Settling into Seoul

All of the family is excited to be in the big capital city.
Friday morning everyone was up very early because of jet lag, so we left our little airport island we’d been staying on around 8 am. We stopped at Incheon Port to buy ferry tickets to China. You see, after our trip to Japan we’ve decided we’d like to take an overnight karaoke ferry to China. This won’t be for about a month, but we need the tickets to get Chinese visas.
After an hour train ride, we arrived in Seoul.
It was very different from the part of Korea we’d been staying, it was a lot busier. For lunch we found a little place that looked appetizing enough. They served Korean barbaque because as you can see in the picture below, the low tables had the grills built in. We had hoped to order noodle bowls or something affordable like all the diners around us, but, unfortunately language got in the way. The guy running the restaurant was a talented chef but he didn’t speak a lick of English and other than a badly pronounced gomabseubnida (thank you) we definitely don’t understand Korean. Dad tried to communicate what we wanted with our server but at the end of the day we just pointed to some characters on the wall and hoped for the best. What came was amazing. 1.2 kilos of premium beef cooked before our eyes and dipped in a delicious sauce. The banchan (side dishes) that accompanied the main course were yummy too. Needless to say we didn’t have room for dinner that night.
After a bit of a scramble to find a hotel last minute on a Friday night, we discovered a clean little hotel hidden in some back alleys right in the heart of the city. Emphasis on little. Our family of four squeezed into a room that had a double bed in a room no bigger that 8 by 8 feet. Sleeping accommodations last night were uncomfortable to say the least. After a few hours of down time we decided to see what was happening around our hotel. We watched a vendor make these special Korean treats called dragon beard. They are made from over 16,000 hand stretched strands of cornstarch covered honey wrapped around an almond filling and are utterly delicious. (That’s what I’m eating in th photo below, the white, hairy looking pouch)
Jetlag struck again before the sun rose this morning. This resulted in Nick, Justin and I taking an early morning walk around our neighborhood.
We came back to the hotel room for breakfast and to tidy up our clostrofobic room.
We decided we would spend the day exploring the quaint traditional Korean villages. We hiked a few blocks to the beginning of a self guided walking tour. As soon as we got into the first peaceful complex Nick and I discovered a room where for 3,000 wan a piece (about 3 bucks) we could use special ink brushes to create pictures of Korean tigers. While very zen, it was a very time consuming process taking over 2 hours to complete.
When we were done it was the heat of the day and if you don’t know Korea gets really hot. Everyone was pretty sticky and a bit hungery but we still walked up all the old fashioned streets, they were quite picturesque.
We then finished with a late lunch sampling all kinds of street foods vendors were selling on a street called the Insadong.