A short travel vlog transcript of Kara and Nate Buchanan exploring Myeong-dong in Seoul. They arrive excited to try local street food, follow a viewer recommendation to a dumpling shop (order 10 dumplings), taste dumplings and kimchi, note local prices and portion sizes, sample large ice cream cones, and browse beauty stores. The hosts comment on pacing (enjoying a relaxed week), people-watching, and observe that many street-food carts set up later in the afternoon.
Questions this video answers
10 dumplings.
3,000 (stated as 'like less than $3').
32 cm (sign said 32 cm).
Chapters
Oh my gosh. I cannot believe we are back in Asia. I'm so excited to be in South Korea. I can't wait to eat.
So we are staying about 15 minutes outside of the.
Dang it. We practiced so we wouldn't forget me.
My.
I don't remember. That sounds right.
I think we're gonna butcher all of the pronunciat this entire week while we're here in South Korea. But we'll do our best. And that's supposed to be the. Wait, the Myeongdong district. That just sounds so wrong. This district is supposed to be filled with tons of things to do. Lots of good street food. So we're just going exploring. We have absolutely no plans. We're just gonna see where the day takes us.
And it's sunny and warm. We just belong in Asia.
I'm just so happy I actually lied. We do. We do have one plan. So when we arrived, we sent out an email and we were like, what should we do in Seoul? And our inbox has been flooded with recommendations. So thank you so much for all of those. And the first one that we're using is this place that's supposed to be the best dumplings in all of Seoul. And that's where we're starting our day.
And I'm obsessed with dumplings.
I really want a hat.
Can we see how much they are? It's just 3,000. That's like less than $3. Let me just look.
I love this street.
What is.
I'm so hungry. This stall smells so good. But that's not the place we're looking for. Let's go find it. Found it.
Just in case.
Smells really good in here. We're literally just standing awkwardly waiting for somebody to tell us what to do. There's no empty seats. I like to take advantage of this time and watch how everybody's eating things. Cuz there's always like a certain way to eat stuff and we don't know how.
So there's a hole upstairs that we didn't even know about. There are so many people in here. Menu is in English and it had pictures. So super easy. Oh, wow.
Thank you.
Drawer. And they came with some traditional tea. Do you think you put the whole thing in your mouth?
Do you want to take a bite of it?
All right.
We're just gonna do it. Here we go.
It is even better than it looks. There's like pork in there. Leeks maybe. And the outside dough.
Perfect.
We also got a bunch of these little bowls. I'm assuming they're for this sauce on the table. Soy sauce. There's also a really big bowl that maybe is for this other sauce.
Vinegar. The dumpling probably goes in the big bowl and the sauce and a little both sauces. I think I'm not gonna use that one. So I had never had kimchi before we got here. We had it at the restaurant last night. Apparently it comes with.
It's some kind of fermented cabbage with like spicy sauce on it. It's pretty good. It's not like amazing, but it's pretty good.
Pretty spicy.
That was such, such a good way to start our day. We showed a lot of self restraint though. And we only ordered 10 dumplings because we're planning on eating a lot more street food today.
I am so sad that that's already over. I wanted to order like five more plates.
Those were incredible. So we've been eating Russian dumplings.
Boozy, I think is how you say.
It for the last couple weeks.
Which I made a pretty big deal about. But it's because I forgot how good they were here.
I hate to break it to our Russian viewers, but Seoul's dumplings are way better than Russian dumplings.
They were a good substitute for the time being.
Going to find some more.
Yes. We're in Taiwan. We got these ice cream cones that were bigger than my face.
And they're here.
Whoa. Thank you.
Thank you.
Don't shake it.
That's amazing. Pretty good at that. I'll shake you.
I won't shake you. We're making a split in ice cream cone.
We probably should have. We lose control when we see ice cream.
But only 175 for all of this.
So good. Sounds good. The sign said 32 cm. We should have measured it. Make sure we were getting our money's worth.
That's crazy.
Good start to the street food.
So this whole neighborhood is shopping and beauty stores like every other building is shopping or beauty store. And I her in South Korea had really good beauty products. I just got sucked into my first beauty store. Ladies are like handing you stuff and coupons all over the place. She totally sucked me in because she gave me free samples, showed me a bunch of stuff. I haven't bought anything yet, but I'm really tempted. It's really cheap for being like good quality stuff. At least that's what she told me. She almost talked me into something but I didn't have a wallet or I.
Would have bought it probably.
It's like this mask, like gel peel mask that you use once a week because the seasons are changing and your skin dries out and the mask just helps revitalize your skin.
I always tell Kara that she is the reason that they put stuff by the cash registers at, like, grocery stores and anywhere that you check out, because she is the biggest impulse buyer that I know. To be fair, like, since we started traveling, she's gotten so much better. But, like, any gimmicky, like, sales thing that people do, it's people like Cara that they do it for.
Yeah.
I am so glad that we have booked a week in one place and especially here. We've been traveling way too fast recently, and it's so nice just to be able to, like, kind of have a lazy, exploring afternoon. Yeah. Like, where we're just kind of wandering around, not doing much and not feeling like we've got to go, go, go, go, go, and try to see everything in one day. Like, we have been.
I wish we had longer already. It's only our first day.
I just love people watching and, like, I don't know, for some reason, all the signs with the symbols, I'm sorry I called them symbols. Being yelled at for doing that in Japan. But, like, all of the Korean language symbols, I just love it.
So we've been wandering around looking for all this delicious street food that the Internet promised would be here, and we haven't been able to find anything. One or two little stands selling stuff, but that's it. And so I got on my phone to do some more research, and it turns out none of the street stalls show up till, like, 4 or 5pm so it's 3 o' clock now. We're gonna aimlessly wander around for the next hour or two and then come back and see what we can find.
It's happening. The carts are rolling in.
Seriously, they're just showing up everywhere. Everybody's rolling in their carts. No food being cooked yet.
