Flashback: Walking Around Seoul

I know Elaina's the real attraction, but it strikes me that I've not said a whole lot about Seoul. So, I thought I'd mix in some posts about Seoul, starting with this walk around the area near our hotel.

The picture at the left shows some cool lanterns we passed outside a restaurant around dusk. It's a little blurry because I had to set the camera for a low-light shot, but the lanterns look kind of cool blurry. I'm calling it artistic rather than shaky.

This sign says, "Never, ever relax, or we'll dump you down a hidden trapdoor, and you'll land on your head." (My Korean understanding is coming along really well. I'm pretty sure I'm a natural with languages.)

This is a small village just outside our hotel. As you can see, Koreans are significantly smaller than Westerners.

This is a street near our hotel. We walked up and down this street quite a bit during the week. It looks kind of deserted right now, but at other times, it was full of people and vendors' displays.

Just goes to show that you can find a weird, vaguely creepy robot anywhere. Anywhere.

A shot of the street near Anguk station ("our" subway station). Mostly, I took this shot because my mom will want to know what the streets looked like, and my dad will want to know what the cars look like.

The neighborhood Mom 'n' Pop octopus restaurant...if Pop were an octopus. We didn't actually eat here. It was closed a lot of the time we were there, and I couldn't really have talked Heidi into it anyway.

Now, this is a place where we ate. The food was very good here, especially the cabbage soup. Appetizers consisted of a variety of kimchi, some sort of fish (with the bones but no head or tail), and tiny, whole shrimp in a spicy sauce. For entrees, we had the bulgogi (beef and scallions or something similar) and dolsotbibimbap (rice, beef, egg, and vegetables in a hot stone bowl). We opted to stay away from the fermented skate and bladder moon. (Had I known that a "bladder moon" is a kind of snail, I might have tried it, but when in doubt, I don't eat anything with the word "bladder" in it. None of the Koreans there spoke enough English, nor I enough Korean, for me to ask.)

Another octopus restaurant...or octopus social club--I'm not sure. We didn't eat here either. No one wants to eat an octopus while it's out drinking with its friends.

Nothing says Christmas like a large flightless bird in the window. This was some sort of bakery/tea shop. I don't have a theory about the bird.

Back home at the Somerset, after a long day of walking around.