Well, we have been here for over two months now and have done some more exploring. This past weekend we ventured to the Coex Mall. This is the largest shopping center in Seoul and it is the largest underground mall in South East Asia. It is located in the basement of the Convention and Exhibition Center and the Korean World Trade Center. Not only is there tons of shopping to be done there but there is also an aquarium, a movie theater and lots of restaurants. We walked around a bit when we arrived and found a food court where you could get both Asian and western food, I had pizza and Don had vietnamese. Both were terrific.
After lunch we made our way to the aquarium. Entry was a little pricy compared to other places that we have been here at 15500 won, around $15. The aquarium is set up so that you can walk through from beginning to end starting with smaller fish and eventually ending up in an "undersea" tunnel. They have a lot of species of fish but they also have turtles, monkeys, seals, penguins, a crocodile, all kinds of reptiles, and some small land animals like chipmunks. We enjoyed our leisurely walk through the facility and it was nice to see so many fish with such vibrant colours. Then at the end while walking through the tunnel we saw the large fish and some sharks which are pretty amazing to see close up.
After the aquarium we decided to check out the theatre. This was our first time going and didn't know exactly what to expect. We had already been told that the theatres here have assigned seating (like at a concert at home) so we knew that we would have to choose our seats, but other than that we did not know what the theatres were like here. First task was to figure out movie times, not the easiest thing when all of the movie titles were listed in Korean on the showtimes board. They had one screen that showed the movie time with the movie poster so we watched that screen until the movie (District 9) that we wanted to see poped up. The movie was not playing for another couple of hours so we made our way down to the ticket counter to buy our tickets. We waited in line for about ten minutes. The gentleman that helped us spoke some English and we told him what movie we wanted and he brought up the screen with the available seats. I guess this movie is popular here because there were only about a dozen seats left, and we werent sure from the screen if they were in the last row or the front row, but we chose two and got our tickets.
Before the movie we went to get a smoothie and went to the bookstore. The bookstore has a pretty good sized English section and Don picked up a book that he wanted (I know, we went to a bookstore and Don was the one to buy a book, not me, Amazing!). Soon enough we made our way back to the theatre, amazing ourselves that we did not get lost in the maze of the mall. We bought some popcorn that we thought was butter but it was actually sweet (they will make anything sweet here, from popcorn to garlic bread...). They had two kinds of popcorn, caramel and the one that looked like butter popcorn but wasn't. I was disappointed since I haven't had popcorn since we arrived. I miss having a microwave. Anyways, we made it into the theatre and found our seats which were at the front, but it wasn't bad because the front row sat pretty far back from the screen.
The movie started after some commercials, not movie previews. When they play Hollywood movies here they keep them in English and just add Korean subtitles which is great for us. And another nice thing is that when there are English subtitles for when a character is not speaking English, they put the Korean subtitles up in the top right hand corner so that they don't cover the English ones. We have encountered Korean subtitles covering English ones while watching TV and were worried that this would be the case for the movie too. The movie was good and afterwards we made our way home.
The mall is not too far from our place, about 45 minutes by subway with only one transfer. It was nice and we definitely didn't evcen scratch the surface of seeing all of it so we will be going back for sure.
