Day 1 in Seoul.

I thought I would take advantage of having a computer in our hotel room.
We left Naju at 7:44 this morning on the Mugungwha train. Our trip was pleasant. We enjoyed sleeping, listening to music and watching movies, although I ended up with a slight headache. Thankfully, acetaminophen took care of it. We arrived in Seoul at 12:44pm. We ended up getting on the wrong Metro train and had to turn around, thankfully only after the first stop. Unfortunately our bumble took us around an hour to fix. We were quite exhausted and ready for lunch.
We finally got on the right train and found out what a city of 12 million feels like. It was full, although we hear that Tokyo, Japan has a subway where they literally pack people in, we were glad it wasn't like that. Balancing was fun, we had to stand in the middle with people around us and nothing to hang onto.
We got to our subway stop and found our way out to the street. Thankfully, there was a taxi stand. We ended up giving him the phone number to our hotel so that he could call and get directions. It was the easiest way.
We are staying at the Sun Bee Hotel. It's quite nice. The room is comfortable. We rested for a couple of hours. We ended up watching a documentary about the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra going to North Korea on CNN. We had been CNN deprived, our only link to the outside world besides the internet.
Finally we headed out for lunch at Burger King and to the North Seoul Tower. We are so thankful for taxi drivers that know a small bit of English. We had to take a cable car or walk up to the tower. It's on a small mountain called Namsan Mountain. We chose the cable car. We wait around 45 minutes to get on the cable car. It was a short ride up, but after seeing the stairs, it was worth it.
The tower is in a huge park. No cars are allowed in the park. It is really beautiful and green. There is nice decking with stairs to walk up to the tower itself. I really need to start doing the Tae Bo DVDs I got. Walking up bunches of steps really showed me how out of shape I am. We tried to walk quickly because they had boiled silk worms and they stink. They smell like wet dog and zoo or something nasty like that. I almost gagged.
There were lots of people. There were food vendors, photographers, and a few artists. We glanced around and then headed for the tower entrance. We bought tickets and got on the elevator. The view was amazing! Almost every window had a city from around the world and the distance from the tower. After seeing the 12th largest city in the world I wonder how big the largest city is. This one is huge. All I can say is the pictures will have to help explain that. We took our time looking around at the city. We bought a magnet for our places collection and headed back down.
We enjoyed a cup of ice cream similar to Dip 'n' Dots. It was yummy! We were thankful that the line for the cable car wasn't nearly as long as the first one. We had to find a taxi to get back downtown. That was a bit of a challenge, but we finally found one after walking a bit. The traffic was a bit heavy, but it didn't take long to get back to where we knew our way around. We were excited to find out that our hotel is pretty much in the middle of everything we were planning to do.
We decided to walk back to our hotel to find out exactly where Insadong was. It's the best place to shop for Korean souvenirs and gifts. Can't go into details about that and spoil the surprises. After finding a few of the things we were looking for we walked to Subway for sandwiches - aah, just like home.
We are now in our hotel room chilling and ready to call it a night. We did a lot in one day. Tomorrow we are going to shop a bit more and then meet my former boss' (SC) daughter for lunch. It will be nice to connect with someone from SC. We are hoping to also visit a palace. We had wanted to do it today, but ran out of time.
Signing off after our first day in Seoul.
Love and Blessings!