THE ADVENTURING

CONTINUES!

This week was so busy! But I did find time to do some fun things. I met up with my friend Stori (you'll probably hear me mention her in a few other posts) and my other friend Alora (she's my kpop/kdrama buddy) for a trip up to the famous Namsan Tower. If you're at all familiar with kdramas, which I am—good way to help you learn korean ;)—you'll be more than familiar with the tower and its possibly more famous love lock wall (for those not familiar, you'll see what I'm talking about when you get to the pictures). 

There are three ways to get to the tower: by bus, by cable car, or you can take the stairs (which ends up being about a half hour-ish hike I've been told). Because we got there a bit later in the day and it was already nice and hot and humid, we opted for the cable car. It was completely pack on the way up (I'm talking sardines in a can here, people—which is quite normal in Korea, I assure you. So we didn't get much of a view on the way up. But when we did get to the top, here are some of the sights we saw:

A nice little pavilion in the shade

Here's our little group (don't mind the slightly awkward face I'm making—I was trying to get everyone in the picture and that's a bit difficult with the tiny stubs I claim as arms).

A shot of the stone wall surrounding the area (I have a love of old stone walls—don't ask me why...).

Selfie time :)

Here's the famous love lock wall I was talking about earlier. You and your significant other are supposed to attach your lock to the wall and throw away the key so your love will last for a long time if not indefinitely (my lock might have to wait a few more years...). You also generally write something on the lock even if it's just your initials. Like this:

Namsan Tower is also famous for its love benches (which encourage lots of skinship—i.e. physical contact for those not familiar with Korean terminology). We even found one with the super famous Kim Soo-hyun (if you watch kdramas you'll probably recognize him if you don't already know him by name). He's super popular in Korea right now, so he has ads everywhere.

It's a bit hard to see him, but you can always look up a better picture on the Internet if you're that interested.

A view of the tower itself. You have to pay extra to go up the tower, so we didn't go (maybe next time). There's also a famous restaurant at the top that spins! It's a famous romantic place as well (we're talking proposals galore).

A cool metal heart made from different words. This is right by the lock wall and there's writing all over it (probably more promises of eternal love and such).

Some guys were getting ready to do some kind of martial arts performance right as we were leaving. I caught some of their practice on video, but we didn't have time to stay for the actual performance because we had to meet up with some other friends. But here are the videos of their practice (or at least the part we saw before we took off):

 

And here we have a couple views from the cable car ride back down (it was a lot less crowded).

After a sweaty day at Namsan Tower, we headed to Costco to meet up with some other friends and have a late lunch/early dinner (mmmmmm, Costco pizza!!!!).

On the way back home we stopped for some snacks and Stori picked up this after one of her coworkers told her about it (I believe "interesting" was the word he used to describe it). So here's the first weird Korean food I'm posting about (and hopefully it won't be the last): milk soda.

I'm also trying to keep up with my Korean class—I've finished two weeks, going on three :) so this is my life right now: 

It's not too bad yet, but the first two classes were basically review since I already knew the Korean alphabet. But now we're past that and heading into basic sentence structure and all that fun grammatical stuff... Oh, and lots and lots and lots of memorization...