Myeongdong (명동), is one of the largest shopping district in Seoul. It is also one of the shopping area with the most tourists. It is an incredible place with the abundance of cosmetic shops, restaurants, and street food! The area was so large that you could easily spend one whole day exploring the entire place.

On the first day, we arrived Seoul at 9am in the morning. We took the train all the way to Myeongdong to check into our hotel at Ibis Styles Ambassador Hotel, an amazing hotel that we booked through AirAsiaGo. The location was quite good, being 5 minutes away from Myeongdong Station and 10 minutes away from Chungmuro Station. After resting for a bit, we headed down to the Myeongdong shopping area with excitement! 🙂

Miss M and I were pretty overwhelmed with the number of cosmetic shops. I was also surprised to find that there were the same store almost every one or two blocks. But I guess it’s a strategy that works because people have the tendency to enter a shop that they did not enter the first time at another location and when they do, ka ching!

One thing I found weird was that some of the sales girls were shouting out in Chinese to attract customers. Chinese in Korea? Who would’ve thought! Their accents in both Korean and Chinese sounded really local to the point where I couldn’t tell if they were from Korea or China. The world is changing so rapidly. I also found out that some of the salesperson is able to converse in three languages – English, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. Remarkable.

The three most popular brands were Nature Republic, Innisfree and Etude House. I also saw some new brands like Too Cool for School and Labiotte (which sorta was interesting to me, but not really).

As a guy and a foodie, I was definitely more excited for the street food! There were so much variety. However, the street food was really expensive. On average, one small serving would cost around ₩4,000, which is equivalent to around RM12 *gasp*. Street food in Taiwan is much more worth it! However, we went around sampling some of street food because we’re already here and we didn’t want this opportunity to go to waste 🙂

So the rest of this post will be flooded with scrumptious street food photos that we spotted around Myeongdong.

Brace yourself 😛

I was so tempted to buy some fruits but I couldn’t bring myself to buy it because it’s just so expensive 😦

Lemonade was one of the popular drinks stall in Myeongdong. We saw some stores selling pomegranate  juice too.

This is the most iconic street food in Myeongdong. The potato spiral is so eye catching!

We had both our lunch and dinner in Myeongdong which will be covered in my future ‘Things to eat in Seoul’ post. So keep an eye on this blog!

Time flew by really quickly and before you know it, the sun has already set. Myeongdong is pretty vibrant at night with all the neon lights coming on.

Miss M spotted a store selling cheese topokki and she immediately got super excited. Never tried cheese topokki before so we went ahead to try one out. Basically it’s rice cakes and cheese stuck back to back on a stick and it is grilled to perfection. It was so good that we went back for seconds!

So that’s it! That’s Myeongdong in a nutshell. What an incredible array of street food. Keep in mind that this post is bias towards food pictures. Actually Myeongdong has so much more to offer!

Staying close to Myeongdong was really convenient as it has plenty of street food, restaurants and shops in the area. The vibrance of this entire place is simply unrivalled. I can easily recommend anyone travelling to Korea to stay within this district. Amazing.