Long Weekend in Seoul

A little less than a month after our trip to Busan we had another long weekend; 3 days (Oct. 2-5). This time, we took the opportunity to go to Seoul. We all finally had money because we had just received our first pay check, so we even spent the little extra to take the KTX train for 2.5 hours rather than spending 6 hours on a bus. The trip was not nearly as touristy as Busan was with all the sightseeing and instead it was mostly about shopping, seeing our friends from orientation, and going out in the biggest city in Korea. Thus, I don't have many pictures from this trip.



Our first evening, we happened to be in the general area of Seoul tower, so we decided to wait in line and take the cable car up to see the view. It ended up taking over 4 hours to get to the top, look around and then come back down because there were so many people there. (It was a holiday weekend, so that was our own fault for not thinking ahead.)





At the base of the tower (we didn't actually get to go up in it - another line that was way too long) there were love locks everywhere. One area had a row of metal trees built specially for the locks, and another area had a fence that couples had covered in the little love promises.





The view of the city, or part of the city (it's so big, it's impossible to see the whole thing from this height), was gorgeous and actually worth the wait once we got to the top.



The rest of the first night involved going out with friends in the "foreigners" area of the city; we even went to a country bar there (probably the only one in all of Korea). We played street games, took lots of funny and random pictures, and has an all around great time with the friends we hadn't seen since orientation.


The following day, we to another long shopping excursion in a different part of the city. Most of the other girls just wanted to continue clothes shopping in the subway station, but Andrew's and my goal was to find the giant bookstore that everyone had been telling us about. The issue was we had no idea what part of the city it was in or what it was called.


Our search took us to Gangnam - yes, the part of the city that the famous song is named after. We even found this little stage and sign attributed to it to pose for some pictures with. 


Eventually we got really lucky and ran into a Korean man on the street that spoke very good English and knew exactly which bookstore we were looking for. Plus, it was only about a 15 minute walk from where we were!


That night, we went out again with an even bigger group of people to a different part of the city. Our goal one of the nights was to stay out until the subway started running again at 6am (because then you don't have to spend a lot on a taxi), but it didn't happen either time. However, we have lots of friends that live in Seoul, so we'll definitely be visiting them again in the future, and next time, we'll do less shopping and more sightseeing!


The KTX back to Ulsan was quiet. Everyone was exhausted from the trip and fell asleep for the majority of the ride while I curled up next to the window with my iPod in and read one of my new books.


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