Our hotel room.. if you hadn't noticed.. no beds ever!
The first thing we did was hit up a cab to the center of Seoul, a grand city indeed. I knew cities around asia were bigger than their USA counterparts, but the insane amount of people and structures is still staggering. Busan was huge, but it was dwarfed in comparison to the capitol.
How do you get a statue of yourself in the center of town? Why, simple! Just invent the korean alphabet (which is vastly superior to chinese/japanese characters I might add)
We decided to mix things up a little bit in the food department and had some delicious thai food. We all had some pad thai, which was some of the best i've ever had.
Being sated, we began our pilgrimage to all of the big sites of the city. The first, the grand palace Gyeongbok .
Upon entering, we stumbled upon a recreation of the calling of the guard, which was pretty interesting to watch. I would have had a video of the event, but my camera ran out of juice midway.
Front of the Gyeongbok palaaaceeee
This place was pretty epic, lots of very interesting structures. Unfortunately , all temples and castles in korea pretty much use the same color/design scheme… which we later confirmed countless times.
Still pretty cool looking tho.
"NEAT!"
Alright, you've convinced me... I'd live here.
Next, we wanted to check out the "stream" inside of the city. Originally it was a stream, then it was a sewer, then they took out the road onto of it and turned it back into a stream again. Just a cool site inside of a big city. Apparently a lot of festivals and concerts go on in the area. I can understand why.
The beginning of the stream
It's rather long
Amy's big desire while in korea was to check out the art, so away we went to the big art museum of Seoul. Outside there were some very very cool sculputres… but the inside was rather lacking…. pretty much all video art and photographs. Which we all agreed where about the dullest media to witness. There were still a couple cool ones inside anyways.
trippy sculpture in the front.. made you think you were staring at a convex mirror
what the hell is this thing? oh... modern art.. i get it.. =/
Stopped for some korean food along the way for Gimbap (shushi like rolls), Dumplings, and of course Kimchi!
We then went out to check out the Seoul tower. In korea, it seems that every big city needed its tower to be able to have tourists come in and witness the surrounding area. Being the capitol, seoul was the most popular by far (much to our later dismay). We had a pretty cool hike up to the tower, which itself wasn't very high at all, but happened to be on top of a very large hill… we went up to the top of it.. but we had to wait through quite a few lines.
Amy was miserable the entire hike up... turns out she had 7 blisters on her feet.. yeowch
we made it! How exciting!
Apparently lines are fairly commonplace here at big sites, being that there are so many people. In fact, at most fairs the lines for rides are about 20-30 minutes long, something similar to the biggest theme parks in america, but everyone's used to it and just shrugs it off.
View from the top.. Seoul is rather huge btw
We had it with sightseeing, being tired and all that we decided to go back… to hit up the pubs! We enjoyed a few brews and then hit back to the hotel.
Drinkin away... they love putting napkins on top for twistoff bottles (but still put them on for ones that needed to be popped as well...)
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