Times Square, Seoul Style

Yesterday, we made the trip to Times Square. Before we left for Seoul Tower the other day, I told Eric that would be the easiest trip of our week. Everything else required multiple subway transfers, bus rides, etc. So after our completely unsuccessful trip to Seoul Tower, everything else looked a lot easier.

A couple of weeks ago, one of our friends showed me an easy way to take our little 03 neighborhood bus to get to lines 1 and 3 on the subway. Now that there are fewer transfers involved, everything seems a little closer. We were pretty excited when we discovered that Times Square is only 5 stops away on line 1. A pretty short trip, really.

So, we hopped aboard at Namyeong Station and the kids really enjoyed the ride! This portion of the line is all above ground and when we started to cross the river, Cade yelled, "It's the Han River! Mommy, we're going over the Han River!" It was pretty cute to see how excited he got about it!

Then, we arrived at the station. I'd read that we needed to go out Exit 3, so I thought this was going to be a piece of cake. No problem! Well, it turned out that Yeongdungpo Station is one of those huge subway stations. It's pretty much a mall in and of itself. Can you imagine buying your socks, bras, and underwear in the subway station? Me either, but people must do it because there is one stand after another through many of the subway stations. (We did buy Eric a pair of gloves in one the other day!)

have I mentioned it's cold here?!

Well, we went out exit 3 and didn't find a huge TV screen, any bright neon lights, or any other signs that we might have arrived at Times Square. It was cold, so we went back inside. We wandered around Lotte Mart (also connected to the subway station) while I tried to figure out if we were at the wrong station again.

Then I went back out into the station to wander around and see if I could orient myself. Finally, I decided I would give up and give in to the requests for Krispy Kreme so that the trip wouldn't be a total loss. While the kids inhaled their donuts, I decided to give it one more try by getting on the Times Square website. I finally had a better idea of what I should be looking for and was ready to head back outside.

By the time we got back outside, it was really snowing and the kids were so excited about the snow flying into their faces! We walked about half a block when we saw the sign! It was not exactly what I was looking for, but we had found it and the adventure was not a loss--we found a great place to take pictures, too!

I love that you can tell how excited she is even without seeing her face!

Times Square here in Seoul is really just a big mall. Not the most exciting thing in the world when the clothes and the shoes don't fit you. When you don't really want to spend a ton of money on things to decorate your house (by the way--did I tell you we finally hung pictures on the walls? So exciting!). When you're not hungry because you just went to Krispy Kreme for a snack. And when you aren't sure that you want to spend the money to sit through a movie with Korean subtitles.

I love the sweet expression on his face!

Eric did get me coffee at one of the five Starbucks we walked by before we headed back home. We found the underground path back to the subway station on the way back (through tons more shops), but the kids were disappointed we weren't walking in the snow. When we somehow missed our bus after getting off the subway (it stopped further down than we'd expected and the driver wasn't watching when we tried to wave to him), Kennedy was certain we needed to catch a taxi rather than waiting outside in the snow for the next bus. It sounded like a pretty good idea to us, too.

I don't know if we need to go back, but we had fun and now we can say that we've been to Korea's Times Square!

Entered in my favorite photo of January 2012 at thepapermama.com.