Insadong, teatime with birds, and street art

Another rainy Saturday, we slept in (wow, 9 is sleeping in these days? haha) and had a relaxing morning before heading out into the rainy city, humid and hot, geared up to go exploring yet again! This time our exploration took us north of the river to and area called Insadong. Insadong is a cultural center of the city, with many temples and historic landmarks surrounding the area. There is a main street which is pretty popular with Korean tourists. There are lots of little shops with artists selling their work, and many restaurants and tea houses lining the side streets and alleys, and a sea of umbrellas... 

a shop dedicated to selling dried herbs

To take a break from the rain we headed up a steep staircase to a tea house in one of the many alleyways. This place was incredible, it was like a museum! Small rooms and sitting areas were divided by old wood dressers and fabric curtains, antique furniture covered in silky oriental fabrics, paintings covering every inch of the walls and figurines and buddha statues adorning every shelf! And to add to the peaceful ambiance of this strange, dimly lit place was the presence of birds! Yes little tweeting birdies flying around and hopping amongst all the artifacts. No cages or boundaries, except for the walls themselves. The birds were beautiful and sang a beautiful tune to accompany our green tea time. 

After tea we braved the torrential downpours yet again, but only to quickly find respite in a nice restaurant, where we ate spicy kimchee stew and drank some makgali. This restaurant was great, really big and open, with the nicest ajumas (old ladies) there to wait on us. 

the yummy soup restaurant we ate at

many of the restaurants have grills in the center of the tables, so each has to be equipped with it's own exhaust system.

the panchan that accompanied our soup. daikon root kimchee, bok choi kimchee, sweet peanuts with onion and soy,  perilla leaf kimchee, and one other that we couldn't figure out (maybe eggplant?).

After filling ourselves with tasty and nourishing food and drink we decided to set out on a long walk through the crowded streets, just to see what we would see! The rain let up and it was quite nice to not have to hide under my umbrella, it's pretty hard to take photos with just one hand, believe it or not. Well we saw lots of statues and sculptures, lots of people and traffic, and had great conversation to accompany all that. Here is some of what we saw:

a recycling center. these are private centers and they employ really old people to push around the carts (on the right) and dumpster dive to find cardboard, plastic, glass, etc. It's kind of sad to see these old women, maybe over 90, pushing these heavy carts and sifting through the trash. But hey, they need to survive too.