Tuesday

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 – City Tour
We got up this morning and went to Holt, which has a travel agency attached to it, to meet up for our city tour. We met a couple, Chris and Mary, from Saginaw, Michigan who would be going along with us. It was nice to be with someone who was at least within a couple inches of me. Our tour guides were two Korean college students who did this to practice their English, which was already excellent. One of them was a student at Carnegie-Melon and was back for a couple months. She was working on learning Chinese and Spanish this summer. We are such losers when it comes to learning other languages. She was hoping for a job in International relations or business. I would bet that with Korean, English, Chinese, and Spanish she is pretty much covering her bases. Our other tour guide studied film in Seoul.

We set out to the same palace that we visited on Sunday. That was fine as it is a beautiful place. We then headed out to Insadong market which was pretty neat. They are such crazy places. I didn’t get any pictures of the food streets because I would have gotten run over if I stopped, but they are quite different. We bought some little gifts for a couple people. They then took us to Namdaemun Market, which is very near to our hotel, to do some shopping. They were a big help as we had been looking for a soccer jersey for Liam. They also helped me find an ATM that would take my card, I was beginning to run out of Won, but then again, it is only monopoly money. They also helped us barter and bicker as we bought a Han Bok (traditional Korean dress for a child’s first birthday) for Owen. We found a very nice one a little different from Liam’s.
We ended our tour with a trip to one of the 167 Starbucks in Seoul. It was way to hot to have a coffee, although I am going to go get one tomorrow morning. Cathy tried the Red Bean Frappacino which seems to be only a Korean item. They then showed us a couple of traditional Korean restaurants to eat at. The other couple wasn’t too interested in eating Korean food so we came back to the hotel and will probably go back there tonight or tomorrow. We are going to try to get to the DMZ tomorrow and then on Thursday we get to go to Owen’s final doctor’s appointment.

We went to a traditional Korean restaurant tonight where they cook the meet right on a grill in front of you. We didn’t quite know what to do until the waitress showed us, but we figured it out. You took the meat (marinated ribs in sesame oil) and put it in a piece of lettuce or other green and then added a garlic clove, onions, red pepper paste, kimchi, and/or a piece of hot fish. The toughest part was that we were supposed to use chopsticks. In Korea they do not use wooden chopsticks either… they use stainless steel (originally sterling silver) ones instead and they tend to be a little bit slipperier than wooden ones. I did manage to make it through the meal using them but Cathy resorted to the fork. I think together we ate around 25 cloves of garlic, so needless to say no one wants to be around us tonight.