The Soul of Korea

The Soul of Korea – that’s the slogan for the city of Seoul. We know this is a little delayed, but we wanted to still post something about our short trip there before leaving Korea back in January. First off, we stayed at the Westin Chosun Hotel, which was awesome. It’s listed as one of the top 100 hotels in the whole world and is the oldest hotel in Korea (as proved by the following plaque on the side of the building).

Seoul was quite different compared to Ulsan. There were a lot more American restaurants and stores (we ate at Subway and Cold Stone – so good!) and in general a lot more Americans.

As we said in previous posts, we were (okay, at least I was) really excited to see the Myeongdong Cathedral, which was the first Catholic Church in Korea, built in 1898. It was really close to our hotel, so as soon as we arrived and unpacked a bit we headed out towards the Cathedral. Unfortunately, when we got there we realized that the whole outside and front of the church were under construction, so we didn’t get to see the tower portion. However, to not disappoint the many tourists who come to visit the Cathedral, the church raised scaffolding all around the Cathedral and hung a canvas that was painted to look like the real Cathedral underneath.
It wasn’t quite as impressive as seeing the real thing, but it was still pretty cool that they tried to give you the effect of what it would look like. There were tons of people milling around the Cathedral, and it was hard to tell if we could go inside with all of the construction. We saw some people going in and out of a construction entrance, so we decided to try and go in. We entered through the side only to realize that we were crashing a wedding. Jeff wanted me to take a picture, but I just felt a little awkward, so we booked it out of there. We came back on our last day and were able to get some pictures of the inside, which was gorgeous.

On the last day we also took some pictures of the statues outside since there weren’t too many people milling around outside. I especially loved the Grotto, which was a shrine to the Virgin Mary.

Something really distinctive about Seoul is all of the ancient sites scattered throughout this completely modern city. In addition to the Cathedral we visited Gyeongbokgung Palace. It was this huge ancient palace and we spent an entire afternoon walking through the grounds. The buildings were all so cool and different, but they all seemed to have these dragons built into the roof for protection.


There were also a bunch of statutes and carvings on all the stairways and scattered throughout the palace grounds.
Jeff loves this little guy and ended up buying a statute of him to take home with us!

Another really unique tourist attraction is the Cheonggyecheon Stream. which was recently reconstructed a few years ago. It is a site of an ancient stream that formed the class-boundary in the city. On one side was the Emperor and the upper class, and on the other side the peasants. Over time, the stream became dirty and a locale for the homeless and other "undesirables." The city then covered the river to eliminate the problem. In an effort to beautify the city and recover a piece of its past, Seoul invested a ton of time and money reconstructing it. They laid down stone and carefully controlled the flow, which starts with a big waterfall on the north side of town. Jeff actually saw an hour long show about the engineering of it on TV (Discovery Channel?) when he was in Saudi Arabia. The grand reopening was just about two years ago. The end result was really cool – basically a man made river through town that looks completely natural. We walked down different parts of it every day we were there and took a ton of pictures.
The final touristy thing we did was taking a tram ride up to Seoul Tower, the highest point in Seoul. It’s basically a spire located on top of a big hill.

We got some gorgeous views from the observation deck of the tower (it wasn't the clearest day, but oh well).
Instead of taking the tram back down the hill, we decided to walk down and got some more great pictures along the way.

I guess the walkway down the hill is quite famous for Koreans. They call it a lover’s trail and its said that any man who proposes along the walk will not be refused. Towards the bottom of the hill there was this bench that I couldn't help but take a picture of.

In case you can’t read the bench, it says “stand on this bench and sing a love song." In case you were wondering, no, Jeff was not singing (but it does look like he might be drawing a tear).

Wow, this has been one heck of a long blog! I guess we really packed a lot into those three short days!