Seoul on a layover

[librarygirl]

Seoul has a slew of palaces but Changdeokgung is my favorite. All of them are fascinating and such a great escape from the hectic city. I "believe" you do have to go on a group tour for Changdeokgung although I could be wrong (it lasted about 80 some minutes?). But I agree with the previous poster that I don't think you could necessarily do 2 palace tours in one stop over. For shopping, I liked the Insadong district the most although I found quality shopping to be had throughout the city. Another fun thing I enjoyed was drinking tea at a traditional tea house. And for "history fun" I thought my visit to the War Memorial was interesting (it covers all of Korea's military history but the K.W. is the focal point).

There is no subway line that runs between the airport and downtown (a shame since I love the Seoul metro system) and as previously mentioned, the airport is a long way from it too. But there are a lot of airport buses that run continuously (think Greyhound size) although I would certainly allocate plenty of time for your coming and going.

[sillygoosegirl]

I think we had a 12 hour layover. It was plenty of time, though we didn't do enough research and the main place we tried to go was closed the day of the week we were there. Also, be aware that it is bloody cold there in the winter, which makes the whole "wandering around" thing kind of not very fun if that is when you are there.

[basilosaurus]

As of over a year ago they did have an airport express train (45 minutes). Super easy.

I'm on my phone, but I'll come back later with the palace name. It's not the one that has the tour (that's a world heritage site) but it's excellent and close to insadong.

Edit; It's Gyeongbok. Big and impressive. The additional issue with the tour at the other place is that you have to wait for one in English.

There's definitely a lot of shopping in Myeongdong, but I don't think I ever once purchased anything. We'd wander around at night just to people watch and to grab a couple beers, but it just wasn't anything special IMO.

Itaewon, though heavily military, is actually a fairly decent area if you want to get some good food and a sample of shopping at the same time.

And if you don't want to do the work yourself, there are long layover tours that operate out of the airport that will drive you to the main sights.

[basilosaurus]

Here's the AREX info. www.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/GK/GK_EN_2_2_2_3.jsp

When I last left Korea, May 2011, they only had 2 of the stations open, but since the subway is so easy, it wasn't a problem to connect to where I wanted to go.

I actually got on the express instead of commuter train right after it first opened without realizing that it was more expensive. I was just coming back into Korea from a week away and had my t-money card still loaded with a little bit of won, so I hopped on the first train going into the city. Yeah, I wasn't supposed to do that. But once I got off in Seoul station I just paid the difference in fare, and it was no big deal.

They really try hard to make travel easy on tourists, so you shouldn't have a problem. They've put together info for transit tours here. asiaenglish.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/SI/SI_EN_3_5_1.jsp