...IN the middle of a three day weekend I managed to find some time in my busy days off to blog about exactly what I have been spending my time doing since school finished on Thursday.
As I mentioned before, thanks to Chuseok today (Saturday) we had a four day week at Talkster so with an extra day's leisure available I've been doing my best to keep busy!
On monday my friend Aimie from England arrived in Korea to start a three week long vacation visiting me (and conveniently doing some university work at the same time.)
Like when my mum came here, it was strange to be seeing someone after such a long time away from them but needless to say being visited by someone from back home, it was lovely to see a friendly face. I went down to the station after work as Aimie was getting the bus from the airport to Suwon so I had agreed to meet her in from of the shopping centre as that was where her bus stopped. After about an hour and a half of waiting for her bus to make it through the traffic from Incheon Airport to Suwon she finally made it here and she got back to Hwaseo just in time to eat dinner and finally meet Charlie and Kevin.
As Aimie has never been anywhere near Aisa before this is another oppertunity for me to play tour guide and show her around the area where I live and attempt to show her what I have learned in my five and a half months in a completely new culture. We've spent most of the week eating at our favourite restaurants and on a couple of evenings I've been able to take her up to the fortress and show her what I great landmark I have just around the corner from where I live.
The extra day of work has provided me with ample oppertunity for me to show Aimie around and although we weren't able to achieve much during the week because of work I decided that Friday and Saturday should be completely devoted to spending time in and around Seoul. Anyone who knows me well realises that despite being from Yorkshire I enjoy change, but with Aimie being in town it was a case of showing her the few sights that I have seen in my time here.
There's plenty that she had lined up herself and with a wide choice of things to do over the weekend we decided to spend friday in Seoul visiting a couple of attractions that I visited whilst my mum was here.
As I mentioned in my previous blog, Charlie's parents, his cousin and his brother are visiting him from the US so the both of us were out in Seoul. Where as Charlie headed out at ridiculous o'clock in the morning we headed out later in the day to visit Chunggyeonggung Palace which is in at a stop on the Seoul Subway called Jongno-Sam and is about an hour or so from where we live.
Having walked around and taken in what the palace has to offer with my mum when she was here I was pretty familiar with the location but it was still nice to walk round in some nature as the grounds of the palace itself are pretty cool. With it being Chuseok, the park had put out some traditional Korean games for people to take part in. Obviously I was more than willing to try my hand at a couple of the games. One of them involved throwing plastic arrows into a bucket and another one was basically a haki sack shaped like Christmas decoration that was meant for doing keep ups with. (If you need to see a hilarious video then it will be going up on my video website soon.)
The final game (which I'm not sure got videoed) basically involved a rope and a wooden spinner with the object being to keep the spinner rotating as quickly as possible. The only way to do this for some reason is to whip the wooden spinner round and round with nothing more than a skipping rope. Needless to say my attempts to do this were pretty useless. Thankfully Aimie wasn't much better at it either.
From the palace we decided to walk to Dongdemoon which is just down the road to get some dinner. Sadly the shopping centre which holds most of the restaurants decided it was going to be closed so on the way to our next destination, Seoul Tower, we stopped to get a KFC at a nearby food court in the station opposite.
Once we were eaten and refreshed we decided to walk our way up to the cable car station which is up a hill and about 300m away from the station.
Upon climbing the hill we discovered that there was a massive queue for the cable car which takes you up to the base of Seoul Tower. Seeing that there were about 400 people trying to mount a cable car which takes about ten minutes to get up to the top and carries fifteen people we decided it would be sensible to take the other route to the top which involved climbing the stairs. Sadly there were about a million steps to climb and a 1.2km distance to climb before we could get there.
We made it to the top after about forty minutes of climbing to discover that not only does the tower look extremely glorious in the full light of the evening. About 1000 people had also wanted to check it out at the same time as we had! There were all kinds of things going on at the top of the tower and whilst up there we decided to get a good view of the city at the lower of the three levels.
Getting to the front of the queue for tickets we discovered that there was a forty minute wait to go up into the tower. We walked around the tower shop and sat around for a little while until our number was finally called so we were able to get the elevator to the top of the tower. The view of the tower at night was as fantastic was it was during the day the last time I visited and it was a lot busier than last time. With it being dark it was pretty difficult to take alot of pictures but I think I got a few decent ones.
We were going to wait for a cable car to get back down to the bottom but as there was a massive queue awaiting us when we arrived at the station we decided to take the 1.2km route back to the bottom and then walk back to the nearest station. We didn't arrive home until 1am or so following a long subway ride but were up early today (Saturday) to go visiting again.
With it being Chuseok I expected a few attractions in Seoul to be closed and instead we decided to go to Incheon which is a city just to the West of Seoul.
Having read the South Korea guidebook which was left in my room we noticed that there was a cheap theme park just to the South of the city. We travelled about two hours on the subway and following the directions which I had found on the Internet we climbed on a bus which was supposed to take us to a place called Song-Do which is where the amusement park was.
Sadly the directions that I had picked up weren't exactly very detailed and with the bus map in Korean we managed to board the bus 45 minutes in the wrong direction to discover we needed to be going the opposite way. Getting on the bus in the right direction we spent about an hour and a half trying to get back in the right direction but with it being about 5pm and the park closing at 6pm it would have probably taken about three hours longer to get to where we needed to be!
Korea obviously hasn't listened to any of my complaints about it's directions over the past six months but we're hoping to get there either next weekend or the weekend after now that we actually know where we need to be.
We decided to catch the train back home to Suwon and had agreed to meet up with Charlie and his parents to eat dinner at the shopping mall in Suwon Station.
A group of us are heading to the DMZ tomorrow so following writing this blog I shall be heading to bed to get an early night so that I am actually able to drag myself out of bed tomorrow morning.
Check out some of the pictures which I have taken on my photobucket website and hopefully there will be plenty more tomorrow when we visit the DMZ. It's been a good weekend tomorrow and I am hoping that tomorrow will follow up on that.
Ben
We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon.
Konrad Adenauer
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