Saturday Afternoon Exploring Sinsa-dong (Garosu-gil and Apgujeong Rodeo Street)

Sticking with our theme of exploring Gangnam, we followed up our visit to Goto Mall and Shinsegae with a tour of the Garosu-gil and Apgujeong Rodeo Street areas of Sinsa-dong. This is the northern trip region of Gangnam, as you can see here:



It's a quick, two-stop subway ride from Express Bus Terminal to Sinsa station on Line 3. Seemingly all Seoul subway stations have some combination of retail and food options along the way. Some are extensive, others pretty limited. In Sinsa station you have a pretty sharp looking fruit shop and, allegedly, Seoul's most delicious bunsikjip.

REMINDER: click any pic for a higher res version

I'm not well qualified to weigh in on the relative deliciousness rankings of Seoul's bunsikjip, so I'll let you check this one out and decide for yourself.

Took a few lay-of-the-land vibe shots once we surfaced from the subway.

(I cannot find this 'Sausage Restaurant' on Google Maps, but it's right near this Tim Horton's if you want to go looking for it)

We got sucked into Sweet Korea Mart

The volume and variety of things on display is really amazing. Some Asia/Korea-only snacks. Some unfamiliar / exotic versions from familiar brands. Generally great prices (at the time of this visit $1 USD = ~ 1350 Won). We grabbed a few things, though, ironicially, none of what is actually pictured below.

(What caught my eye originally here were the 'Grain Mini Cookie Cranberry', but now I'm noticing the 'Chocolate Chip Mochi Cookies' and thinking we should have grabbed a box of those bad boys.)

What I did pick up were these:

(Love the ginger candies. Judy has brought me a Trader Joe version of these before and I'm consuming about 2 per day on average)

Soon we came across a Daiso, which has become one of Judy's favorites.

We spent a good amount of time in the Daiso at Coex the day before, but still are stopping pretty much every time we see a Daiso just in case they have something different. We bought a few things, including a new travel neck pillow as shown below.

(The one on the left was purchased at the Istanbul airport after I had left my previous pillow behind in the Veliko Tarnovo apartment I stayed in. It cost me something around $30 USD. The one on the right is my new Daiso upgrade, which cost 5000 won, or less than $4 USD.)

Further up the street there is a pet accessory store with a greeter dog strategically positioned in the entrance. Judy stopped to say hello.

Garosu-gil was nice. Relatively low key, but pleasant. If you're a shopper you could easily spend a few hours in the area, plus lunch at one of the various restaurants worth checking out. But we just did a quick-ish spin through and then pointed ourselves toward Apgujeong Rodeo Street. The walk between the two areas takes maybe ~30 minutes. It was semi-interesting just in that it was all still new to me, but apparently I didn't take any pictures during that zig-zagging trek. My fotos pick up somewhere along Eonju-ro 164-gil, maybe near the Matin Kim Dosan Store, where we started noticing foot traffic and then eventually mini-swarms of people taking pictures of each other in front of store logos.

It was a little odd and sad to see this behavior in person. But we moved on. I had been looking online for a sneaker/shoe brand (Scarpa) and thought I saw something about them being available at Kream, which has a store in this area. Found the store, which had some cool stuff. Very hipster, but interesting. Also, the a/c was cranking, which was welcome. So we did a little lap before heading back out.

Another place that popped up pre-trip while I was noodling around in Google Maps is the London Bagel Museum. They have a few outlets around the city and we happened upon this one right on time. Snagged the last table available out on the terrace, where we would have been happy just to be sitting down for a few minutes (warm, humid day and we'd been roaming around for hours at this point).

Bonus that the bagels were great. Judy held the table while I went inside. Vibes were kind of rustic general store.

I deliberated over what to pick and went with a pretzel / salt bagel & butter 'sandwich'. Yes, sandwich. I hadn't seen this before, but essentially it's where a few pats/slabs of butter play the part of the 'meat' within the 'sandwich'. Intrigued, I grabbed it. And it was delicious. Probably our new favorite bagel. We inhaled it, which is why in the pick below you only see a remnant bit of it, alongside the red bean paste bagel that we saved for the next day (also quite tasty).

Refreshed and recharged, we continued on, following the flow a bit, taking some shots of what caught my eye.

(This one surprised me. A standalone Birkenstock house/store in what has to be a very high-rent part of the city. The economics on this make sense? Huh.)

Another shop that triggered some nostalgia was the pop-up sale prominently featuring Marithé & Francois Girbaud. I was very proud of the one pair of Girbaud jeans that I could (kind of) afford to buy myself at Filene's some 35 years ago. Had NO idea the brand was still active.

We lightly considered some hat and t-shirt options, but ultimately walked out empty handed. At this point the sun was setting and we were close to the Apgujeong subway station, so I snagged a couple more vibe pics before we hopped the train back home to rest up before another big day Sunday.