We then headed back to Camp Bonifas, shopped for souvenirs such as pieces of the border fence, NK currency etc., boarded our tour busses and headed back to Seoul.
Back in the hotel, the front desk had a message for us that the manager felt so bad about our experience the night before in securing a suite. They offered us a complimentary city tour the following day for the inconvenience, which we gladly accepted.
As we love doing in Asian cities, we inquired about the shopping area and headed out. However, we had in mind more of an Asian market with crafts, souvenirs etc., but what we found were behemoth malls selling everything under the sun….retail. No thanks. We walked around a bit but realized we were just wasting our time and headed back. Like most of the times we meet people of Asian descent, they go ga ga over Western children and they will crowd around and take pictures of/with them. I’m already quite used to this, but if it’s your first time, you might find it to be a bit overwhelming, especially when they start touching them.
Thursday morning we got picked up by the tour company for our free city tour. The first stop was a Buddhist Temple in town but we sat that one out. We then rushed to the Gyeongbokgung Palace to catch a reenactment of an ancient changing of the guard. I have seen many changing of the guards around the world such as in London, Monaco, Athens, Copenhagen, Beijing and Prague at the top of my head, but this one was refreshingly different.