Seoul Day 4: Seoul Children's Grand Park

The last few days have been filled with lots of touristy activities, subway riding, and trying to follow proper Korean etiquette, and today, our kids just needed a chance to be kids. So, we took the subway to Seoul Children's Grand Park. Contrary to the name, there were a TON of people there without kids, but there were also quite a few groups of children that looked like they were visiting the park with their schools.  After searching for cherry blossoms on our first day, without success, we were delighted to find that the walkways of this park were lined with blossoming trees in full bloom.

 First, we went to an outdoor playground area, with a more "natural" play area, and also what was called an "energy park." The energy park had multiple rides that you could operate simply by pedaling, as you can see in the videos below.

After playing here for a while, we grabbed some food from one of the convenience stores in the park to eat while we walked. If you're not familiar with Korean convenience stores, you may not know that they're quite different from American ones. There are lots of foods that are prepared fresh, but also lots of foods that are pre-packaged, but can be prepared in the store. It's pretty common to buy a bowl or package of ramyeon, prepare it using the hot water dispenser in the store, and either eat it at the store or at a local park. We chose some triangle kimbap, sausage on a stick (that you can heat up in the microwave at the store), and some red bean bread.

After our snack, we walked around the park until we reached an indoor botanical garden.

Then we made our way to the zoo that's located in the park.

Did I mention that this was all free?? There is also an amusement park located in the park, which costs money, but we didn't visit it because we ran out of time. Once we were done at the park, we went to a restaurant across the street called Mr. Pizza, because, as already mentioned, our kids needed a day to just be kids. We still got bulgogi pizza, so they had to be a little adventurous. But it was a good experience overall.

We stopped for a little treat in our neighborhood on our way home: mochi stuffed with gelato!

For dinner, we walked to a kal-guksu restaurant not far from our apartment. Kal-guksu is a knife-cut noodle dish that we (especially Pumpkin) were hoping to try. It definitely lived up to our hopes. We are staying in a university/residential area, and haven't seen any other tourists around here, so we're definitely getting the authentic restaurant experience! While we were out, we stopped at Daiso and did a little shopping, and also got hotteok again from the same street vendor. She was happy to see us again and gave us an extra for free. Hotteok is one of the many things we will miss from Korea!