Seoul!

We finally made it to Seoul! The bus drive took about 4 hours. We decided to stay in an area of Seoul called Itaewon which is the foreigner section. We were REALLY surprised by how nice our hotel was!! We were expecting a sort of middle of the road Holiday Inn type of hotel, but we really lucked out! We felt really spoiled by how luxurious the hotel was and wish we could have stayed there longer! That night, we went to some foreigner bars in Itaewon and met a new friend from Michigan (so far we have met four people from Michigan -- is there something really undesirable about this state or something?!). The bars were really fun and we saw a show at one of them. We headed back to our hotel for (a very short) sleep and woke up early the next morning. We wandered around Itaewon a bit...it was so bizarre because SO many people were foreigners, children, senior citizens, babies, you name it. A lot of people looked like they were there on vacation and of course, there's also a large population of military people who stay in Itaewon.

We took the subway to Miyungdon which we had heard was a really popular area for shopping. It was so unbelievably crowded. I guess that's what happens when you have such an enormous population crammed into such a small geographical area. The shopping was good, but the crowds at time were really overwhelming, especially because we've spent three months in a small town with a population of 500,000, but feels morel like 50,000.

We went to an amazing Chinese restaurant for lunch/dinner and I don't think either of us have ever eaten so fast and enjoyed a meal so much! It was such a nice treat and change from the Korean food we've been eating. We walked around for hours and hours until our feet fell like they were going to fall off. We shopped ourselves out but really didn't buy too much! There was a forever 21 in Seoul as well as some other American stores, but the crowds in the stores, the temperature (Koreans seem to really like hot, hot temperatures inside) AND how overpriced many of the things were deterred us from buying too much.

We took the 9pm bus back to Pohang and got here around 1am. We really love Seoul, but there is SO much to see and do. It's definitely a place we will need to come back to several more times in order to really see and do all there is to do. We got a little taste of it and it was really refreshing to get out of Pohang. Now we're less than 6 weeks away from our trip to Thailand. The countdown begins!!!!