French Fries and Wiis

Our first minutes in Seoul started propitiously. After dropping our bags at the hostel and making our way out to the corner of the street to begin our exploring, we ran into a neighbor from Gunsan. She works at the BBQ chicken restaurant that's around the corner from our house, which we frequent often, much to the enjoyment of the family who owns the place. She was out looking for apartments with her younger sister who will soon be attending university in Seoul. The probability of us running into her on a street corner in Seoul is quite enormous so we looked on it as a good luck charm for our trip.

Our trip revolved mostly around eating food. And I won't lie and tell you that we were sampling the many varieties of Korean food that line the streets of Seoul. Nope. We ate as much American food as we could find and savored every minute. We went to Subway, and TGIFridays, and Outback Steakhouse and found some Mexican food. It was all incredibly tasty, and the hamburger I had at TGIFridays was probably the best I had every had. It was also about the size of my head, but I ate it all. I will dream about it in my kimchi filled days to come. It is incredibly nice to be able to have a quick trip to Seoul to enjoy all this. I remember when we lived in Bolivia and used to spend months dreaming about the food we would eat when we got back to the States.

We also had an adventure buying our Wii at the electronics market. The Yongsan Electronics Market is the largest electronics market in the world. You can find anything you might possibly want. We wanted a Korean Wii (Korean Wiis are cheaper than American ones) that had been modified so that we could play American games. This is of course illegal, and would have been a lot of work to make if we were living elsewhere. But this is no problem here. There was a huge row of guys selling Wiis, all of which could come modified if you so desired. We ended up with a modified Japanese Wii, which was considerably cheaper than any of the other Wiis we looked at. Jordan can tell you all about the good deal we got, all I know is that now we are the proud owners of a really cool Wii.

We toured various Museums around the city, including the National Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Prison Museum. The latter tells the story of prison life during the Japanese Occupation. It was very grim and disturbing with the scenes of torture that were modeled and tours of the actual jail cells. The Museum of Contemporary Art was more amusing, mostly because we had a slightly crazy time trying to find it. We ended up riding an Elephant Cart in freezing snowy weather around in circles for a while before we managed to find the place. 

We also took a trip up to Seoul Tower, which is the tallest point in Seoul and from which you can gaze on the beauty of the huge city.  We rode the cable car up about an hour before sunset so that we could experience Seoul by day and by night.  The day was a little cloudy, so it didn't make for the best view, but we were trying to sieze the moment as the weather forecast was pretty grim about sunlight.  

We spent most of our time inside at Museums and shopping malls because the weather was absolutely frigid, perhaps the coldest weekend we have had in Korea so far. We tried to see one of the large palaces in the city, but the freezing wind ended our trip short.

We our glad to be back in our "Sweet Home" (as it is called by Jordan's co-teacher). Our Wii is hooked up, and I'm just waiting for Jordan to get out of the shower so we can give it a spin.

 

We have more photos in our album.