Day 12: Namsan (Sam-soon) Stairs and Park

I headed off to my next destinations which were the Namsan Stairs and Park. My wanting to visit these 2 places was totally inspired by Korean TV. To someone not in the know, the Namsan Stairs looks like any other set of concrete stairs. To many Korean Drama lovers though, these stairs are most famous for being featured in the drama “My Lovely Sam-soon”. To me however, these stairs will always be defined as place were Alex (of Clazziquai) and Shin Ae reunited for their second run on MBC’s We Got Married. As you can probably tell from my blog posts, I’ve been a fan of the show since the beginning and though many couples have come and gone, the AlShin Couple is still my favourite couple of all time.^^ If you want to see the segment featuring the AlShin Couple at the Namsan Stairs that inspired me to go, you can watch it right here! It’s cute.^^ It's too bad they didn't turn out to be a real couple.

In planning for my trip, it was one of those “wouldn’t it be nice to check it out?” type destinations. So it wasn’t necessarily on the forefront of my planning but it was one of those underlying places that I wanted to visit. It wasn’t until I asked about its location on Seoul’s Facebook page that I got serious about it and put it on my itinerary of things to see. The Namsan Park, which I recently saw featured in an episode of Baker King Kim Tak Goo, is located at the top of the stairs so it was only naturally for me to visit both places together.

I came back down the Namsan on the #2 bus and because there wasn’t a stop called Namsan Stairs, I kind of had to gauge approximately where to get off at. Here is a nice map I found online that I used to determine where things were around Namsan. It’s only in Korean but the depictions of the various places helps.

I plotted it on Google Maps with the location of the closest Yellow #2 bus stop to it.

View Namsan (Sam-soon) Stairs in a larger map
It turned out I got off one stop too early but that was OK because it was such a beautiful and breezy day and the walk was all in the shade. Along the way, I passed a very tall set of stairs but it wasn’t the one so I kept walking and just around the bend I found it. Here is the Namsan Stairs in all its glory!^^

There were a bunch of ahjumma’s sitting at the bottom of the staircase using it as a resting spot during their walk so I waited for them to leave so that I could take a picture of the stairs alone.

I found that the stairs were not as steep as they seemed as I made my way up. As I mentioned before, at the top of the stairs is the Namsan Park.

There was nice floral arrangement depicting a family with a cow. They looked like they were either moving or farming.

One of the highlights of the park is a water fountain but unfortunately for me, it wasn’t scheduled to run again for another couple of hours.

Up until this now, Seoul was unseasonable warm so seeing the blue sky in these pictures again, virtually free of clouds brings back so many feelings and memories about how cool and fresh it was on this day. Just to check to see if this was actually the case, I searched the historical temperatures in October 2010 for Seoul and found the actual high temperatures from the start of my trip to before this day ranged from 20-24 degrees (with the exception of the day of my arrival where it slightly rained). On this day, the high was only 17 degrees so my memory was accurate. It was the coolest day thus far!

If you go further into the park beyond the fountain, there are several hiking paths leading back up and into the Namsan Mountain. I’m not sure if they go all the way up to the top (from the map above, it appears as if they do) but as I just came from there, I only walked to the entrances before turning and heading back to the Namsan Stairs.

Thinking that this was probably the first and last time I will ever see these stairs, I paused in the middle and looked up once last time. Bye stairs! It was nice meeting you. Thanks for all the fun memories you gave me through We Got Married.^^ Here are some video clips I took at the stairs and park.

At the bottom of the stairs, I took a left and walked to the bus stop nearby and waited to board the #2 bus once again to whisk me to my next stop…