Hi Seoul (part 2)

We made it to the bookstore: Kyobo, I think it’s called, and it was massive, like the city itself. It was also underground. It really just looked like a mixture of Barnes and Noble and Borders, though, so nothing too special. Mr. James and I picked up some books like Anne of Green Gables and A Christmas Carol along with some others before we left the store. We then entered Insadong after a fair amount of walking. Insadong is just a giant open street market lined end to end with touristy stores. By the way, there were tons of foreigners everywhere. Different from the one or two you might see in Daejeon. I was trying to find a post card to send back home, but I’m pretty sure they don’t exist at this point. I haven’t found one anywhere! Well, after a good deal of window shopping, and buying a few pairs of cute socks, we saw a Starbucks and dropped in. It was decked out with Christmas paraphernalia, so Jen, being the Christmas-lover she is, saw it and had to enter.

I enjoyed a nice hot chocolate and Mr. James had a blueberry scone. I’ll let Mr. James describe the blueberry scone:

First, we make one thing clear: it was warm. Not just warm, but soft, and warm, like it had just tumbled out of the heaven, probably baked in The Almighty’s personal oven. It was perfection embodied, each bite brought forth a vision, filled with the secret to baking excellence. The soft, slightly undercooked inside brought me into the baking process itself and filled me with the warmth the scone must have felt as it was brought into being. The sensation was tinged with the hint of crunch offered by the outer crust of the thing, and then the blueberry nectar entered the divine equation. I remember little after the experience, only the longing to return to the origin.

He liked it. Well, before we left, I had to visit the ladies room, and there was a line! It took a while, but I finally got in. We left a few minutes later and headed out toward the street again. We started heading back to make our way to the lantern festival. We saw these guys on our way back.

Just to put a disclaimer, even though the candy looks like a cocoon, it was delicious! It tasted like a Frosted Mini-Wheat. It was also around this time we saw a lone Korean man with a microphone singing in the middle of a circle of onlookers. It was weird, but we watched him for a minute. He was singing some kind of crooner-love song, but he was all alone.

It was finally dark, so we walked back to the lantern festival, and it was crowded. I’m pretty sure the entirety of Seoul was in the one street alloted to the event. The festival was gorgeous, though. To start off, there was a grounded hot-air balloon. It was bright yellow-orange, and there was a large building behind it, and every light was on in the place. Well, all in all, it was really, really hard to see anything because it was so crowded. Everything was down in a riverbed, and people were lined up around the top railings that were guarding the river from sight. Along the river, there were all sorts of lanterns lit up. I got a few pictures, though!

Only a couple came out really well, but I have to place the emphasis on how many people were there. I guess Mr. James and I are used to having a lot of space, coming from Suburbia and all. Anyway, it was hard to get any good shots, so after we walked around and eventually got out of the crowd.

At this point, we had been walking and or traveling for the better part of eight hours, so we were all walked out. We went to the subway, and after some much-needed advice from Jen, we all headed home in our separate trains. After we parted from the Hansons, we found ourselves back in Yongsan, Well, the G20 summit was happening in a few days, so lo and behold, there was a giant protest directly in front of the train station. We were herded through by the cops, and thus made it safely through our first ever protest! We eventually made it onto the train and back home. All this even though our ticket was completely in Korea, they must have written out the track numbers in Korean, because we had no idea where we were going. I asked a worker and he pointed us in the direction of the track. We made it onto the train with about one minute to spare.

We made it back to sweet Daejeon after a long and exhausting trip to Seoul. Mr. James finally had a New York hot dog at the Daejeon station, but that’s another blog post entirely. I just have to say this was the first time I felt happy to be home. Meaning that, since I’ve been in Korea, this is the first time we felt like we got back from Boston to our home town, only it was from Seoul to Deajeon. Home sweet home.