Seoul 2

Finally home in Gyeongju. ^_^
No school friday meant a 3 day weekend that I could spend partying in Seoul. Got to Bong House (awesome Hostel!) early and went to Myeongdong to do some more shopping. As I said before, 1 hour in forever 21 just isn't enough time!...so 100,000 Won later I go back to the hostel to make plans for the night. Ended up meeting a friend in Itaewon, he's a DJ for the East to West rock and roll bar. At first, I wasn't sure how fun the night would be,but turned out ok! after a while people finally started showing up and I started to get drunk. Met two great army guys at the bar, one of which I hope to keep contact with ^^ Around 1230 I realize that the subway had stopped running so I would have to take a taxi back to the hostel (getting a taxi for a foreigner in Itaewon is a lot harder than it should be!).
Next day was not so interesting. Had planned on doing some site seeing, but ended up just going to a New York French Fry stand in Gangnam station-delicious! My friend got a cup fries covered in gravy and swiss cheese (or at least as close to swiss as you can find in korea), mine were covered in a cheddar cheese sauce, sour cream, and tomatoes. They were amazing!!
Saturday night was spent with my best friend's boyfriend who is also teaching English in Korea. We had lunch at a korean bbq near the hostel, walked around Insadong, had dinner at pizza hut and ended up drinking at Bong Bar. (bar next to the hostel-both owned by Mr. Bong. note also the subway stop is 420) Bong bar was empty, the two of us and the owner. I was glad to note that a few pictures of our last stay at bong house and bong bar made it up on the bar wall ^^ It ended up being an early night, my old friend went home and the guy from the bar the night before wasn't allowed to leave his post. oh well. I'm sure I can make my next stay in Seoul (and Bong House) more adventurous! Due back in mid december!

On a separate note, i'm starting to take my future plans a bit more seriously. Now, i'm thinking when my contract is up next August I will spend a bit of time volunteering at an orphanage in India. How awesome would that be!!! then go home for 2 months or so. It will be good to go home for a bit, but just for a bit. I will slowly make my way across the world through WWOOF (look it up) and hopefully end up at Graduate School in Sydney, Australia. I'm thinking either Buddhist studies or Anthropology. I think Anthropology would take my life in a more interesting and fulfilling direction. Will decide after much more research which path to take before I have to apply. After graduate school i'm not really sure. Hopefully in the next few years I will meet a great guy who wants to travel for a bit. Hopefully after grad school I could get some cool jobs around the world, and I would want someone who would also be travelling for work. teaching, army, w/e. I'm interested to see how my future works out...

Seoul 1

This weekend I went to Seoul with some friends, it was a great time! We took a midnight bus and arrived at 4 in the morning. Found a McDonalds, got some coffee and just waited for the subway lines to open up. Around 6 we made our way to Camp Kim where we got on a USO tour bus for the DMZ! The DMZ tour was really cool, went to Camp Bonifas where you can see the border b/w North and South Korea as well as the guards just standing and watching each other. There is also a conference room there where you are supposed to be able to go into and technically be standing in North Korea, but due to swine flu concerns they would not let us do that. =/ Guess I will have to go back again to do that part of the tour. After Camp Bonifas we went to the third infiltration tunnel. They showed us a video about how the 4 infiltration tunnels were found then we got to walk down it ourselves. It was neat to see and when you got to the end where the first barricade was you could see past it into the second barricade. Be prepared to walk hunched over though! the cave is low and the return from the cave is uphill. After that we went to a korean restaurant and got overpriced bulgolgi, it's good but not worth 10,000 won! Then we made our way to the Dora Observatory where you are able to see into North Korea. It really is a shame that the North Koreans built this area up to look good and it's not actually how the rest of North Korea is, but it's still pretty cool. Of course you can't take pictures past a certain point and where you can take pictures has no view at all of North Korea. Last stop of the tour was Dorasan Station which was built in hopes of unifying the country and has a train from Seoul to Pyongyang. The station was really nice, and they have a station where you can get a commemorative stamp. Our stupid tour guide told us we could get our passports stamped, but when we got there we saw signs saying not to stamp our passports, i'm sure our government would wonder why we had a north korean stamp...Overall a wonderful tour and I highly recommend the USO tour (after the swine flu concern dwindles down).

When we got back into Seoul around 2:30 we found two rooms at the Namsan Guest House. It was a decent place to stay and was 90,000won for two rooms split between 5 people. That night we walked up Namsan to Seoul Tower...Beautiful! The walk was gorgeous with all the fall colors and the view of the city. The tower was cool and of course had a great view over Seoul. It was actually my first tower! There was also a wonderful Italian restaurant where we ate dinner and drank some wine. After dinner we got some Coldstone Icecream and walked around Myeongdong, what a great place! We were exhausted before too long and ended up back at the hotel and sleeping before 10:30.
9 in the morning came too quickly and greeted us with too much rain. That didn't stop us! The girls made their way to Forever 21 and the guys found something else to do. What a great store! 3 floors of too many clothes, we spent an hour but that was not enough time to look at everything! After Myeongdong we went to Insadong and walked through all the souvenir shops, then caught a bus home.
It was a great weekend and I'm planning on going back soon, maybe a bit too soon....next weekend! This time I will see some palaces, maybe go to the museum there. For now I'm back home and have a 4-day work week ahead of me!