A little Seoul trip

Hey there!
Sorry I haven't posted anything in a while. These last few weeks have been crazy busy! Just a little update: Our major TaLK orientation is over(finally!) and now I am at my province orientation until Wednesday. Basically we are practice teaching tomorrow, Tuesday we will visit a school and go on a field trip of some sort, Wednesday my principal and mentor teacher will come to pick me up. They will take me to my school and then my apartment, and then I'm on my own I guess. Maybe I should be more nervous for that but honestly I'm so excited! The orientation has had good info, but I'm ready to be there and teaching and exploring!
Anyway, what I really wanted to write about was my little excursion to Seoul. Last weekend TaLK took all the scholars to Seoul to see one of the most popular live shows called Nanta.

 

 The show was really fun! It is about 4 chefs who are trying to get a wedding feast prepared in an hour. They make all sorts of music with the cooking utensils, the dance, do Tae kwon do and actually make korean food. It was pretty impressive! After that my friend Megan and I decided to stay the night and do some exploring. We had a list of museums we wanted to make it too...that didn't really happen, but we found some really awesome places, figured out the subway system on our own, and had some pretty interesting experiences!

We started out by finding a dessert we'd both been wanting to try called binsu. It is shaved ice with red beans, rice cakes and a scoop of ice cream. Sounds gross you say? Wrong. It's so yummy! As you can see these things were gigantic but we almost got through all of it.

This is Seoul(Namsung)Tower. It is at the top of a mountain and we get the most amazing view of Seoul at the very top. Unfortunately it was rainy and foggy the day we went...

but we decided to hike up there anyway. My shoes were soaked so I opted for bare feet, luckily they had a really nice, and beautiful trail.

Finally we made it! Well sort of. We took this picture with Katie and Inez before they went back left and Megan and I decided to keep going all the way to the top. I'm so glad we did!

This was my favorite part of Seoul Tower. All around the fences at the very top there are locks and keychains with messages on them. It is an old tradition that couples climb up and put a lock on together symbolizing that their love is locked in time(I think that's the phrase used on the sign.) Anyway, there were locks there that were pretty old and so many messages, most of them written in Korean, but I just thought that was really cool!

 

Ah yes, and the view was amazing at the very top! Unfortunatly my pictures were not. Here is one I took on the way back down that turned out a little better. When we were at the top I realized that this city is gigantic, which made me all the more excited to explore it!

After quite a while we made it back down and had no idea where we were since we had taken a different path down. But we stumbled into a pretty cool area with lots of fountains and huge rocks with Korean writing. It was very pretty and probably some kind of historic place but I really have no idea. And then we just started walking. I mean we kindof knew where we wanted to get to but we just walked and walked and hoped we were going the right direction.

And we were! This is were I say HA! to all of you that just love the Doniphan Watertower story, I'm better at directions than you think! :) This is Myondong a huge shopping district. By the time we got there it was about 8ish, and we hadn't eaten anything but that binsu. Needless to say we were starving! So what did we do?

Well, we ate the best Korean food I have had so far! We found this restaurant that didn't look like anything special but smelled amazing. It was so fun too! They gave us little aprons, started the burner at our table and poured in chicken bulgogi and I bunch of vegetables and we cooked it. It was so so good! Of course they also brought us some Kimchi, which went untouched, and some pickled radishes. New discovery: I like pickled radishes, who would have guessed?! So I look exhausted in this picture because I was.

Which brings me to this place. Siloam Jimjilbong. This picture doesn't do justice to the freaky display of gnome and animal figures they have out front. Finally after figuring out the subways, and walking, and walking, and walking, around 11pm we wound up here. Here's what I thought it was: a really cheap place were you rent a mat and sleep in the same room as a bunch of other people. Here's what it really is: all of the above but it is also a sauna like place. Boy did I experience some culture shock here. We paid and they gave us our pajamas and pointed us to the women's locker room. We walked in and there were just a lot of naked women walking all over the place. Basically in the basement of these Jimjilbongs they have a bunch of different comunal baths, but to go down you have to completly undress in the locker room and walk down a couple flights of stairs. For them its just normal, for me not so much. I washed off with some wipes and washed my hair in the sink. Many women tapped me and said "Showa" pointing to the stairs. I just smiled and kept washing my hair.

We slept in that day, found some breakfast and bought our train tickets back to Jochiwon and set off to explore for a few more hours. We found this awesome Hanock Village which is like old traditional Korean houses. They are really pretty and interesting to walk around there.

We took another little hike and just took it easy for a while. After that we went to a market, can't remember the name of it, and walked around for a while. It is the biggest outdoor market in Seoul, so it was fun, but that part was a lot like the markets everywhere in Peru, so it wasn't really anything new to me. Around 5pm we boarded our train and slept all the way back to Jochiwon. It was awesome exploring a little part of this huge city!