Heart and Seoul

Apparently a music student lives in the apartment above us, or at least someone taking piano lessons. We’ve heard her/him practicing a few times, and s/he’s not bad; it doesn’t bother us or anything. In fact, the repetition is kind of soothing, and it can put you to sleep.

We kind of decided to go to Seoul on a whim. We have no furniture or television or anything, but we do have Internet, and we got invited by some friends over Facebook to tag along on their excursion for cell phones. We need cell phones too (we weren't able to get them anyways), and Seoul is a city I’ve wanted to visit for some time now, so we said “Why not?”

Anyway, the morning we set out, we heard the music student open her day with “Heart and Soul,” over and over and over again. Seemed like a fitting way to start our adventure.

We actually managed the bus system pretty well. Our little island home isn’t like Seoul or any of the other big cities in Korea, where many people can at least understand English. Nope, no one here knows a word of it, so the first big task was finding the right bus.

By some miracle, right after we sat down in the bus terminal waiting room, a bus pulled up with its stops written in English, and there it was: Sinchon, a bus terminal in the heart of Seoul, and our destination. We hopped on, the bus driver looked at me and said, “Odi?” (“Where?”), I stammered, “Sinchon,” he nodded, and we were off.

The bus ride wasn’t bad. Beth and I listened to our iPods and the trip only took about an hour. We agreed Seoul would be an easy day trip from our isolated island.

It’s kind of hard to put the rest of the trip into words: navigating the subway system, the cable car up to Seoul Tower, our endless walking in search of a decent hotel room, the Myeongdong shopping district, the food and drinks… and Beth took some amazing pics, so I’ll let those do the talking.