Sunday, January 22, 2012

Skating at City Hall

Haechi on ice, Seoul's mascot.


As I have started to mention in my posts, my time in Korea is coming to an end. So my spare time is spent crossing off all the things I still want to do before I go. Skating at City Hall was one of those things. A few weekends ago my boyfriend and I headed to City Hall and finally went. Living in Osan last year I did this and it was great fun. One dollar for a pair of skates and we had a blast. Seoul's skating rink experience and Osan's were slightly different, due mostly to the sheer volume of people there.

We arrived at about 2pm and actually had to buy tickets to the 4pm skate because everything else was sold out. So we paid our 2,000 won each and headed to nearby Myeongdong to kill the time. We arrived back to the rink early to join a huge, but quickly moving line up to grab a pair of skates. The skates were pretty horrendous. The cheapest variety possible made of awful, hard plastic that dug into all the wrong places, and blades that couldn't have sliced through much. We waited for the skate patrollers to let the lineups of people waiting to get on the ice at 4pm and then slowly made our way out on the ice. The ice surface was pretty shady but then again you couldn't go much faster than a crawl due to the amout of people on the rink. It was organized chaos. Lots of people, but everyone generally moving in the same direction, with the flow. There were people of all ages and and if you take away the actual 'quality factor' of the skate, it was great fun. We spent maybe 40 minutes going round and round with what seemed like the rest of Korea's population. A DJ was blaring K-pop, and the sun was shining, so all in all another great afternoon in Seoul.



Patiently waiting.

Almost ready.

Joining the masses on ice. 


Skating @ City Hall, Seoul.


Check out this link for more information on skating at City Hall in Seoul.
http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=264554

2 comments:

philly pam said...

At least it looks like the rink was big! Everything is SO crowded! When you get home, you will probably think Wells Hill Park is like Algonquin Park....Enjoy every day now--it will seem a long way away when you return to Canada! Love, Mrs S

Jessica said...

Well, I hope they're still open! Patrick and I hope to hit the ice this Sunday (but we'll see). Thanks for sharing. Lovely pics, as usual. Hope I can go!