Time After Time

Returning to Seoul after twenty years, our intrepid explorers find sweeping changes – and comfortable familiarity

- Everen T. Brown

In 1998 my nephew and I visited Seoul enroute to Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands. We spent a few days touring South Korea’s dynamic capital ending with lunch at Seoul Tower.

Fast forward twenty years to February 2018 and we are in Seoul again, this time coming back from the Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang. With only a few precious days to explore, we very curious to see how much the skyline has changed and visit some places we missed on our first visit or which had been added since then. The plan was once again to end our visit with lunch at Seoul Tower.

Getting to Seoul is easy, whether from the airport or other cities and towns within Korea. Trains are often the easiest; for our travels it was the newly inaugurated KTX line. This high-speed train can whisk you from the airport to downtown Seoul station in 40 minutes. In less than two hours you can travel to Korea’s east coast, to cities like Gangneung – one of the Olympic host cities and home of the Winter Olympics’ coastal cluster of scenic sports venues.

The day after the Olympic closing ceremonies we boarded the high speed KTX train in Gangneung. Packed with Olympic fans and spectators, this train arrived at Seoul station in one hour and forty minutes. After a quick taxi ride to our hotel, we were off for an afternoon of shopping in Myeongdong, Seoul’s flashy shopping district. We began at the giant Lotte department store, expressly looking for Olympic souvenirs – as if we hadn’t already purchased enough. Then we took to the street looking for more.