Seoul Grand Park (대 공 원) is the largest park in Seoul, and possibly Asia. With a massive assortment of sights, it’s impossible to see it all in one day. Therefore, I’ll blog about what I saw now, and when I go back I’ll make a part 2 🙂

One of the murals inside the Seoul Grand Park subway station. Arriving at Seoul Grand Park couldn’t have been easier – take the subway to the Seoul Grand Park station. All of the exits (which usually lead to street level anyway) lead you straight to the gates of the park.

At first glance, the area appears like an amusement park – plenty of greenspace, crowds, people selling food and other souvenirs (private vendors selling stuff before you get to the park? Wow…) In brief, Seoul Grand Park offers a number of gardens as well as being the biggest zoo in the country (it’s not called ‘Grand’ without a reason!). Instead of just being one long road with all the animals one after another, they’re grouped nicely into smaller clumps of sights. Those ‘smaller clumps’ still take a hour or two to fully experience, however.

After entering through the main gate (free admission to the park itself!), we opt to walk up the hill instead of taking a trolley on wheels. We got a snack before finding our way to the Rose Garden (2,000 won entrance fee – about $2):

Just a fraction of the hundreds of varieties and tens of thousands of flowers in the rose garden.

Kids playing in the fountain and water. Awwwww… how cuuuute.

The kids weren’t playing in this fountain, which was probably one of the nicer sights in the park.

A line of windmills – and one curious kid.

Here there be dragons! OK, well just one at least.

Tinkerball? Another fairy? Take a guess – it’s as good as mine is.

What better place for artists to paint flowers than in the middle of a rose garden? They didn’t seem to mind the crowd, and were mostly oblivious to people taking pictures.

The classic art of topiary – creating sculptures from trees and shrubs.

A stream ran around the outside of the garden, and you could jump over or just take a bridge.

The Rose Garden was simply beautiful – and I don’t think the pictures do the park justice. We later curved around to a Children’s Zoo area (free admission), which was an opportunity for visitors to see the animals up close and personal:

Spider monkeys! When not being fed, they managed to crawl and climb around the entire rock and rope set.

Llamas! Not the spitting type (at least not that I saw), but quite a few people were intimidated by their size and stature.

The sheep were pretty harmless however.

A Japanese macaque – also known as the ‘red faced’ monkey.

Rabbits in a zoo? Sure, why not! They’re not common pets around here, so let’s show them off at the zoo.

Korean cow – mmm beef… I mean, Korean cow.

A sapsaree, or Korean dog. What’s that Lassie? Billy is stuck in the water hole? Let’s go!

I’m standing in front of the opening of the ‘Big Cats’ exhibit, featuring – you guessed it – tigers.

“IT World” – under renovation / reconstruction, but still a very nice dome. There was so much more to see, which is why I’ll be posting a ‘part 2’ when I go again!