Seoul's "Amazing Race"

The Seoul tourism desk here on post provided a fun and challenging opportunity this past four day weekend to get out see more of Seoul using 'urban orienteering'. It sounded like a lot of fun to me, so I talked the hubs into it, found a baby-sitter for the kiddos, and off we went! We were provided with a pre-paid transportation card (good for subway, buses, & taxis, though we were not allowed to use taxis for this) and full page photo hints (including a picture of the nearest subway stop) with a direction, azimuth, and distance.

Example of a clue sheet.

It really wasn't that challenging to find the objects, and when in doubt it was very easy to flash the picture around to people and they were very obliging. We didn't win, and that was okay; I didn't intend to. The prizes were various nights stay at the hotel on post, and what would I do with that anyway? I live here! We did have a lot of fun together, and that was what I intended, though I was exhausted by the end of it! 

Getting some directions.

Lunch! I can read something about vegetables and toast.
We just got the stuff on a stick.

One of our objectives; self-portrait.

The guy who took this for us actually took several pictures; he was trying to be artistic I think!

Seoul International Fireworks Festival

There have been numerous fireworks festivals recently around Korea, and I have been unable to go to any of them no matter how much I planned. So when I found out there was going to be one right in my backyard (almost) I was determined to let nothing stop me! There is not much to describe about a fireworks show; I think it's pretty self-explanatory. The show lasted about 80 minutes and involved three teams from Japan, Portugal, and Korea. Here's an excellent video clip with a much better view than we had. One interesting thing to note: some of the fireworks would explode as English letters; I've never seen that before.

Not the greatest picture, I know. I couldn't figure out what they were supposed to spell out.

The picture below does not do justice to the crowd. There had to be over 500,000 people there, if not more. This made exiting the park difficult, to say the least. My husband and I got separated in the crush (literally) and I was swept along by the crowd to places unknown. This was, honestly, a little frightening. Not being able to control or see where you are going is not a good feeling.  However, it all worked out (after about a 3 mile walk!).

The crowd extends behind me and well past the tall building in the center.

A few more pictures to enjoy. 

Smile!

COEX Mall

The COEX in Seoul is a multi-purpose place. It has convention centers and exhibition areas and an underground mall that contains a large movie theater, an aquarium, and a kimchi museum.

I found the mall disappointing. Unless I missed something there was a minimal selection of stores, though restaurants were numerous. We chose not to visit the aquarium today, it being Saturday and highly crowded. We did visit the very small kimchi museum. It was actually quite interesting and I learned there were many more types of kimchi than I could have imagined!

The kimchi making process:

preparing the cabbage

preparing the spices

mixing

storing for fermentation

They also had a tasting room with 8 different kinds of kimchi to sample. I could not bring myself to sample any since I didn't know who had done what and when. Also, I must have something with kimchi; it's not something I can just eat by itself.

Chusok, Korea's Thanksgiving

This is our third Chusok in Korea, but the first one we've ever really 'celebrated'. The date of Chusok is set by a lunar calendar, so it can fall anywhere in September or October. It is a celebration of the harvest, and they give harvest offerings to their ancestors and spend time tending graves. I don't know how many people still give offerings to their ancestors, but everyone still goes to their hometowns and tends graves and gives honor to their parents/grandparents.
This year, Chusok fell on a Monday. On Saturday our family went to the National Folk Museum where they had some performances and booths set up to make traditional style crafts. They also had an area with traditional games set up for anyone to participate.

samulnori, with buk & janggu drums

painting traditional style masks

too-hou, throwing arrows

On Monday, we went out to a Korean folk village to see the founding activity of Chusok, the harvest time. I didn't see what I expected, but we still saw many other things and got to participate in some hands-on activities. (This was also our first time taking a bus somewhere in Korea! With dozens of buses coming and going every few minutes this can be rather daunting.)  

grindstone

pounding grinder

selling rice candy

making 'dok' (or 'tteok'), traditional rice cakes

threshing

You can take a boat ride around the small lake. I'm not sure what the barge looking thing in the middle is.

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.