Saturday, August 8, 2009

Days 11 & 12 : DMZ and N'Seoul Tower ... and beyond!

Day 11 was Saturday, July 8th and it was a good thing we had gone home early the night before, because boy did we ever have an early rise that day... 4:30 AM!!! We were tired but excited, and we even brought Lindsay with us.

Oh? Where were we going? Let me show you...

Back in time, perhaps? A war zone?

Well figuratively yes to the first, and technically yes to the latter. Both! Although I must say the pictures look a little less menacing in colour.




On an interesting side note however, all of the grey building in this picture are owned by communist North Korea. They have creepy soldiers who peer out from behind windows and make obscene gestures to the American and South Korean soldiers who are protecting the tourists... crazy!

If you look very closely in this picture in fact, you'll see a North Korean solider watching our every move with binoculars... double crazy!



Well all got to take out picture on the North Korean side of the DMZ, and saw a whole bunch of other places in the DMZ that we weren't allowed to take pictures of. It was pretty amazing, and I would highly recommend it to anyone else who was interested.


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Day 12, Sunday saw me with the family back at the COEX mall to do a little more shopping and we had a really great time. We also went to N'Seoul tower that day which was quite a hike (we didn't take the cable car), but completely worth it for the view of Seoul.



First when you arrive at the base of the mountain, you must either take a cable car to the top of the mountain and then hike to the tower, or you can hike the entire way if you feel so inclined. We had originally intended to take the cable car ourselves, but we hadn't anticipated the volume of people who were present on that Sunday evening. The wait to ride in the cable car was over an hour, and so we decided to hike on up.



As we have been apt to do over the past week or so, we took many a picture, including this one on the right, which is only a small part of a rather large fence. The fence is covered for dozens of metres in locks and love notes. Young lovers go to N'Seoul Tower and put their locks on the chain link fence, throwing away the key to symbolize the eternal nature of their love... *sigh*. Naturally, I fall for that kind of stuff, I thought it was sweet.


Located in Seoul Tower, is also strangely enough a Teddy Bear Museum. Who knew?



We were also treated to a pretty fantastic light show that evening, AND we had Cold Stone ice cream (my favourite). ALL, before we even went up the tower itself. Fabulous!


The view from the top of the tower was incredible! My camera, however, is not fancy enough to help you appreciate it, so I'm not going to put up any of the pictures that I attempted to take. They were very sad attempts indeed.


When we finally got back down from the tower itself, the wait to take the cable car down that mountain was even longer than it had been to go up the mountain.


So down the stairs we went...
Down...

Down...

Down...
I promise that we did eventually reach the bottom. It just took a while. :)


The rest of the week went off without a hitch, but also without a lot of participation from me, as I started back to school on Monday morning. We had a relaxed day today, Saturday, Day 18, with a little On The Boarder Mexican deliciousness, and some final shoe shopping in Idea, and now they're leaving tomorrow. Boo....

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