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How is it that i have more time to blog prancing around overseas than rolling around in bed back in Singapore? Ah well. Jaunting down Insadong (which sounds an awful lot like Instagram, explaining the post title) snapping away like the trigger happy blogger I am pretty much translated to the word regret when I sat down to post process 500 odd photos that night.

Insadong was pretty much slapped with the label of Korea’s best tourist trap from the word Go. The entire place consists a pretty hanok village, tea houses, cafes and shops, which pretty much sounds like the whole of korea, come to think of it. But oh- what a lovely tourist trap! Insanely photogenic cafes filtering gentle morning light, photo walls every two steps, a huge cheesy lovers garden where you purchase waterproof heartshaped tags and write your lovenotes on them to hang on a wall of vines.. and there’s an entire street of modern art galleries i dont understand at all. So commercialized, so beautiful. They do constructed quaintness very well.

When having Kimbap (korean’s take on sushi) with a couple of ladies I met in a Korean international church, I flipped through a few shots from Insadong with them and gushed: i love your cafe culture here- there are cafes, proper cafes, on every street and they all have such good coffee. It’s true though, the entire indie cafe crowd in Singapore would have a spontaneous combustion or something upon touchdown in Korea. One waved a hand: We have too much free time. They both laughed, and the other chimed: Koreans need a hobby.

I’ve said this so many times before on various social media channels, but hobby or no, their cafe culture is something i adore. Composing this post I scrabbled through the mounting heap of photos taken at Insadong and found myself clicking through the entire day’s folder again. That’s about thirty photos of a cup of coffee and another four hundred of random people and shops on the streets, by the way. Is it too cliche to throw words like re-living and mesmerizing into the mix? Probably. Is it appropriately cliche? Um. I pulled a quick google search on the place and the entirety of the world wide web seems to concur that Insadong is a huge tourist trap. And yet, like moths to a flame-

Willingly: let me be trapped.

x
♥jem