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!