Life and Times of the Arkansas Stucky Seven

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

With INCREDIBLE tour guides...we did SEOUL!!!






What an amazingly fun day! If we have to be w/o Emma Hope for these days in between, we sure did have an incredibly fun day with newly made friends from Kentucky (who are also adopting an 8 month old!) and our super fun college gal tour guides! Holt asked us before we came if we wanted to sign up for a "city tour". It was part of the fee anyway so we said sure. But you never know if those kind of things are going to be real long and boring or really great. This was beyond great! These gals had all the time in the world and made such an effort to take us places we wanted to go see and do some shopping. Hopefully the pictures will give you a little taste of our day!
Here are the highlights and more observations:
  • The Ceremony of Opening the Palace Gate was really something! This is done daily at Gyeongbokgung Palace, the main royal palace of long ago kings. I'm told this is also known as the Imperial Palace. It is very ornate, massive, and regal. Our tour guides were full of interesting facts about Korean history and legend.
  • Then we took the subway! Wow, what an incredible subway system Seoul has! Not sure we could navigate it on our own, but it was sure fun to ride with people who knew what they were doing! These parts of Seoul make it seem like New York City on steroids!
  • We went to two open air market shopping areas and our interpreters did a little wheeling and dealing to help us make some traditional Korean purchases! It was fun to sit back and listen. Once again, we are amazed at the millions of people and businesses/street vendors here! But much of today we were away from the thick of the crazy traffic and crowded sidewalks so that was fantastic! Felt like we could breathe!
  • Our sweet gals picked an incredible authentic, sit on the floor Korean restaurant for lunch. They ordered for all of us after kinda getting a feel for foods we like and not so much! For the most part it was DELICIOUS but there are definitely Korean staples that I just cannot do! Brad on the other hand loves super hot/spicy dishes with odd textures so he was in total food heaven!! This was really the first day we have gotten to just sit and visit with Koreans who knew English well enough and were gracious up and beyond what was expected. We all asked them so many questions and they just answered and helped all day! They were such a blessing!
  • One question we had was "to tip or not to tip"? The guides confirmed no tipping and no taxes! How simple is that! It is culturally just "their pleasure to serve" so tipping would be rude.
  • We also had to take taxi rides to some of the places and that in itself is an experience! Wow, people drive fast and close and it is amazing there are not accidents every few seconds!
  • Most of the people we have interacted with have been so gracious, however in the market places or on the subway if you are in someone's way, they will just shove you aside. There is no "excuse me." Lynda about got ran over by a cart piled high with boxes!
  • Steve & Shelly from Louisville were a blast and we laughed and laughed all day! They were wanting to find some of the same traditional Korean gifts we were so it really worked out perfectly!
Well, we are thoroughly exhausted so I will close for now. The last two nights have been very interrupted sleep, so we hope tonight can just be snoozing all the way through, maybe even past 6am! Tomorrow morning we get to go to Emma Hope's final doctor appointment so we look forward to that! Bye for now.

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