Third time's a charm - I finally did the Seoul Bus Tour

Two weekends ago, I decided to join Caroline, Illani and a new girl named Taryn in Seoul. We got up super early and took the 6am bus from the inter city bus station (which I found out was just as good a bus to Seoul, cost 3000 won less and took 30 minutes less). We arrived in Seoul, hopped on the subway and went promptly took pictures of random statues, then got dressed up in robes.

Statute outside of a subway entrance. Later this whole area was filled with was either a protest, a memorial or a party.

Me and Illani dressed up in robes. The guy who signed us up and ran the "shop" thought we were hilarious.

We then found the reason we traveled to Seoul - the City Bus Tour. I had previously tried twice (once with Cindy, once with Jeff) to do the tour and for various reasons it didn't work out. But, I had already done some of the stops. The bus is a single deck bus with about 30 seats in it. Each seat has a headset and you can chose a variety of languages. It gives you a little blurb of information for each stop. You can get off at any of the stops and catch a bus every 30 minutes (or so they said). We started our tour right around 10 (it might have been 10:30). Illani had never been to Seoul and wanted to see a market. So we got off at the second stop Namdaemun Market.

In case you get lost, this provides absolutely no help at all.

We walked around for about 20 minutes, bought some stuff and hopped back on the bus. We went 4 more stops and got off at the National Museum of Korea. This was not one of my planned stops, but Illani wanted to check it out, plus it was free. We got off the bus and had a snack (gimbap) then went inside. The museum was quite nice, but oddly had a lot of stuff from other parts of Asia. There was a children's section that I wanted to see, but we ran out of time since we didn't want to stay for another 30 minutes.

In front of the museum is a really nice pond and some other nature things. There is also a sculpture garden that we didn't see because we ran out of time. Here was a nice little fall scene near the entrance.

Going up the steps to the museum are huge flower pots. There were some butterflies on the flowers. I got so close to this one that you can actually see its tongue inside the flower.

This pagoda represents something, but I forget what. I know the tiles on the roof are special.

This was a giant buddah

Here are some more buddahs. There was a sign that showed what the various hand positions symbolized, but it was in Korean, so I didn't take a picture.

Some stone chimes...with ducks.

God masks from Nepal

A lion figure

A large metal gong in the metal crafts room

Model of a restroom. I thought this was hilarious for some reason. Like, why was this preserved?

We took a brief detour to India...

Back outside. On the exit stairs they had huge pots with water lilies and other flowers.

There was also this giant bell and the pavilion. This bell is old.

After the museum, we went 3 more stops to Itaewon for lunch. It was around 3:30 at this point. We ate in a random little restaurant that had bizarre names for the dishes. They also gave us little "palate cleansers" of celery-apple juice.

The little bottles had our juice, the pitcher has coke.

Sample menu: I want to be a human being now (fried mugwort on garlic and olive oil pasta); Soothe tired me today (crab meat saffron risotto); Hello vegetarians (primevera); Let me show you who I really am (bbq chicken); You look much more lovely today of all day (smoked duck breast)

Front of the menu. The decor was very odd too - alot of metal. The door handle was a huge wrench and there were chains hanging on the walls and stuff.

After lunch we went to a few stores to look around and then to a book store called "What the book". It's a decent bookstore and has mainly English books, including a large used section. I got 4 books and everyone else got some too. Taryn's friend met her there and she stayed with him while we got back on the bus. Unfortunately, traffic sucked and we waited over 30 minutes at the bus stop for the next one. This meant we pretty much couldn't go anywhere else. Luckily, all that was really left on my list was 2 castles and the war memorial, which I can do some other time.

Downtown clothing market at night

We backtracked our morning trip (city bus stop, subway, to bus terminal) and tried to get tickets home. It was 8pm at that point and I got the last seat on the 9pm bus. Instead of going home alone, I traded that ticket back for a seat on the 10pm bus with the girls. Then we went to dinner at a coffee shop and talked for awhile. Then we went back to sit at the bus terminal and our driver talked to us for awhile. He tried to teach us some words in Korean and was really nice. We got home around 1:30 and crashed. Illani and I got up and went to church the next day and then we went to O'Taco for lunch/dinner. After dinner I stayed up until around 3 in the morning writing mid-term tests for all my classes as I hadn't done any of them yet (whoops). Luckily I finished them all.

It was a fun weekend, but tiring. I'm not sure how I feel about going up to Seoul just for the day, but it did save on hotel costs, plus all the tourist things other than bars close around 7 anyway, so it saved me money on alcohol and food too. We'll see what I decide to do next time I want to go finish my tour!