Day 1 In Seoul

What an INCREDIBLE day this has been! I have to say I am utterly and absolutely exhausted from climbing steps, walking sidewalks, and touring palaces. Seriously, I think we may have walked between 5-10 miles! (Even Jeff just confirmed this for all of you who think I am exaggerating!!) But Korea is such a beautiful country. I just love it here! The people are sooooo friendly and even if they don't speak English, they will try their best to help you. Everyone is so polite and they will smile and help you in anyway they can. I am so impressed and so happy that Adelyn is coming from such an amazing culture. I hope we can find ways to embrace this culture and hopefully come back someday!

SUBWAY:
Well, we started our day by hitting the Subway. Seoul has a beautiful subway. It is very clean, bright and easy to navigate. There are maps everywhere to help you and English translations and signs on everything. Even inside the subway cars, there are digital screens that announce and show you what station is coming in Chinese, Korean and English. The hardest part of our Subway experience was trying to figure out how to purchase tickets for the Subway. They have lots of digital machines- with English instructions, but we wanted to buy a card that would just let us load money onto it without buying individual tickets each time. After trying a few kiosks, I did what any smart tourist does... I pulled the old "puppy dog eyes I'm so confused because I'm a tourist" look. Within seconds, a very nice gentlemen asked in ENGLISH if he could help us!! We never approached him, he came to us! He led us to a different looking machine, showed us how we needed to buy a smartcard first, then load money onto it. He even showed us how to go through the turnstiles correctly (for all of you going to Korea... BLUE light means you can go, RED light means you can't. Look for the BLUE lights! LOL!) Before we knew it, we were on our way! First stop....

GWANGHWAMUN
Our original intention was to go here to pick up the Seoul City Bus Tour. When we arrived, we found...

KYOBO BOOKSTORE
This is Korea's largest bookstore... more like a monster store.... more like Barnes and Nobles on steroids! Its huge! We wanted to find Addi some board books in Korean and English and it didn't disappoint! We even found "The Hungry Caterpillar" in Korean! How cool!

After leaving the store, we found ourselves at...

GWANGHWAMUN SQUARE on a main street with a HUGE statue of a warrior on a central boulevard. Underneath the statue are rows of water fountains. On a hot summer day like today, there were tons of kids and adults running and playing in the water! Just a little past this was another statue of a past king. And beyond the statue of the king was a BEAUTIFUL palace outlined against the blue sky at the end of the street...























































































GYEONGBOKGUNG PALACE
This palace is AMAZING! It rises up at the end of a busy intersection! It is so majestic and the architecture is beautiful! The hand carved and hand painted woodwork that made up the roof was amazing. It was first built in 1394! What an old, rich history! But one of the coolest things were the palace guards! They were actually a bit scary! They carried huge Samarai swords and battle axes and they wouldn't blink. Jeff said he would take my picture next to one, but I didn't get too close! Once we entered the main gate, they were ready to do the changing of the guard which we got to see. There was a group of guards that played instruments while the palace guards marched in formation. It was very cool to see! After that, we walked to the main palaces... and we walked... and we walked... and we walked! What we thought was a small palace was a sprawling city! There were so many beautifully restored palaces within the walls. We saw where the king would have lived, where the queen's palace was, where his throne was and even where his concubines stayed! We even got to see a traditional tea ceremony taking place in one of the palace buildings. It was beautiful. They were dressed in the ceremonial traditional hanboks and had a beautiful ceremony for serving the tea.


















After finding our way out, we went to the
NATIONAL FOLK MUSEUM OF KOREA which is on the same property as the palace. We toured the museum, then witnessed an amazing performance of drummers, singers and dancers performed in front of the museum. They played traditional Korean drums and instruments. It was very cool! The best part was at the end they had a hip-hop group do some street dancing and break dancing and they wanted some volunteers to help. Of course Jeff was wearing the "I'm a gullible American... please pick me" look on his face!! We tried to sneak out, but couldn't in time. He did a great job dancing for the crowd!





























After we left the palace area, we found our way down to a small street. This is called...

INSADONG
This is a street lined with artsy stores and outdoor vendors. It was so much fun shopping! We found a chop shop where we bought Adelyn name chops of her name. These are hand carved out of stone that have both Adelyn in English and Daum in Korean written out. They are square and absolutely beautiful. They wrapped them in a special case and gave us special ink to stamp them with. We were thrilled to have this special gift for her someday!


























We also picked up some other fun gifts throughout the streets. It was awesome shopping! Finally, exhausted and hungry we ate at an INCREDIBLE mandu dumpling restaurant that had been recommended by some other adoptive parents. WOW! These were amazing! We split a plate of mandu dumplings and mandu soup. The dumplings are filled with a garlic, onion and meat mixture and steamed to perfection. I think I could eat there everyday! AND... guess what? Jeff encouraged me to try the kimchi and I did... AND I liked it! It was very fresh and had a great flavor... hot, yes... hot enough that I thought I didn't have any tastebuds left, but great!


After eating, we took a detour to a huge department store (that's another story) and headed back home. Now we are working on assembling our foster family gifts in preparation of our big day tomorrow!! Sweet dreams!!