Valentine's Day

To all men everywhere that attempt to conjure up the romantic on good old St. V day, you should try and do it in another country! With two weeks to spare I had a plan but had no way of implementing said plan. I wanted an extravagant location for this sweetly special holiday. So, with the help of Miss Yun and Mrs. Kim in the school office, I obtained a reservation for a room at Seoul Plaza Hotel. It was beautiful! More than I was expecting by far. With our room we had free club floor pass that allowed us an awesome view of the plaza as well as snacks/coffee/soft drinks and an amazing morning breakfast.

Now for the far less romantic parts...

Shortly after dropping our stuff at the hotel, we turned around, jumped on the subway and headed to the Dongdaemun Stadium stop. I have been told that the shopping center in Dongdaemun is something to behold, but I was totally unprepared for what we found.

First though, we had to fare on the local cuisine. Everywhere I looked, I saw people eating these...well it looked like a ball of french-fries stuck together on a stick. Upon closer inspection we found out it was a corn-dog with french-fries stuck to the outside. They hose it with ketchup before handing it to you and voila! Something that tastes like a complete country fair meal on a stick!

Now, back to Dongdaemun... The area itself is huge! Expansive in nature and yet it seems that merchants were scraping the bottom of the bucket for their special spot. Everywhere there were clothes, home furnishings, nick-knacks, odds and ends, the kitchen sink and other small appliances to go with it. Now it would be one thing if it were all contained in one area but we literally walked for 3-4 hours and saw store after store after store. You can see the stats on the wiki page, but I am trying to think of a way to relate it to those in America... I could talk about football fields, but I fear I would need too many of them. I could possibly describe it in blocks, but that seems a little ambiguous. So let me see if I can describe it universally. If you have 20/20 vision, then on a clear day you should be able to see things almost a mile away with some distinction and ability. I could neither see the end of the main road, nor do I think that we went to even a quarter of the possible shops. And if I were to guess at the total weight of the all the wares, I would have to say that even a dozen triple locomotive trains with a couple hundred cars could not contain it all!

All that being said, I think that Charity and I were a little overwhelmed at the sheer amount of things available. We spent most of the time simply walking from store to store and passively taking in all that we saw. The most amazing part though, these shops stay open as late as 2 and 3am. I have a feeling we will be back for some more expeditions in the future....

On the way back to the hotel we stopped at Chungmuro, where many of the pet stores are, and looked at some of the shops for a little puppy. They were all extremely cute...until you hit the price. Cheapest dog we found was ₩250,000.00 (about $220.00 USD) and the ones we liked were about ₩600,000.00. Needless to say that neither of us are that liberal when it comes to a pet!

That night we enjoyed our wonderful hotel and relaxed to some French/Spanish/Italian/Chinese/Japanese/Korean/English TV (pretty good with only 30 channels...you do the math).

The next morning we let time slip away a little and checked out of the hotel around noon. Right across the street from the hotel is the grounds of Deoksugung Palace. A very interesting place. The grounds had several buildings that displayed the detail and fine craftsmanship of the Korean people. You can check out the pictures here. It is especially cool to note the detail taken on every single beam, rafter, joint and window of the buildings. The colors used throughout were fantastic! Also, they have a water clock and a Singijeon Launcher Carriage. Also, I did not know that they had a sun dial that is intricate in its design and precise in its use.

The last thing we did was take in the National Museum of Art. It was very interesting to see how different the art was from what I was so used to. The paintings were very impressionistic and tended to focus on the mood created by the blurred lines. However, there is a stark contrast to the shadowless paintings that seemed to be 1950's magazine drawings. Detail and precision are brought to the forefront. While the eras of paintings carried through in theme and general makeup from beginning to end, there were points that you could tell Western culture has influenced the Korean people. Highly interesting and well worth the ₩1,000.00 admission fee.

On the way home we caught "a show." Evidently they have subway performances and this young man played "You Raise Me Up" on the saxophone. Beautiful. But hey, don't take my word, see for yourself:



In my opinion, a great weekend...

Maybe the romantic can try again next year...

More later...