Most of the time, foreigners come to Korea to visit Seoul. They want to take in the marvels of Gyeongbokgung palace and get a birds eye view of the city from the top of Namsan Seoul Tower. Ironically, even though I have been to both of these places, I am yet to actually fully experience them. I’ve gone to the palace, watched the changing of the guard, but then didn’t pay the entrance fee to get inside. Similarly, I’ve trekked up to the cable car at Namsan, but didn’t think the hour long line to get on board was worth the wait. However, I don’t really feel like I’m missing out on anything, because I find the treasures of most countries aren’t in their main attractions. The best locations to visit are often those off the beaten trail.

Over the weekend, I traveled to Suwon, a city about an hour outside of Seoul, to visit the Hwaseong Fortress. Constructed in 1776 during the reign of King Jeonjo, this fortress stands as a fortified city with walls, gates, observation towers, massive staircases, and historic statues. It’s existence as both a fortress and city at the same time is kind of confusing. There’s no one monitoring tourists visiting the site, therefore upon first driving through the gate you’re left with the overwhelming feeling of where do I go. Yes, you need a ticket to climb up the wall, and ticket booths exist at several wall “entrances,” but no one is stopping you from just walking through the city and up to part of the wall without an entrance next to it. You also can in fact park where ever you want . . . which we also didn’t know. We parked in the lot at one of the gates, paid parking, but if we had just parked a few blocks away in the middle of the town parking would have been free.

We decided to do a walking tour of the entire fortress. I should note here that we really had decided that we wanted to do a trolley ride, that brings you from one part of the city to another on a weird 50’s style funeral car attached to rows of wagon seats but the woman told us it was sold out for the entire day. We got there at 1pm, so I’m not quite sure how it was sold out until 5pm since the place wasn’t too crowded . . . but it ended up being a blessing in disguise. Walking the fortress wall was way better than taking a trolley along the street down below. It’s only 5.5km around the whole wall, roughly 3 and a half miles, and so even though we started with the intention of talking a little walk then visiting the market streets and leaving, once we got walking the loop seemed like nothing.

We were able to cut through the city market streets during our quest to finish the loop. We stopped at one packed fruit stall to buy clementines to eat on the road, which were definitely overpriced but hey that’s the price of being a tourist, and donut holes to eat in the streets. This was after we thought perhaps we would find food in a hidden food market . . . which we could have done if we wanted to eat pig liver. We got 4 small donut holes and two larger sugared donuts for only 2000won (about $2)and were able to watch a man hammering rice cake at the stall next door while we waited in line.

After our snacks, we continued on up a large hill to get back up to the fortress wall. This happened to be one of the gates checking tickets, which was no problem since we had bought them originally and pulled them out to show. She definitely thought we were foreigners trying to get in for free at first. Once at the top, tree branches loomed over the walkway making a beautiful photo opt. Unfortunately for me, I still need to work on my Korean style poses. Park attendees could take a turn at swinging a massive gong and overlook the the area in a small tower at the top that was build as if it was a castle in Europe. However there really wasn’t too much to see considering that the surrounding areas of Suwon are just high rises and poorly maintained suburban land.

After completing our loop we grabbed the car, drove back into town and attempted to find “Chicken Street” as our fortress map suggested this destination as a proper place to get food. Well we managed to find a chicken place, we failed to find the street in time for our hungry stomachs. The place we went to eat was advertised as being one of the “top 1000 restaurants in Korea” . . . not sure how you get that ranking and what that even really means but I can tell you, it is not on my top list of 1000 restaurants, whether or not I even have been to 1000 restaurants before. We are 99% sure the woman served us dog as one of the side dishes to start the meal. The meat resembled beef but smelled too strongly to be anything but dog. We didn’t eat it. The chicken was an entire chicken cut up with bones and all body parts into pieces and fried. There were parts of that chicken that I’m sure were not designed for human consumption being fried up on that plate. Needless to say, we ate what we could and not what we couldn’t and were out of there. On our way out of the fortress, driving in the car we passed actual chicken street. It looked a lot nicer than where we had eaten.