In Seoul with a Japanese Friend

     In April, 2010, a guy from Japan contacted me.  He was a student preparing for graduate school in South Korea and was looking for friends who could speak English and with whom to enjoy a bit of South Korea.  Eventually, as he got into graduate school, he became very busy, so we ended up losing contact.  Still, we enjoyed finding things to see in Seoul.  At the end of the first day, we spent a night at a Jimjillbang near Seoul Station.  This jimjillbang was HUGE and complete with workout gym, lots of saunas, showers and hot tubs, many restaurants, a computer game room, and a singing room.  There was even a sleeping room for snorers.  The sleeping room where we slept must've had five hundred beds (2-story bunk beds).  Not bad for 12,000 wons each!

     The more I visited palaces and museums in South Korea, the more intrigued I became (But, that's the point of it all, eh?).  Elaborate ceremonies, artistry shown in jewelry, pottery, fabric, wood, stone, and on canvases indicated sophisticated culture since pre-Christian days.  That means more centuries of development even further back, and we're talking about only this small area we now call South Korea.  

     That big wall back there is the original gate to the palace, Gyeongbokgung.

     Pictured above, and below, is a statue of King Sejong, the man who invented Hangul, the Korean language writing system.  He invented other things too.  The museum below the statue shows that he was quite a genius.

  See that pizza box in my left arm in the Free Hugs picture?  The guys making candy in the pictures below saw it too and signaled they would like to trade some candy for the pizza in the box.  Deal!

      I guess I should have placed these breakfast pictures at the top of this blog.  After all, they helped us get this day kicked off well.  We met at a The American Diner in Itaewon.  It was the only place I knew (at the time) where I could get a western breakfast.  It was pricey, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

      We had a tourist map of Seoul, and it showed us how to get to the dock where we'd start a ferry ride along the Han-gang River.  On the way there while we were exiting a subway station, a Korean woman asked us if we were looking for the riverboat ride.  How did she know?  Ha!  Ha!  How kind of her to point us in exactly the right direction!

     I've featured this riverboat ride in my videos on Youtube.

     A few weeks later, he came to Yeongcheon, and we went to Gyeongju together.