Finding Solace in Seoul's Parks, Seoul, South Korea

One of the things I love about Seoul is that there are many parks around, providing solace (or should I say Seoulace?) from the hustle and bustle of the city. In past trips, I would visit a park or two for a specific reason: Yeouido Park in spring of 2012 for the cherry blossoms (but we were there a few days too early); Namsan Park in autumn of 2014 for the beautiful autumn leaves; and Songpa Naru Park for the cherry blossoms and Banpo Hangang Park for its Moonlight Rainbow Fountain show, both in spring of 2016. For my autumn 2018 trip, I went park hopping and I had reasons for choosing these parks.

Dream Forest Park, with an area of 660,000 sq. m., is Seoul's fourth largest park and is not frequented by tourists (or at least, that's what I read). The park is so big that there must be many reasons to visit. Indeed there are. Dream Forest Park has an observatory, an art center, a children's gallery, different kinds of gardens, cafes, a restaurant, and an ancestral shrine. The main reasons why I decided to visit were the observatory and art gallery.

The Dream Forest Observatory, with a height of 49 meters, affords a view of the park, the city surrounding it, and the mountains beyond. The observatory is open from 10AM to 10PM and admission is free. To get to the observatory, I had to take elevators that go on an incline. It was a rainy day when I visited and the observatory was quite deserted-it was just me and two other visitors. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).