Yeouido Hangang Park

Full transcript

Annyeong, yeoreobun! It's Yul from KVIBE IDOLS. Today we're at Seoul's favorite picnic spot, Yeouido Hangang Park. But this island has a secret past. It used to be an airport!

First, the name. An old joke says that when floods covered everything except one little hill, people laughed, "That's my island? No, it's your island!" Yeoui, "your island." A sandy island nobody wanted.

But in the colonial era, an airfield was built here. And on December 10, 1922, a young Korean pilot named An Chang-nam flew over this island while about fifty thousand people looked up and cheered. Imagine that crowd, all here!

Plot twist number two. Passenger flights moved to Gimpo in 1958. Then, in 1968, Seoul built a huge embankment around the island in about a hundred days, and a brand-new city rose up: TV stations, the National Assembly, skyscrapers. The road along that embankment is the one everyone calls Yunjung-ro, and every April it turns pink with cherry blossoms. Daebak!

And every autumn since 2000, the Seoul International Fireworks Festival lights up the sky right above this park.

Yul's tip! Do it the Seoul way. Buy instant ramyeon at a riverside convenience store and cook it in the ramyeon machine, then order fried chicken to the delivery zone. Chimaek by the river! Bring or rent a mat. Tents are allowed only in marked areas, and sides must stay open.

Next, let's climb a beautiful hill that is secretly a mountain of trash. Kaja!