Seoul, South Korea

Our February flight back to the States left and came in to South Korea. Since we were flying standby, we left a few days on either end of the trip just in case we didn't get our first choice of flights. We ended up making both the flights (!) so on our return to Asia we had a few days to be tourists in South Korea before we flew back to Japan. This was a pretty great way to readjust to the time zone, which is almost completely opposite from the States, and see our first Asian country besides Japan.

We spent the first day on a really cool bus ride around Seoul's highlights. It was a hop on hop off bus, so we got a chance to get out at a few cool sights. We walked around the palace of Changdeokgung. It was beautifully restored.

 We went to the National Museum which was huge and very nice. You can see the Seoul Tower on a mountain through the opening of the museum entrance.

 There was a great children's museum area inside. The boys had a ball!

 On our second sightseeing day, we ditched the kids with a babysitter at the hotel and had a fun date day exploring a few of Seoul's many cute neighborhoods. Seoul is so big that there are many neighborhoods that take on different personalities. Nathan and I researched the ones that sounded neat and ended up making it to three of them.

First was Insadong. It's an artist's neighborhood that has traditional Korean crafts, tea houses and restaurants. There were tons of really cool alleys to explore and get lost in.

Just a short walk from Insadong was Bukchon Village which had many blocks of restored historical homes that are still lived in. It was a very ritzy part of the city with great views.

The last neighborhood we visited was Itaewon, which is a pretty seedy neighborhood that sprung up right next to the military base, Yongsan, where we were staying. It's a pretty hopping area with lots of really cheap things to buy - like leather jackets, tailored suits, knockoff name brand stuff, etc. There are a lot of different types of restaurants. We had trouble finding a Korean place to eat, but saw restaurants from just about every other country in the world. The neighborhood also has a red light district and is known for having pretty rowdy weekends with the American military base so close. It was definitely not as classy as the first two neighborhoods we wandered through, but it was still really interesting. 

Here Nathan considers some of Itaewon's waxing services.

Hate to leave you with the above picture in your head, but that was pretty much it for our time in Korea. It was very short but sweet - we had a lot of fun and are big fans of Seoul!