Day 6: Free Market and Ewha Woman’s University
The walk from Coffee Prince to the Free Market took me across parts of Hongik University which is an art-centric University and for a Saturday afternoon, the area looked like a regular school day as the streets were busy with people. It had me confused as to whether there was a special school event going on in the area or whether this was just a typical Saturday in the life of a Seoul student. In addition to the university students, I saw a lot of pre-university school students in the area also with their uniforms on. I heard stories about the pressures placed on Korean kids to do well academically and how they would study non-stop from morning until night. After school, parents would enroll their kids in all sorts of lessons and academies to further improve their chances of standing out amongst the competition. While travelling around town at night, I saw young school kids in their uniforms out and about in the evening hours and it made me think why aren’t these kids at home resting o...