N Seoul Tower

The major landmark of Seoul, N Seoul Tower. No, the 'N' does not stand for north. It is pronounced in Korean "en Seoul towa". Why the 'N'? Perhaps because it is located on Namsan mountain, although of course they have a different alphabet than us. Who knows. Regardless of the name, the tower can be seen from just about anywhere in Seoul, except maybe the outlying areas. We have quite a good view of it from our house and found our house easily from the observatory. It is not really that tall, 777 feet (compare to Washington Monument at 555 feet or the Empire State Building at 1250 feet), but being on the mountain top gives it quite a boost.

 In the very center of this picture you can see the "Blue House" nestled against the mountain side, which, as you can guess, has the same purpose as the American White House. Notice how rocky the mountains are.

The Hangang, or Han River.

You can see our house! Red roofs on left, near the big rectangular bluish building.

Only foreigners can drive, or taxi as we did, to the parking lot at the top, some sort of goodwill tourist policy, which our taxi driver told us Koreans complain about. Can't say I blame them. The path is very shady, but also very steep. You can see (highly repaired) parts of the Seoul Fortress Wall along the way.

As you can tell from the pictures, Seoul is surrounded by mountains and crossed by the Han river. This makes it a good location for a capital city, especially in ye olden times, which we learned from our visit to the Teddy Bear museum at the base of the tower. A wonderfully cute, very basic overview history museum, with depictions of life using teddy bears. In each set-up, some of the bears move, and they have music/sound effects also. Fun for kids, informative history for foreigners! It was great because with as much history as Korea has, a history museum here can be quite overwhelming for someone ignorant of all things historically Korean. I don't understand all the dynasties and kingdom eras and etc they refer to at most museums and get brain block and don't want to look at anything else! This was super cute and fun!

ancestor memorial ceremony

traditional wedding ceremony

market scene

royal court

the Blue House

Americana at the gift shop!

KINTEX

The KINTEX, Korea International Exhibition Center, a massive building with multiple exhibit halls, ballrooms, and meeting facilities. They are also getting ready to open a second building nearby next month. It is quite a long subway ride out from Seoul, but was well worth it for me. This past month they had several interesting exhibits. For our first trip out there we went to see the "Rhythm of Africa". It wasn't a very big exhibit, but the show they had was great. There were, of course, the drums, and everyone in the audience had a drum to participate as well. Some singing, dancing, a little flute playing, great fun. 

After the show the performers came down and of course we took pictures with them!

There wasn't a large amount of things on display, but what they had was interesting. A little bit of everything: jewelry, weapons, burial items, masks, and others.

A few days later I went back with the girls to see the "Hi Dino" exhibit, and to have some fun at the "Happy SpongeBob World". The dinosaur exhibit was fantastic! It had numerous full scale dinosaur skeleton replicas, and many smaller real fossils, plus a few robotic dinos. There was a place for the kids to "dig up" bones, make their own fossils, and it also had a 3-D movie.

digging up bones

Dino Last Supper -  their caption, not mine!

After this scientific exploration we had some fun at the SpongeBob place, the place the kids were really wanting to go to. It had some jumping balloons, a ball pit, a few games, a bubble show, and several pools set up with different activities: little boats, water slides, small wading pools.