Adventures in South Korea

Day 66: So we are a little late on our posting, we've been pretty busy! This past Friday we had a going away party for two of the teachers- Melinda and Mike at our friend Carissa's apartment. It was a potluck and we brought wine that we had gotten for teacher's day which was still unopened. It was a pretty laid back night, Brandon played his guitar and Mike played the ukulele and we all had fun singing along to some Jack Johnson, Sublime, etc. Carissa brought out these wish papers that she had gotten back home- the idea is to write a wish down on the paper, crumple it up, then uncrumple it and roll it loosely so that it can stand on its own- then light it on fire, and when the fire gets to the bottom of the paper, it flies into the air. The papers kinda looked like tissue paper, they were made specially for this activity by a family friend of hers. A few peoples just burnt out, but Shayna's got some good height and it was alot of fun. Below is a photo of our friend Kristina writing her wish...
We had alot of fun that night, but it was sad to see them go. Since Mike was leaving, he gave his cat to Carissa to take care of, her name is Bella, isn't she beautiful...

On Saturday, we decided to head into Seoul on our own to check out some palaces and Seoul Plaza (which can hold up to 100,000 people) which is right in the downtown part of Seoul. First we walked around the palace grounds which were gorgeous (our pictures don't do the place justice). they had a mixture of Korean and Roman architecture made in the early 1900's.


As we were leaving the palace, we noticed a HUGE amount of police and riot squad groups covering the entire area. It made us a little worried that something bad was about to happen but we were told that they do this every so often and it is normal. Here's a photo of just a small amount of the police guards in front of the palace gates.

We crossed the street to get to Seoul City Hall plaza and there was a huge area with water shooting out of the ground that children could run through. It was an extremely hot day, so there were tons of kids running like crazy through the fountain. We wish we could have joined them!


We walked around down town Seoul for a bit and came across an amazing block of camera equipment stores, that I will have to go back to and do some bargaining! After that, it was getting late and we were exhausted from the heat, so we headed home. Sunday was rainy so we just relaxed, played some scrabble and went for Korean BBQ. We hope you all had a great weekend and are enjoying the summer. Monsoon season has just started and so it will be rainy here for the next few weeks :( Anyways, that's all for now, we will leave you with some Happy Canada Day messages from our kids.

With love from South Korea,
Shayna & Brandon

Enjoy!