Second trip to Seoul

Last weekend was my second trip to Seoul since arriving here in Korea. Dan and I caught an early bus up and met Tom and Bernard at Seoul Station early afternoon. There was a protest going on at the station that day- looked pretty peaceful to me, but they had police units out in full riot gear just in case :) The "police" looked about 18 years old, so we're thinking that they might have been military... all the boys here do a few years in the military after high school. We decided to head straight over to where the palaces are and took a tour of the second palace (there are 5 in Seoul) Chang Deok Gung palace. It was gorgeous! The largest remaining of all the palaces, it took about an hour to do the walking tour through the grounds. I love the old architectural styles here in Korea and all the lovely statues and painted details. It's the height of fall here as well, so the leaves changing in all the garden areas made it even more beautiful. I'll post a few pictures here, but there are lots more on my facebook page for anyone who wants to see. After the palace tour, we walked through Insadong, a popular neighborhood for tourists in Seoul that is full of cafes and little shopping areas as well as a number of galleries for local artists. We stopped into a couple of the galleries on our walk, sampled some traditional candy that they make from strings made of glutinous rice and honey with sugared nuts inside, and actually ate some of the boiled silkworm larvae that they sell in street carts throughout Korea. Yeah... can't say that the silkworms were my favorite, we definitely didn't finish what we were given, but really they weren't quite as bad as I was expecting either. After the silkworms we decided to stop at a little Indian cafe nearby where I had hot chai, the guys tried some fruit lassis and teas and we all shared one of the hookah pipes with cherry flavored tobacco. It was really quite good, had a very refreshing fruity flavor and made for a nice relaxing afternoon people watching from the cafe windows. Then we met up with Matt, one of Bernard's friends, and headed over to the Hongdae area near Hongik University where we had reservations at a guest house to stay for the night. Being near the university, Hongdae is famous for it's clubs and nightlife, but we actually had a pretty mellow evening having dinner at a nice little restaurant and then going to a couple of the quieter bars. It was Bernard's birthday this weekend which is why we'd all come to Seoul together. We got back to the guest house by midnight or so as we were all tired from our day of hiking around the city and had a good night in our tiny room full of bunk beds :) Sunday morning we had breakfast at the 3-story Dunkin Donuts there in Hongdae, then spent the rest of the morning shopping for warm clothes for the coming months. We ended up in Myeongdong, another shopping district, where we finally found some warm sweaters and shoes that would fit us (sizes here being awfully small) and had lunch at a nice little Vietnamese restaurant before heading back to our towns to get some sleep before our weeks classes started again. A very nice weekend and I was very very glad to have some warmer clothes this week. Looking forward to the packages from Mom with more sweaters and blankets!!! :D