Seoul Tower

The weekend after the 4th of July, we were fortunate to have my brother, John, his wife, Carin, and two of their kids Ashley and Andrew come visit for a couple of days. We had barely moved into our apartment and still hadn't received our stuff, but we loved having them here and discovering a little piece of Seoul together. We went down to Seoul on a Saturday morning, intending on joining our branch at the temple. To make a really long story short, we were late, and the childcare we heard about wasn't really there. We did find the temple though, and got to see a bit of it. Hopefully we'll make it there soon and actually go inside!

After that, we found our hotel and relaxed for a bit. That night, the kids were exhausted and fell asleep in the stroller for over 4 hours...BOTH of them! While they slept, Chris and I had a little date night around Namdaemun market - one of Korea's largest wholesale markets. We bought a few little items like a really cute dress for Maddie, cute penguin socks for Claire, a t-shirt for me, and a couple of ties for Chris. What I loved best, though, was of course the yummy street food vendors. We had a lot of yummy stuff, but my favorite was a big bun-like thing with glass noodles and other yummy stuff inside that they fried in oil. Mmm. At the end of our little adventure, we went to Outback Steakhouse and got some good old American dessert. It was a fun night, and a nice unexpected date night.

Of course, that meant it took forever to get Claire to go to bed that night. We got back to the hotel room, and she was wide awake. I knew I would pay the price for letting her sleep so long, but it was worth it. John and Carin and kids got there around midnight, so she got to see them come in. It was really fun to see them since we hadn't seen them since last July. Originally, they were going to be with us for the 4th of July, but since they were flying stand-by, and the flights were booked, they didn't make it. (We spent 4th of July last year with them too, but in LA. You can read about that here)

On Sunday, as we were about to leave the hotel room, we saw these people getting dressed in traditional Korean clothing for maybe a wedding ceremony. I'm not sure. They were really friendly and talked with us a bit. Don't they look cool?

Originally, I had planned to take John and Carin to the ancient palaces and maybe a shrine or Hanok Village. While we were on the train heading there, everyone decided we'd rather check out Seoul Tower. We thought we had directions on how to get there and it was just a stop away from where we were originally going.

Aunt Cay with Maddie. That expensive purse on Cay's lap? That would be Maddie's FAVORITE chew toy. :)

When we got off the train, we saw no sign for the cable car that heads up the mountain. We asked a few people, but didn't have much luck finding people that spoke enough English to understand I was saying "Seoul Tower" not "Seoul towel."

It can't be that far away, right? Let's find the cable car!

Chris found an app on his phone that was basically a compass that pointed to a destination. We decided to blindly follow that. It seemed random, and in back alleys, and then we came to the Namsan Park which is where Seoul Tower is located. The only catch is that Namsan Park is a beautiful, peaceful MOUNTAIN with a 860 foot peak. Um, yeah. My family was jet lagged, and we had a double stroller with 2 kids in it. So what did we do? We thought, it can't be that far away, we'll just go in and find it or at least the cable car to take us there! Well, hours later, and 5 cagillion stairs later (with that double stroller mind you), we made it to the top!

Just a tip of the ice berg of the millions of stairs we climbed. Claire walked most of them so the stroller would be lighter to carry. What a trooper.

We just climbed many a staired path like that. At one point, we thought we HAD to be done with the stairs. We asked someone walking down, and the answer was, "uh, no. There are a lot more. You might be half way." What have we gotten ourselves into???

A well needed rest at a landing.

Almost there!

 Oh, and did I mention it was a hot, humid July day with temperatures around 90? Yeah, I felt like I basically said to my family, "Welcome to Seoul! Now I'm going to have to kill you, but it'll be masked in a sightseeing adventure." Oh yeah, and did I mention that poor Carin had surgery on her knee last year and is still recovering from it? She was a trooper, and didn't complain at all, but you know she was dying. The good thing was, my sweet 3 year old, who only got a few hours of sleep the night before, and with no possible way to carry her AND her sister in the stroller up all of those stairs, was awesome and hiked most of the mountain also without complaining. (She did get carried now and then though, but she is only 3!)

Ashley pretty much captures what we were all feeling. Thank you Ashley.

We liked saying that we "accidentally climbed a mountain" that day. Oops! Anyway, enough of the introduction! It's time to see the fruit of our labors.

Along the pathway up.

Getting closer!

When we got to the top, there was a performance going on with traditional sword fighting/ dancing. It was quite beautiful.

My video won't upload, so you're stuck with a still shot. The dancing was beautiful though.

There were also drummers and other traditional Korean performances.

At the base of Seoul Tower, they had a Teddy Bear Museum. We didn't go to that part, but the bears outside were pretty cute.

There were a ton of these trees there as well. They were love trees where people write messages on them to send their love messages. There were also messages all over the walls inside near the dining area and gift shop.

 It's really hard to explain the view from the top. Seoul is a huge city - about the 11th largest in the world (that's larger than all US cities) and the 2nd most densely populated cities in the world. Woah! You really get a feel for that when you are standing at the top of this tower looking at buildings everywhere you look. It's just high rises EVERYWHERE! It really is an amazing site, and made me even more excited to be living near such a cool city. As is often the case, these pictures don't quite do it justice.

Cool Seoul Tower shadow on the mountain we just hiked.

The greenery you do see is part of the Namsan park which is a little over a square mile.

I love the mountains poking up. Korea is 70% mountains so they make the most of their flat space.

That river you see there is the Han River.

Hey, she climbed a mountain. She needed to rest her feet. And, she adores her Uncle John.

Ashley and Andrew discovered she made this face when you blew on her face. So cute. :)

While we were up there, we saw the building for the cable cars and went to find it afterwards. That ride up would have been a LOT easier. We were all really hungry and ready to eat since it was about 5PM and we only had a light snack in the morning.

What a day! It was hard work, but we all had a wonderful time together. We didn't get to see anything else in Seoul (except for the McDonald's) but we really did enjoy Seoul Tower. We got a bite to eat, and then got on the train ride back for the hour and a half to two hour trip home. We had to wait for a train for a while to get all the way back where we lived. This was one exhausted little girl, sleeping on her daddy. 

If you want to see a different take on our Seoul Tower adventure, head on over to Ashley's blog here (towards the end of this post) and here.