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Quite possibly the most overrused title for visitors to Seoul, yet I feel this title perfectly describes my experience in Korea. My 'soul' was rejuvenated a) because I got a break from the monotony of my job (all July and August I sit at my desk and do NOTHING- good way to spend my time...thank god for sudoku!) and b) I met up with some old friends from Berkeley, which was a nice slice of home. Given the short time I was alloted for summer vacation, it was a quick trip into Seoul and the DMZ, then back to Japan.

I've Got Seoul....

Casey Lary
2007-03-08 20:52:10

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restaurant. We were a bit confused with the menu and manners, but that is the fun of traveling. The chopsticks in Korea are all metal- as if the wood ones weren't hard enough to master! They say that
the chopsticks are metal so that in the good old days when emperors were trying to poison each other, they could tell because their chopsticks would tarnish if the food was laden with poison. In addition they brought out a ton of kimchi. I myself am not a fan of the spicy pickled cabbage, yet Taz did indulge. Kimchi outside of Korea is rather spicy, but NOTHING compared to the spiciness of the kimchi in Korea! Next arrived our burner where we had our meat and vegetables doused in oil, sizziling. It wasn't necessarily the BBQ we expected, but it did taste good! We did also get an order of the INCREDIBLE dumplings and a Korean pancake- a feast for kings!

Post dinner we wandered south just to see what was around. We found ourselves in the a huge shopping area, Myeongdong, with all types of stores- many foreign imported stores intermixed with some local stores. They also had tons of street stalls selling everything from fake watches, belts, socks and even seven jeans. The best was when we stumbled upon the Korean version of Abercrombie and Fitch. We were even MORE excited when we found CAL gear! We
are talking hats with the Cal logo and shirts with Oski! We could tell they were imposters bc of the red trim on one of Taz's shirts....:-). After that we wandered back to the hostel and met up with Naomi!

Day 2
Today we did the touristy thing in Korea. We got the hop-on hop-off bus. We toured the War Memorial of Korea (learned all about the wars in Korea and saw some bad ass planes and tanks) Jogyesa Temple (different colors than the ones in Japan yet similar style), the foreigner/army region (scored a sevens skirt for 20 bucks!), took a tour of Gyeongbokgung and caught the changing of the guard (stunning!), ...