Day 2 in Seoul

Sunday morning we went to McDonald's for breakfast. There was one right next to our hotel. We found out they have great pancakes. We don't get fast food breakfast very often so it was nice.

After breakfast we packed up our stuff a little. We had to make a plan because our train didn't leave until 6:45pm. We asked if we could leave our suitcases there after we checked out. We had a bit of a difficult time explaining that to the people at the front desk, but finally they understood and said that would be fine.

We set off for an hour to finish shopping. We were meeting my former boss' daughter and her fiance' for lunch at 12. I was feeling a bit frantic trying to make final decisions on gift buying, but we finally got it all figured out. It was fun looking at all of the neat tradition Korean trinkets in Insadong. We finished almost all of our gift buying and picked up a few things ourselves. I tended to find more treasures than Cameron, but I am the shopper and the nostalgic person. I kept telling him he had to buy something. He said he wanted to wait and save for that one special item. He is much better at that than I am. I did find a doll for my foreign doll collection. I will have to take a picture of it.

After we finished shopping we ran back and checked out. We found we were not the only people to ask about leaving our bags. There were two other piles. The hotel was prepared with nets to put over them. We were happy to not have to drag our bags around. I was worried that we would have to take them back to the train station, which would have wasted so much time.

We headed to Starbucks in Insadong to meet Brittany and Alex. The Starbucks in Insadong is said to be the only Starbucks written in a native language.

Here is a picture of us in front of it.

We had lunch near Starbucks at a Korean restaurant. It was a nice lunch. They were teaching in Seoul. We got our inspiration for coming here initially from them.

After lunch we went to Changdeokgung Palace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changdeokgung

It was very close to Insadong. We got tickets and waited for the English tour. It was a bit confusing at first. We didn't know if we were supposed to get in line or what. Finally we met a couple other foreigners waiting for that tour. We were all a bit confused. We saw some other foreigners head toward the gate. We figured we might as well follow. Sure enough there was a group waiting to go for the tour. There were about 50 of us on the tour. Our guide spoke English very well. She told us all kinds of interesting stories about the palace. The last emperor lived there until his death in 1926. There were others of the royal family that lived there until the 1980's.

Our guide wearing a traditional hanbuk.

The main hall - where the king sat on the throne. Us in front of the gate to the king's quarters. The roof of the king's office. The only building with a blue roof. Inside the secret garden - this is the royal library where scholars would go to study.

The tour was very interesting. Many parts of the palace were built to Confucianism specifications. Everything had to bring "balance." More picture and details will be on our photo site. We learned a lot about the culture.

After we finished with the tour we went back to pick up our bags. Then we went to get our to go supper from Subway. We got a taxi and headed to the train station. The train station was huge. We didn't have time to investigate the mall that was attached - maybe next time.

I ended up with a bad headache and Cameron had to go hunting for a pharmacy. Thankfully he was able to find some Tylenol. By then our train was boarding. We took the KTX back.

A picture from the train.

That was amazing. We were going 290 KM per hour (181 MPH) at one point. It took us 45 min. to get to Daejeon which takes 2 hours by bus from Seoul. The first part was the quickest. There was only one stop right outside of Seoul then Daejeon. After Daejeon we had 4 or 5 stops before Naju. It took 2 hours from Daejeon. I watched a movie on Cameron's PSP and Cameron watched saved TV on his iPod.

We were tired when we got back, but we still had one more day of our long weekend. We always like to save one day to rest. We spent the next day relaxing.