Seoul Weekend Tour

This weekend I went with a group of friends (I finally have that) and we went on a Seoul bus tour. For about $10, they took us all around the city and we could decide where we wanted to go. They had several busses running, and they would come by each stop about every half hour. It was really nice, because if we wanted to stay somewhere longer than planned, we didn't have to make a huge commitment. We got a late start since one of my friend's washing machine leaked into her entire apartment (this seems to be a recurring problem in Korea- no bueno), so we weren't able to do any of the palaces. I was actually thankful for this, since I went to the Forbidden Palace in China. In my very limited experience, it seems like if you've seen one palace, you've seen them all. Plus, none of them are going to compare to the Forbidden Palace anyways. 

We decided on the war museum and Seoul Tower. Both ended up being great, but it was a challenging day since it was so cold outside. The temperature has dropped dramatically in the past week. It's now consistently in the teens! I thought I was doing well when I was comfortable in the 30s. This is so awful. It was a huge step for me to get out at all with the weather like that; I am simply not made to be in the cold. My body does not work like this. I need a beach.

This was a love lock wall. I have heard of them before, but this was the first one I have ever seen. Lovers are supposed to put the lock on the wall and throw away the key thus symbolizing love forever. It was actually really pretty. It added a lot of color and interesting contrast to the tower. 

--For my other vertical pictures, the blogger has turned them on its own. Does anyone know how I can do this manually? It's driving me crazy for it to be sideways. Please help!

At the bottom of the tower they have a big lookout area which is where we spent our time. It cost about $7 to go to the top, and we are all pretty cheap, so we decided against it. Some of the people I was with had already been, and they have a really nice, really expensive restaurant at the top. It seemed like it would be better to spend the money if I was on a date. Hopefully I'll make it back, I'm sure the food was amazing (and maybe even Western!). They had a really nice cafe underneath with a lot of Western food that was tasty.

In the big plaza-like area where you can ride up to the top of the tower, they had a huge Christmas Tree made of teddy bears. It was right outside the teddy bear museum. They have another teddy bear museum in Suwon near our movie theatre. I've never heard of that before, and I don't really understand it. Why would anyone go to a teddy bear museum?! I guess enough people do, because they have at least two over here.. Strange-y (A lot of the Koreans have a hard time ending a word without a hard vowel, so if it ends in a silent e like above, they add the -e sound. They also say "What page-y?" all the time in class. It's a hard habit for them to break. Some of the Korean teachers and staff even do it)!

This was a view from the top (almost) of Seoul Tower. It's the highest point in all of Seoul, with a great outlook of the city. This weekend was the first time I really understood the magnitude of the city. It is just enormous. I enjoyed it, because we were in some really pretty areas. So far my experiences in Seoul have been fairly negative, and my perception of the city was really dirty and old. We saw quite a bit of modern architecture and clean streets, so it was a really positive thing for me. It felt a little bit like New York City (for the first time); it was reassuring.

We went to the war museum, and they had quite a bit of really fun and interesting things for us to play on. It costs money if you want to go in the building, so we stuck with the tanks and planes outside. It was a lot of fun to get out some extra energy and run and climb. 

This was us in one of the hover crafts. I'm pretty sure we weren't supposed to climb in this, but no one ever came to stop us. Being in Korea, I was expecting someone to be on us immediately shouting "Aniyo!" (aka "No!"), but there weren't any guards at all. It was great fun.

I climbed up on top of the statue to pose with the soldiers. We had to keep moving, because it was soooo cold outside (around 15°). The climbing helped keep me preoccupied. 

Here we are about to go into the plane. It was really cool that they let us see inside everything. They were so small though. I could not even imagine being in the air in something like that; it was uncomfortable enough when it was on the ground.