Seoul in a Heartbeat

So it seems like it's been raining every dang weekend for the past 2 months! This past weekend we got tired of being forced to stay in and not get outside, that when we got off work last Friday we were racking our brains for something that we could do. We finally decided that riding the KTX would be a fun experience. I'd never been on one before and J had the last time he was here in Korea. Next we needed a destination. We saw that the train ran all the way diagonal across Korea, from Busan (the lower east corner) to Seoul (the upper west corner). So Seoul it was! 

Tickets on the KTX weren't too horrible (about $60 per person one way). And the train's pretty fast too. It can reach speeds of up to 185mph! That's why I really wanted to ride on it. I wanted to see what the countryside looked like going that fast. The train is actually called a bullet train and works electromagnetically. It cuts the normal travel time almost in half.

So all of this was decided Friday night around 10 or 11pm and we booked train tickets for around 9am the following morning in Busan, a 1hr bus ride away from where we live. Needless to say, we didn't get much sleep that night (< 3 hours for me and zero for J!), with watching episodes of Dexter on Netflix and Joshua saying "one more, Teacher?" every time we finished one. Haha. There's a local bus that runs from our home to Busan numerous times every day but you can't get tickets until it's the day you want to travel. And these puppies sell out quick. So we woke up at 5:30am and J went down to buy us tickets for a 6:20am bus ride. At this point, though, we didn't feel the lack of sleep yet. The KTX was nice and convenient but I wasn't really impressed with the speed. It seems like it never got up to top speed for us. Oh well.

Now Seoul is the capital of South Korea and there are tens of millions of people living in the city alone.  The subway is the main way of getting where you want to go and it's actually not super hard to figure out. As long as you know what stop you need you can get anywhere. It's pretty cheap too. In Busan we can get a subway day pass for about $3, but we didn't see that Seoul offered the same day pass. So those subway ventures turned out to be about $1.50 per person per destination. All in all, the subway probably only cost us about $15 total for the weekend. One night we stayed out past midnight wandering around and hadn't realized that the subway closed after 12am and had to get a cab to our jjimjilbong. That was a $15 cab ride!

When we first got into the city we wanted to take a tour of one of the four palaces in the city. In ancient times (and up until the early 1900s) the King and Queen and other royalty would call all of these palaces home. The one we went to is called Changdeokgung (창덕궁). On another note, I have learned the Korean alphabet and can phonetically read the Korean characters! I only still have a little bit of trouble with the "w" vowels.

Crossing the threshold of the main gate into the Palace with the Throne Room in the background

It's hard to make out the left pathway, but there's a middle, a left, and a right pathway. Only the royal family could walk on the elevated middle pathway. High officials walked on the right and left pathways, and subordinates off of the path completely on either side. Needless to say, both J and I walked on the middle path!

Beautiful painted wood that only royal buildings could have. The paint kept out bugs and actually protected the wood.

Peekaboo with hidden entrances

One of the buildings in the Secret Garden

(which actually covered a HUGE expanse of land)

Two dragons on the underside of a pagoda in the garden.

J walking through the doorway from the men's living and 

sleeping quarters into the women's. Watch out!

The Cottonwood is blooming and feels like clouds on earth.

Watching it continually fall from the trees was beautiful.

We were thoroughly exhausted of walking after this 2 hour long tour so we wandered around the streets and found ourselves an hour away from the first lantern street parade/festival for Buddha's Birthday. His birthday is actually May 6, but the celebrations started the Saturday that we were there. After sitting on a curb for a while waiting, I walked to get us something hot to drink. While I was gone J helped parade volunteers move some chairs in exchange for them letting us sit in the front row right on the side of the parade route. So we got a great view of everything!

This lantern was given to me by a parade attendant. A nice Korean lady on the street gave me another more beautiful one but I had to leave it behind because it was too big and unwieldy. 

Buddhist Monks chanting

This is actually a true swastika, not to be confused with the Nazis. This is called a Manja in Korea and it's backwards from the Nazi-used swastika. It's a symbol of good fortune.

That's it for tonight, folks. J wants to watch more Dexter episodes so I'll finish the second half of the blog tomorrow. I'll explain about what's this jjimjilbong that we stayed in Saturday night is. And about the cat cafe we visited Sunday!