#KelilingKorea Gwangju: A Lovely Metropolitan

We continued our second day of #KelilingKorea by visiting Gwangju, straight from Daecheon. We started to lower down our expectation for everything after Daecheon. But Gwangju successfully amused us.

Walking out of the station, we found a tourism information center with English-speaking officer. They recommended us some places to visit but it was mostly mounts and hiking trails. Before we chose our next destination, Abby already got message from her Korean teacher that he'd meet us at the downtown. He taught Abby and her mom Korean back then in Trinidad and Tobago. I assumed he is from Gwangju but later I learned that he is not hahaha. He has lived in Gwangju for 10 years tho.

Gwangju downtown is just like Seoul's Myeongdong! Very modern and they have many foreign brands. We were really surprised, as we thought only Busan can match Seoul. I was relieved that we finally knew what we were doing, not getting lost again in the countryside hahaha. We decided to eat first and the special menu of the day was cheese dakgalbi! Yeay!

Everyone was really happy for the great meal, especially that later Abby told us its on her - as a treat from her mom.

We continued to climb to the nearby observation tower that looked very far from the downtown. We walked through resident housings and narrow alleys to get there. Abby's teacher said that it was the shortcut haha.

Gwangju Observatory Tower

The tower was only 4 story-high but it offers amazing view of Gwangju city and mounts around it. Its a newly built tower, replacing the old one. Some of the remaining of the old tower was there too. You can look at the information here.

remaining of the old tower

group picture!

The tower was absolutely amazing. We really enjoyed our time there and of course we took countless selfies hahaha.


We continued our journey to find local street foods in the nearby market. But turned out everything was already closed by 9 PM so we decided to just go to a cat cafe.

Sitting down and playing with the cats was fun. We spent few hours there before going to Gwangju Songjeong station. We planned to take 3 AM train to Mokpo but we did not have place to stay and finding transportation that early would be a trouble for foreigners. So we decided to just wait in the station.

Gwangju Songjeong Station - waiting room

I am really sorry to say this but the station was much much better than Jakarta's Soekarno Hatta Airport.

Very bright, very clean, got plugs and (weak) wifi - they only need sofa and water dispenser to make it perfect.

We were enjoying our time in the station until an officer came to tell us that they were going to close the station at 12.30...

I quickly suggested to wait at the nearby convenience store. Unexpectedly, we had such a blast in GS25 and no one slept. Instead, we talked about many random things and I dragged these people to open social media accounts hahaha. Tugce seemed to find her world in Twitter and was totally absorbed into Twitter shortly after created an account.

Time flies and we walked back to the station at 3 AM, waiting for the train to go to Mokpo