Nic Trips

The last day of our long weekend in Seoul, we went to Gyeongbokgung ( 경복궁), or Gyeongbok Palace. This is one of the most famous places in Korea, and it's been on my "must-see-before-I-leave" list for a while. The day was gorgeous. The blue sky and bright sun provided for really great, colorful photos. In the picture below is the front gate of the palace. This is probably the more famous part and when I've seen Gyeongbokgung mentioned in Korean textbooks, it's accompanied by a picture of this gate rather than the other buildings. This is Geunjeong, the first and center building. It was the king's throne room, and is one of the most popular viewing areas for tourists. However, the entire palace grounds is HUGE, and the further you get away from the main gated entrance, the less and less people you see. I'm absolutely in love with the paint colors and patterns that Korea uses to decorate their traditional buildings. The sunlight on this luc...

Our last day in Seoul for the long May weekend, we went to a couple places. The first, located in Hongdae, was the Trick Eye Museum. It's an amazingly fun place set up purely to take funny and awesome photographs due to the optical illusions painted in the space. Each work is accompanied by instructions and an example photo to show you how to take the best picture illusion. Here are some of the ones we took that worked out the best.   In addition to our purchase of a ticket to the Trick Eye Museum, we received a complementary admission to the ice museum next door. This place was smaller, but it was fun, too. It was SO COLD inside though (obviously it needed to be).

Now that spring is here, one of the fantastic must-have experiences in Korea was a baseball game. And, wow, are they exciting! It's nothing like baseball games I've been to in America. First off, you're allowed to bring in whatever kind of beer and food you want - no having to settle for gross and ridiculously overpriced beer! Secondly is the ambiance. Each side has one of these stages with several dancers and an announcer. The home team gets to advertise theirs on the big screen, but each team is equally loud. They cheer and sing and dance through almost the ENTIRE game. When your team is up to bat, the whole crowd (on that side that is rooting for them) stands and chants, sings and does hand motions all lead by the announcer and the dancers. In this particular game our team, the LG Twins, was losing by quite a bit. But even in the last inning, no one failed to cheer their hearts out at the top of their lungs. If anything, they cheered LOUDER because we were l...

From May 2nd - 5th, many of us had a long, 4 day, weekend because of the Children's Day holiday May 5th. So naturally, we left Ulsan in search of an adventure elsewhere in Korea. This time, we headed back to Seoul to explore some of the endless list of places we had yet to see. The first day of our small vacation, we spent most of the morning and early afternoon hiking Bukhansan ( 북한산). This is a relatively small mountain compared to others we've climbed in Korea at 836 m, but it was a great trek and offered an incredible view from the highest peak: Ba egundae. It ended up taking us about 3.5 hours to get up and back down again, but we spent a considerable amount of time hanging out at the top eating gimbap and taking pictures on the cool cliffs. The first great photo-opt of the trail was of a different one of Bukhansa's 3 peaks: Insubong. We had to hike around it to get to the trial leading up to Baegundae, but it was neat to see all the brave climbers...