Ah, South Korea. The land of colorful hanbok, cherry blossoms, K-Dramas, and my most beloved side dish—kimchi.
I have yet to reach this country, so when I saw this Seoul travel video from one of video contributors, Paolo Fernandez of Backstabbers Production, I was instantly enthralled. I thought, is this seriously what I’m missing out on? The street food, the shopping, the night life, the temples…everything calls out.
Plus, it also doesn’t help that the video is set in spring, a season when everything is in full bloom—the trees, the flowers, and the people, too. Watch the captivating film below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdwEf4duKq8&feature=youtu.be
Paolo shares a little story about his video. He wrote:
“Part of our personal project is to cover four seasons in different places. We already have Autumn in Nagoya, Japan, Winter in Hong Kong & Macau and Summer in Boracay. The Spring season is the only left to finish our 2-year personal project and we decided to cover Spring in Seoul. The challenging part for this video is that we need to capture cherry blossoms since it is the most associated thing when you heard of spring season. As most of the travel blog sites will say, it is hard to see a full bloom cherry blossoms but luckily we were able to capture some during our stay in Seoul. Through the help of weather predictions available online, we planned our trip on the 2nd week of April.
Visiting the attractive city of Seoul, we were welcomed by its various culture and nostalgic heritage. We stayed in Seoul City Hotel for 5 days. The weather is still cold so we still brought with us our jackets and fleece.
As I observed Seoul, it is somewhat similar to Japan especially Osaka. It is already a modern city but still not as clean as Tokyo or Kyoto in Japan.
Palace in Gyeongbokgung is a must-see! You can really feel the Korean vibes in this place as well as in Bukchon Hanok Village where it houses several traditional Korean houses. It is better to go to this place in the morning because we went there late afternoon and a lot of people were already piling up on the aisles and taking selfies with the native houses.
We spotted most of the blooming cherry blossom trees in Yeouido Park. There are also some along Ewha Woman’s University. This place is like a university belt so you can see a lot of young students and can really feel the college vibes. If you love make ups, they say it is much cheaper to buy here compared in Myeong-dong.
The most beautiful attraction we visited was the Nami Island. It is really a great island and if you like nature, you will love staying there. It is also famous since a Koreanovela hit was filmed there. Unfortunately, we went there on a Sunday so there are too many tourists and locals. It is much better to visit it on weekdays. Going to Nami Island would require a day, we actually stayed half day and we weren’t able to tour around the entire Island because we have other side trips which are Petit France and Garden of Morning Calm. We just booked a day tour trip for this because it is quite far from Seoul.
We also purchased a DMZ tour going to the border of South and North Korea. It is a bizarre tour because you’ll be visiting a demilitarized zone and all you can see are tunnels, train stations, histories referring to the South and North Korea conflicts. But still, an interesting tour to try!
And lastly, The most memorable activity we did during our stay is to shop and eat street foods! There are various selections of street foods everywhere! Every food is great as well as the cheap shopping areas. You can definitely shop ’til you drop. If you have to bring back souvenirs to your friends, I would recommend you of buying socks! Because there are so cheap and cute.
Our Spring video summarized all of this during our stay and we would love to visit South Korea again.”
See another one of Paolo’s travel videos on WhenInManila here, this time in Japan: WATCH: Adventures in Japan + Where To Go and What To Do
Have you been to South Korea, too? What is your most favorite thing about the country? Tell us your recommendations in the comments!
