Andrew Comes to Korea!

Spring has sprung! Little green tufts of grass are popping out of the rocky Korean soil and the weather is taking a sunny turn for the better! It's a wonderfully welcome change!

This past week, darling Andrew from back home chose to spend his spring break with me in Korea! It was star-crossed timing, as his college's spring break lined up exactly with my first week back to teaching, but we made it work!

The horrific Japanese earthquake threw a little bit of a wrench into Andrew's flight and he arrived about two days later than expected. His plane touched down about 30 minutes after the disaster, so I am so glad it was not as bad as it could have been! I slept in the airport awaiting his arrival, sans a trip to Itaewon for a WhatTheBook trip and a viewing of the Frills and Thrills Burlesque show. Andrew arrived on Sunday, and quickly made friends with a homeless man at Seoul Station

I forget how much fun seeing a new country is, especially one I've called home for 8 months, but Andrew loved it! He developed a quick love of ingoppang (fish bread with red bean filling), mandu (dumplings) of all varieties and ddukbogi. God bless the ddukbogi.

Tuesday was my school's birthday and we went to Gongju-- Magoksa Temple and the National Museum of Gongju! Magoksa is beautiful as always. The buses can be a bit of a drag, 40 minutes to and from and they come and go every hour. And the National Museum is a very nice, small museum.. albeit very very empty on a Tuesday afternoon.


Thursday we headed to Seoul and stayed at the lovely NAMU Guesthouse. We saw The National Museum of Korea and Namsan Seoul Tower. The museum is absolutely amazing and is large enough to spend days in (I hope little Korean kids do sleepovers there.) And Namsan Seoul Tower is.. a rip off! We went, we saw, we wondered what the big deal was! But.. here's a picture anyway!

Friday we took the Seoul City Bus around to Gyeongbuk Palace (pretty place), Namdaemun Market (holy hell the street food is amazing), War Memorial Museum (I liked the radiation safety man costumes), Insadong (we got lost), Itaewon and back to Hongdae. I highly recommend the Seoul City Tour Bus if you want a nice, simple tour of the city. It's only a $10 ticket to tool you through all of the most prevalent tourist spots in Seoul.

Andrew got to see the Hongdae subway exit on Friday night and eat fried street food covered in sweet spicy ddukbogi sauce.

And just as soon as he came, he was gone. Just.. like.. that! Poof! But it was a great trip.