071202 - Olympic Park, Lotte World

Since it’s Sunday and I had a heavy drinking session with my Korean colleagues, I tend not to have a tight schedule of my itinerary, so I explored the East side of Seoul. I took a Line 5 subway to Olympic Park station (1100won) from Jongno 3-ga subway station. As I walking toward to one of the Olympic Park entrance, I saw many high-rise apartments, which I believe to cater the accommodation for the Olympic athletes and delegates.

I took this entrance through the bridge called Gommal which mean dream village and of course the admission fee is free.

This is the map of the Olympic Park. With a map with me, it took me almost 20 minutes to plan how I can cover all the places here and I had spent at least half a day here. Hope this will burn all my beer and soju calories which I had yesterday. This park hosted the 1988 Olympic Games; many stadiums are still used for other sport events and performances.


As I strolled down the park enjoying the cool weather, I saw the well preserved wooden fence of Mongchon Earthen Fortress. These wooden fences were widely used for defense against enemies in ancient Korea from the Early Iron Age (300 to 0 B.C.) to Choson Kingdom (1392~1910).


I went to Mongchon Museum to understand the lifestyle and culture of Mongchon.




Nearby the museum, there are the ruins of Mongchon Fortress


The bird-eye view one of the stadium in Olympic Park

Swimming pool stadium

Few of the sculptures scattered around the parks. From the brochure, it said the park is one of the world’s five best sculpture parks. There are around 200 over sculptures made by many world famous artists.




One of the monuments

The Olympic Museum where the entrance fee is 3000won. I did not go in.

Another entrance to the Olympic Park

This Peace Gate looks like a wing-shaped design structure. On the foreground is ice-skating rink. The Olympic flame is burned in the middle of this structure.



At the each side of the structure, there are 30 columns with traditional Korean masks on top of it leading to the main entrance.



After the visited the Olympic Park, I’m trying to explore the surrounding area and heading to Lotte World. There’s nothing interest me and took me almost a 45 minutes miserable walk to Lotte World. My advice is to take a subway to Jamsil Subway station which takes less than 5 minutes. Since I’m alone and I’m not in the mood for any theme parks. Lotte World is the recreation center most frequently visited by visitors, even locals. It consists of the indoor amusement park “Adventure” and an outdoor amusement park “Magic Island.” It opens day and night all year round. At night, it is open from 5 pm to 11 pm.


With my tiring legs as if it’s going to break, I took a subway back to my hotel.