more of Seoul, about travelling alone

Right now I'm at the Seoul airport and got some time because my flight is delayed - 1,5hours it seems :-/
But at least I find some time now to write on this post in which I want to describe some more experiences and impressions about Seoul and also talk about the experience of travelling alone.

On my last days in Seoul I took a boat trip around the huge Han river that runs through Seoul. It was a very pleasent tour and offered a nice view of the city. Finding pleasure in passively leaning back and just letting the impressions pass by, I decided to take a further sightseeing bus tour in the evening.

some architecture

I also met up with Jieun, another Korean friend I met at UCSD and we had some Korean food together. She had actually just come back to Seoul from Frankfurt where she had an internship for a few month and she had also visited me in Berlin a few weeks ago.

delicious Korean food with Jieun: my dish is called korean "bibimbap" (mixed pot)

There is a small river running through seoul, constituting a strong contrast to the towers of steel and glass. It actually used to be a road that was rebuilt to this river a few years ago. Liked this a lot and reminded me of the Highline in New York.

Besides that, there were actually not very many public parks in the city. I think this has to do with people usually not having the motivation to enjoy the sun outside in contrast to Europeans.
What I also liked a lot about Seoul is that it has many open spaces and wide streets so it doesn't feel cramped here despite the hugeness of the city. Also there are many open wireless internet works for free everywhere in the city and also at the airport what is quite convenient for me. And I also felt extremely safe here.
Some more impressions:

around my "tent" was some kind of shopping area for building/constructing with hundreds of tiny shops for sinks, lamps, drill machines etc. So where there's one "Bauhaus" in Germany there are hundres of these shops here instead it seems...

Got one of these for breakfast!

Usually around subway stations there were huge underground areas also often filled with hundreds of tiny shops for everything you could need. I even saw a shop for medieval antiques...

All in all Seoul has been significantly cheaper for me than Japan. In total I paid only 200€. 60€ for accomodation (3 nights) and 140€ for the rest as transportation, food etc.

Now some last thoughts about travelling alone: As some of you now, I actually wanted to travel through Asia just on my own. I had often been quite fascinated when people told me how they travelled somewhere just on their own as I think this requires a lot of self-reliance. And also when I travelled to Paris last summer, besides visiting some friends, I did most of the actual sightseeing just on my own and found this quite enjoyable as I found myself more open and more focused on the outer attractions and also liked the complete independence - you can do whatever you wanna do.
In constrast to my travels through Japan, in Seoul I was usually in the company of friends as I stayed with Geebum at first and with Mikkel later and met a hole bunch of other people. What I noticed is that while travelling alone, interestingly I had generally stronger and also more emotionally intense experiences - bad ones as well as good ones. I think the reason is that travelling alone moves you out of your comfort zone and therefore you just get more exposed to the outer experiences.
Concluding, I think travelling in company is more convenient and pleasent while travelling alone enables deeper experiences.

Next is China! Ni hao! :D