of a festival going on at the time, celebrating Buddha’s birthday. No wonder it’s super packed.

Anywho, we made it back to our hotel. Packed (or maybe I should say forced) our stuff (some of us did some damage with the shopping) into our luggages and decided to took a night stroll to the Seoul gate again since Bella & Melissa didn’t get to go with us on the first night. We stopped by the convenient store on our back to pick up some snacks and drinks. And that’s day 5. Can’t believe that our trip is coming to an end already.