Seoul Weekend

Wow, it's been a really long time since I updated this...Sorry for all of you who look forward to reading about my many adventures.
Well about 2 weeks ago I made a trip to Seoul to meet up with Amanda and Char, 2 of my college graduates. Amanda teaches English in Pyougteak in Korea and Char teaches English in Taiwan. Char came over to Korea for a nice little break and visit time. So I took the bus up to Seoul with Attack. Then convinced him that he should stay because he was going off to the army in a couple of days.
Before meeting up with Char and Amanda I met up with Attack's sister and we took the subway to Insa-dong. This is a Korean cultural shopping area. It was very nice and this is where we had lunch. After lunch we looked around for a littl while. There was a performance going on of a traditional wedding so we stopped to watch and so I could take a couple of pictures. On the left is a picture of the groom and on the right is a picture of the bride.
At this time Attack's sister left to meet some of her friends and we went to the river to walk a little. When we got to the river we saw all kinds of children playing in the water trying to get a little cooler, as it was a pretty hot day.
After walking along the river a little it was time to go and meet Amanda and Char. So Attack and I took the subway to the place where we were going to meet. After meeting Char and Amanda we went in search for the hotel that Amanda had found that we would stay at. We got Attack to ask some people where the hotel was and they pointed us in the direction of what they thought was the hotel. After walking for about 10 minutes, we figured that someone was wrong and that we needed to call the hotel to find out exactly where it was.
This picture is our 'Where's the hotel?' picture of me and Char.
So after calling the hotel, we found out that we were directed in the wrong direction and needed to go back to where we started. So when we finally got to the hotel we found out that there was no room.
At this time we were hot and tired. We all had stuff with us and poor Char had everything with her for the week. She had taken the train and subway with her bag. Mind you the subway has many numberous stairs to go up and down. So we checked my travel book to find another hotel that would be simular to the hotel we wanted.
We found one in a different area and after calling to find out if there was room, set off on the subway again.
We got to the hotel, checked in for a really good price $30 each, and put our stuff in the room. After getting cleaned up a little we set out to find a place to tour around. We decided to go and check out a palace that was located close to the City Hall. So we set off again on the subway to go check out the palace. We arrived to find that they were just closing the palace. Big disappointment. So we decided to walk around, take some pictures, and find a Starbucks. At this point it was about dinner time also. Attack had called a friend, who was going to meet us in the area to go for dinner. We decided on Outback Steakhouse for our dinner. While we waited we took some fun pictures.
The picture on the left is of City Hall.
The picture on the right is of Char, Amanda and Attack in a phone booth.
Finally it was time to meet Attack's friend. We met and headed to the Outback. It was nice to eat at a nice Western restaurant agian.
The picture on the left shows all of us enjoying our food at Outback. We had a great waitress who spoke English really well. She even gave us free dessert of frozen yogurt with fruit. It was so delicious!
After eating it was time to meet another one of Attack's friends. We met him and headed off to Insa-Dong agian, where we would meet Attack's sister. We took the subway again. In Insa-Dong we did a little shopping in a store. It was nice. From there we decided to go to Seoul Tower, which wasn't too far away. We took a taxi to the Seoul Tower. We then took a cable car up to the Tower. It was a nice ride up, but very crowded. We wanted to go up the Tower, but found out that it was too late to get tickets to go up. So we just took pictures around the bottom of the Tower.
Here on the right is Amanda at the bottom of Seoul Tower.
On the left is Attack's sister singing an opera song for us. She is studying opera at university. She sings amazingly!
On the right is a picture of the group of us at the Seoul Tower.
By he time we took pictures and got into the line up to take the cable car down, it was around 12am. We headed off to our hotel by taxi and the Koreans went to a jjimjabong (a sort of spa/sleeping place). We would meet them in the morning to go to church. By the time we got to the hotel and ready for bed it was about 2am.
The next morning we headed off on the subway to where we would go to an English service. We were to meet the boys at the subway station there.
Here are Char and Amanda looking for the boys to arrive.
However, the boys got up a little late and so they were late meeting us, which made us too late for the service we wanted to go to. We decided on going to the biggest church in the world, the Yoido Full Gospel Church. We took the subway and then a taxi to get to the church. For some reason I didn't expect to see so many people, but there had to be thousands of people in the entrance to go in. It was crazy. We were directed to the place where we could listen to the service in English through headphones.
Here is a picture showing people filing in for the service. The church was massive!
It was nice to be able to listen to a translation of a service without having to worry about inturruping the people around me.
After the service, the boys left for Jinju and us girls went out for lunch. After lunch we went for a boat ride. It was nice to just relax and take a rest while seeing Seoul from the river.
Me on the boat ride.
After the boat ride we found a subway station and took the subway to the bus station. We said our goodbyes to Amanda and parted ways. It was a very busy weekend, but fun also.