the last few days in seoul with the fam

Our flight back into seoul landed around 2200…not the greatest of times to be landing, but oh well…after zipping through customs and immigration we got back on the trains…two hours later we got to my area of town…that is, the area in which I last lived…since hana had suggested switching hotels, we decided to find one in an area I knew…the first place we walked into seemed to have an automated system, and I don’t know enough Korean to figure out how that works…the next place was full up…the third place we tried had rooms, and at first we wanted to stay four nights there…but the desk clerk told us the price would more than double over the weekend, and we had no desire to do that…howeva, the price that night was fine, and it was too late to do anything else…so we slept in rooms that looked like the wallpaper had been thrown up out of an interior decorators trash…terrible…

So the next morning we decided to switch hotels…after looking around online, we found one that looked promising, and made the booking…it would be too early to check in, so we used the last hour or so of our time in our current motel to make a trip to coffee bean…(as long as I was in Korea, I wanted as much coffee bean as possible)…after my morning fix, we got back on the subway, and found the new hotel…fortunately, it wasn’t far…we’d booked two double rooms, but they only had one left when we showed up, so they upgraded one of the rooms for free!! Hana and I ended up with a small suite!! A lounge with a half bath, big tv and computer…and a bedroom with two beds, a full bath, and a big tv…woo hoo!! The view was straight into the side of another building, but you can’t have everything, at least not all the time…especially compared to places I usually stay when I’m traveling, this place was pure luxury…I loved it…when we checked in, mom’s room wasn’t ready yet, but that was okay…we left everything in our room, and took off again…

The first place we went was deoksugung…another palace…when we got there, there was a changing of the guard ceremony at the gates, but since we’d already seen one of those at gyeongbukgung we didn’t feel like watching it again…this is the palace of longevity and something else…mom and hana probably remember better than I do…it’s smaller than gyeongbukgung, and at the back of the area is a museum I’ve never visited…I’m sure it’s a great museum, but I’m not one for museums most of the time…we saw a statue of king sejong and it seemed like a good place to take a picture…as we walked up, some schoolgirls asked to take pictures with me and hana…we obliged, having fun with jumping photos…mom was a pretty good photographerJ…the ladies then took a photo for us, of the three of us, which was nice…of course, it didn’t get the king in the background, but oh well…

Wandering through the palace was nice…there is a pavilion with Russian/western influence, a few gates, the traditional throne room, etc..in one corner is what remains of the worlds largest water clock…it didn’t look like much to me, but I guess very little of it remains…I would’ve loved to have seen a picture of what it should’ve been, it would’ve given me an idea of what I was seeing…there was also a large bell on display, I’ve forgotten what that was from…as we walked out, we could see all the school classes having class photos taken in front of the throne room…

After deoksugung, we split up…mom went to namdaemun market, while hana and I went to insadong…insadong is an area that is touted as a traditional art area…that’s true, but it’s also completely touristy…again with gazillions of little shops selling kitchy souvenirs…but there are also great tea shops, and art galleries and yummy food…hana was looking for some souvenirs for friends back home, so I wandered with her, and helped her remember which shops were worth visiting again after we’d wandered all the way through the area…she got her ceramic stuff, as well as a stamp with her name on it…that was fun, and the guys in the little booth weren’t at all pushy…they even made her a couple bookmarks with her stamp…hana’s name is simple, and because of what it means in Korean, it’s all over the country…we weren’t giving the guy something strange to carve…(have I ever mentioned that the word “hana” is the Korean word for the number 1?)

After insadong, we went home…shopping is tiringJ

I’ll leave the DMZ tour, which we did the next day, for another post…it’s a full on experience to say the least…

Our last full day in seoul, hana wasn’t even awake at 10am…mom came to our room around 1015, and I didn’t think hana would be up anytime soon…and if she was, I knew we wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon…so we agreed to meet later in the day, for dinner and our last night…eventually hana did get up, and we both got ready…my idea was to get coffee bean, then go to Olympic park…I thought it was a 20 minute walk from the subway station where I’d lived for a year…I was wrong about the length of the walk, but at least it was a nice day…most of the time I could see part of Olympic park from the windows of my flat…hana and I walked through the park as well, trying to get a few photos, and just enjoy where we were…the flags of all the nations that participated in those Olympic games are still flying in the park…which is nifty, because not all of those nations exist anymore…(Czechoslovakia, USSR, etc)…we saw a few sculptures, walked along the remains of an old fortress wall, etc…on our way back to the hotel, I got us going the wrong way on one of the subway lines…argh…you’d think I’d know which way to go after living in seoul, but I still get confused from time to time…whoops…fortunately, the timing worked out, we saw mom in the hotel lobby…

From there we decided to get dinner…it was still pretty early, but none of us had really had a proper meal yet that day…we ate at kimbap town, though none of us had kimbap…

from there, we took the subway to the stop closest to namsan tower…namsan is a little mountain in the middle of seoul…there is a tower on top, much like the sky tower in Auckland, or the space needle in seattle…from the subway station to the bottom of the cable car, there is no direct walk…you have to walk up a bit, and turn a couple corners…fortunately, we found it relatively quickly…the cable car takes you to the base of the tower, and from there you have more choices…you can eat, visit the teddy bear museum, or take a really fast elevator ride to the observation platforms of the tower…we went with choice #3…despite living in seoul for more than three years total, I had never been to the top of the tower…(or even to the bottom of the tower, for that matter)…I don’t know why…while waiting for the elevator, we had our picture taken…the company takes the photo of every individual/group going up the tower against a green screen…at the top, you can choose to have your photo put against the backdrop of a daytime tower, or a nighttime tower…just because we liked the family photo idea, we decided to get the nighttime photo…fun stuff…mom and hana looked pretty good in the photo…

The elevator ride up is really fast…they play a video on the ceiling of the elevator, which makes you look up, which helps to equalize the pressure in your ears without anyone realizing it…the video is dumb, but you can’t expect a whole lot…something about blasting off into outer space…I found it amusing more than anything else…after we got to the top, we wandered around, looking out at the city…seoul doesn’t have a particularly memorable cityline…so while there were lots of lights, there weren’t any “ooh, aaah, look at that” sort of moments…it didn’t help that along the inner side of the room, lights were on and stuff was for sale…but I’m glad we went up…the line for the elevator to go down was fairly long, but it also moved consistently, so I had no complaints…the line to go down for the cable car was just as long, and moved in fits and starts…it was chilly, all three of us whinged a bit…all in all, it was a pretty good last night in the city…

The next day we didn’t do much, even though mom and hana’s flight wasn’t until 1850…I took them to the airport, said my goodbyes (not easy, and something I’ll never get used to doing, even though I end up doing it a lot)…then I went to lindsey’s flat for the next couple days…