seoul
Sometimes people ask me if I think it is dangerous to live in Korea. I always wonder why they ask me this because Korea is a very safe place with very little crime. Sometimes I remember that they ask me this because we live so close to North Korea, and word on the street says it's a little crazy up there. Generally for me though North Korea is just a place on the news that other people worry about (my mother not included).
This weekend Jordan's good friend Jed came to visit us, so we picked him up at the airport and took the opportunity to visit the DMZ. The tour started in the Joint Security Area, an area that has both a North and South presence, where the two sides meet for talks. We were "lucky" enough to see real, live North Koreans on a tour from their side.
Apparently this is a rare occurrence and both sides were busy taking pictures of the other side. The visiting rules are very strict, so we couldn't point, wave or make any gestures to the visitors on the other side. There are very serious South Korean guards standing around you all the time to make sure you behave and to keep the North Koreans from getting you.
After the Joint Security Area, we toured a tunnel dug by the North Koreans to secretly flood Seoul with soldiers. Luckily the tunnel was discovered before this happened. So far they have discovered four tunnels, however they estimate that as many as 17 more exist. In order to cover up their true intentions, the North Koreans painted to tunnel black and claimed they were looking for coal. Any rock sample will tell you though that the rock is solid granite. We got to wear cool hard hats as we walked through the tunnel, but pictures weren't allowed, so you will have to imagine us looking cool.
We ended with a view of Freedom Bridge, which was where prisoners of the Korean war were exchanged when a cease fire was declared. Now it's a place of pilgrimage for South Koreans to leave messages for their families in the North.
While we were up in Seoul last weekend to get our certificates of residency from the American embassy, we decided to stop in for a service at Yoido Full Gospel Church. Yoido has the largest congregation of any church in the world, with over 850,000 members--it will probably be the first true "Gigachurch." They have around eight services on Sunday (we went to the 3pm one), and have live translation into 8 languages via headsets. For those of you who are interested, here's a look inside the church:
So, as you may or may not have realized from our twitter activity, Jordan and I spent the weekend in Seoul. We had a long weekend, or I should say Jordan had a long weekend, Thursday and Friday off for exams, Monday off as a gap day between the weekend and Children's Day (a national holiday in Korea). I had school on both Friday and Monday, but thanks to the crazy hours of the American Embassy, got to skip both for an extended weekend.
Friday saw the failure of performing our tasks at the embassy since it decided to close for Korean Labor Day (as far as we can tell, the only place that did, our students remember had exams). We then had a tasty Mexican lunch in Itaewon and stuffed ourselves so full that we couldn't do anything for the rest of the day.
Saturday we enjoyed a rainy day visiting Changgyeonggun Palace:
In the afternoon we visited Insadong for some shopping:
And got to see Anika and Jon, friends of mine from Bethel, who currently teach in Seoul:
On Sunday, the sun came out and we visited Changdeokgung Palace:
Which had a Secret Garden:
And in the afternoon we attended yeouido Full Gospel Church, the largest church in the world. Monday morning saw us successful at the Embassy (which miraculously decided to open) and a brief shopping trip to Namdaemun Market before we got back on the train for Gunsan. The trip ended wonderfully with a stop for schwarma from an Iraqui man which was luckily just by the subway station.
Today we had a great picnic on the roof with many English teachers friends, complete with a quiz game. Tomorrow it is back to school, which may be a little rough after such a lovely holiday.
To see more picture from Seoul, click here.
If you want more of our experience in Seoul, check out this video. It's long, but has many exciting parts, like when I film in the electronics market which is apparently illegal and when we get stuck on the elephant cart in the snow. Special memories.
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.
This last Saturday we took a bus up to Seoul (about a three hour ride) to see Matthew,* and do a little electronics shopping (we weren't actually in the market for anything ourselves, but we thought we'd go ahead and tag along). Seoul is massive, teaming, and spreads over everything; about half of South Korea's 49-million inhabitants call Seoul their home, making it the second most populated metropolitan area in the world behind Tokyo (and equal to Tokyo in density--my previous home of Cairo, I'm pleased to say, is the most densely populated of the world's largest city areas).
The area of Seoul we visited, called Yongsan, is very famous for having... well, everything in the world there is to buy. To my understanding it is in fact the largest electronics market on planet earth (and sells everything else as well). About half way through the shopping we decided to ditch the rest of the party (American friends of Matthew's from his province of Chungbuk) and see Quantum of Solace with Matthew at a fancy cinema to celebrate the fact that the movie came to Korea before the US (which still won't see it for a couple more days).We then almost missed our bus back to Gunsan despite having over an hour to make it to the station.
In short we had a fun time, and learned how to navigate the city: on our next trip we plan to see more of the actual sites, and do some shopping for ourselves (we did buy an incredibly cool splattering pig, though, which you can check out in the video).
*Matthew, if you don't know, is my former college roommate of four years, and very good friend, who got us into this whole wonderful mess: he discovered Korea's need for English teachers first, and we proceeded to follow him over here (and are very glad we did). I would direct you to his blog, but he has stubornly taken it down for the moment.
Marisa Says: I am pleased to note that it doesn't get any denser than Hong Kong. Also it is the best James Bond movie I've ever seen (and I'm not just saying that because the story focuses on Bolivia).