the amazing race seoul

We started Saturday morning by going to the Itaewon area of Seoul and visiting the War Memorial Museum. This truly is a great place to visit while in Seoul. It houses war memorbilia from all the wars and conflicts that Korea has been involved in. We ended up being there for 4 hours or so! There are tanks, helicopters, airplanes, etc. around the building that you can look at and even go into. Inside, there were 3 floors of all sorts of items to look at, along with several areas you could watch documentaries of events (especially the Korean War). Just a little tidbit of information - the island that we live on housed POW's from the Korean War. In fact, Gohyeon has a POW Museum that Ken and I have been meaning to go see. (We have actually toured the outside, but it was closed on the day we went.)

From there, we headed to the streets of Itaweon. This area has a large concentration of expatriates due to a nearby military base. We strolled the streets for a couple of hours exploring all the street vendors and antique shops. We actually saw a Norwegian lady that I knit with in one of the shops! What a small world. I could tell that Ken was winding down, but one of the main areas I wanted to visit was Insadong Street.
It is a pedestrian only street (at least it was on the weekend) and houses many tea shops,
art shops, antique shops
and Korean souvenir stores. I definitely didn't get enough time here - it will be my first stop when I return. There were also alot of trendy boutique shops.
After dinner (yes, we ate at TGI Fridays one night and Tony Romas the next night in case you were wondering if we ate at any wonderful restaurants. Remember that we gravitate to anything western when possible!), we returned to the hotel to collapse and watch one of the blackmarket DVDs we bought on the street.
We had already purchased return bus tickets for 9:30 the next morning. We thought that if we caught a cab around 8:15 we would safely be there in plenty of time. After all, it was Sunday morning and hopefully traffic would be light. What we didn't count on was foot traffic. The Seoul Marathon had begun that morning. We got into the cab and circled the block before we realized that we wouldn't be able to get through for the time being. So we ditched the cab and headed down into the subway. After riding a few stops, I realized that we had gone one stop too far and we had to get off and turn around. I think Ken had decided that there was no way we would make the bus. We had to get off at one point to transfer to another line. It was at this point that I decided we should try the cab again. I felt like some of the people probably feel on The Amazing Race when they are in the cab trying to get somewhere quickly. We made it to the bus in time - I think it left maybe 2 minutes later. It was such a nice trip - I will leave you with a picture of one of the beutiful floral arrangements in the hotel.