Seoul and Back Again, A Tale by Abby Greutman

So...evidently I am not doing too well at this whole blogging thing! We had last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off for Chusok (Korean version of Thanksgiving). We (the Kazakhs and I) took advantage of this time of and hightailed it to Seoul. The bus took forever because of the traffic.

I think we ended up going too far, however, because it looks a lot more like Russian than Korean:

Haha. Okay, not so, even though I wish it were! We ended up in Russian town after getting off of the bus! Yana's friend, Igor, was supposed to meet us in Seoul, but he was in a different city, so thankfully my wonderful mama found us a room at a nice hotel.

Finding our way around the Seoul metro. It is one of the most complex metro systems that I have ever seen. It has 19 lines and 607 stations.

Our hotel! Thanks mama!

The view from our hotel!

We tried to find somewhere to eat after we got to the hotel, but almost everything was close because of the holiday (on Thursday), so we ended up going to Tom 'n Tom's cafe where I had an absolutely amazing smoothy!

Yummy, yummy!

Friday we met up with a group of students of Kazakhstan studying at various universities in Korea and their teacher. We went to a Russian cafe. Man, was the food good! Korean food is by no means bad, but I am getting tired of eating it every day!

Waiting for the rest of the group to show up.

Still waiting! I guess Kazakhs are a lot like Russians when it comes to time.

Part of the group. The teacher is on the left. The middle three girls are graduate students.

Kutleti and potatoes!!!

Afterwards we went shopping downtown!

Ice-a-cerema!

This guy couldn't believe that Nuortie had four girls with them. He told him that he was very lucky to be surrounded by so many beautiful ladies!

After shopping we went back to our hotel and rested for a while. I then decided on going on a little adventure hike to find the Han river, which unfortunately I couldn't find without the help of two middle school students. They took me to a really neat spot, though, that seems to be off the beaten path to foreigners yet very common to the natives. Right on the river it is a small park where people were setup with picnics or small games everywhere, enjoying their evening off.

Saturday I strolled around the city and ended up at the War Memorial of Korean where I found a USAF airplane (possibly a cargo plane? I am not sure. I don't know too much about them!), among many other statues, tanks, airplanes and ships commemorating those who fought in the various wars that South Korea has been through. These pictures are for my wonderful grandpa who risked his life in the Korean War and also lost his dear friend during that time.

There was so much more to see inside of the War Museum, but, unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to go inside before our bus left.

Beautiful mosaic!

Somewhere in Seoul. I didn't know where I was half of the time!

Random "Good Morning" statue!

The land where car companies own department stores.

The "Trillion Tower" commemorating the one trillion dollars traded between Korean and other countries.

Memorial commemorating the G20 Seoul Summit in 2010 (they are big on memorials here, I guess!). 

In the metro.

We took the bus back to Daegu and grabbed some supper before heading back to the university. I think everyone was pretty tired from our whirlwind of a trip!

I am not sure what these are. To be honest, I am not sure I want to know! I didn't eat them...

An assortment of sausages! We all agreed that we wanted something a little different from Korean food before we headed back to the university!

Chicken ^^

Sunday I went out for dinner with a Korean professor that works at Daegu. He and his wife lived in Vancouver for a while, and they both remembered being lonely during Thanksgiving there, so they wanted to make sure that I didn't experience the same thing.

 Dinner was ginormous! First we put the meat (to the right) into the boiling broth, added veggies and then everyone took out of the pot and wrapped the meat/veggies with additional veggies in a a rice wrap.

After we ate all of the meat and veggies (I am not kidding. There was much, much more than is even shown in the picture!), I though we were done, but then the waitress brought out a large bowl of rice noodles that were put in the remaining broth. When those were gone I thought: surely we are done now! No, of course not. The waitress came out again, this time with rice and I am not sure what mix in that was put in the tiny bit of broth left. After that we had lime Fanta to wash it all down. Goodness gracious it was a lot of food! After dinner we went back to there house and had coffee (his wife apologized that she hadn't had anytime to make dessert. I told her that it was totally fine, and it was, because if I had dessert too I don't think that I could have walked up the three steps to get into my dorm building!

I am now back in my regular routine: study, study, study. However, I am now teaching an English classes two hours twice a week. Scary, right? I think so too!

I hope that all is going well for you, and I apologize for waiting so long to post and then giving you this gigantic thing! I will try to do better in the future. As nice as it is here, I have to say that it will be so very nice to come home and see you all!