The story goes, we went to South Korea, and stayed there for about a month. Most of that time was in Daejeon, but if you go to South Korea, you go to Seoul. We went there for only a weekend, but it was a pretty amazing adventure. I'll let the pictures tell most of the stories, but there's one that words would do better to tell. Guess I'll let the story comes when i picture does.
Everything about South Korea feels like an older time to me. This is a picture from a movie theatre that gave me a supremely 1980s feeling. Most things are more so 90s, but the 80s make me happy, so I figured I'd share a glimpse from the past!
Just a pretty and dark picture of a sunsetting Seoul. Yeah, it's pretty polluted there, but not nearly as bad as this picture implies!
mmm yummy giant tentacles!
The busy night streets of Seoul. For those of you who have heard that Japan is crowded, let it be known that South Korea actually has more people per square foot of land than Japan, so it is even less possible to find space to yourself. Though South Korea does a much better job of building upward. There are many houses in Japan, even in the cities, it is not impossible to find houses. This is not the case of South Korea, there are apartments EVERYWHERE. This means that there's a lot more room for shops, and less room for housing.
This is a Christmas tree of locks. They do these locks in Japan too. Lovers put two locks together to signify their love. They write little messages too.
All of these last pictures have been from the national folk museum. Though none of them get so exciting as they do now! Any of you that know me, know that I play go, so I was very excited to come across go in the museum of course. In South Korea, the professional world is thriving of young intelligence, which is great contrast to Japan, where it is aging.
Habok are traditional Korean women's wear. South Korea is much newer to recent style than much the rest of our world. Habok have only gone out of regular wear since the 1970s!
Hanafuda was in the museum as well. This is a traditional Japanese game, the original source off nintendo. These days it is incredibly popular in South Korea.
Awesome pirate!
Here is where I can fit in my story. We spent our first few nights in Seoul, in random pc bang that turned out terrible. This lead us to finally quest out our amazing Lion PC bang, which was our favorite in Busan. We couldn't tell from the address where it was, but simply a train station mentioned. So we went to the train station, and searched it out. Our search lead us to nothing, but an area about a 20 minute walk away, which turned out perfect! After much searching, we found a nice pc bang with very helpful people that had us figure everything out. The next day we awoke, and I decided to buy a snack. The guy working there in the morning seemed kinda rude at first, as he was working hard to get is job done, and keeping me freezing at the same time. However, when I went to buy my snack, he accidentally said something in Jpanaese, so I mentioned that I knew Japanese, and that was it. He turned into the nicest guy ever. Even gave us all free breakfast! In the end, it turned out that there had been a blizzard overnight, and there was nearly 10 inches of snow on the ground.. and I was wearing sandals! and again, the 20 minute walk to the station.. i was pretty mortified. Luckily our new found friend helped us figure out *everything*, and even got us to a closer station. It just seemed like another "ichigoichie" in life.
Transportation in Korea is very cheap. If you are headed to Korea, and need to plan your travel around, this is how you do it: http://info.korail.com/2007/eng/eng_index.jsp in the "online booking section" you can find schedules are prices for all trains. If you have a lot of time on your hands, and just want to relax your way around, the Mugunghwa train will get you almost entirely across the country in less than 6 hours for only about $25-30. There are faster trains too, and they aren't incredibly more expensive. So anyway, we went to our friend's place for a few days, and then headed off to Seoul for the weekend... and that was our adventure~
