Seoul in Pictures

Now that I've finally organized my photos from the trip, I thought I'd share a few. I don't have pictures of some of the places we went, such as the markets or the theater, but here are some of the sites we visited.

At Incheon, I was very surprised to see orchids growing inside the airport. Especially since outside there was snow on the ground.

The first palace we visited was Gyeongbokgung. I think it was the biggest one, as well. Here I am in front of one of the gates:

And next is the gate itself. There were several gates like this around the palace grounds.

The picture below is one of the main palace buildings. Rather than being one large building like a lot of European castles, these palaces had multiple buildings spread across fairly expansive grounds.

The eaves of the roofs were painted in really bright colors, with all kinds of designs. There were a lot of flower motifs, but I don't know if they meant something in particular.

This smoke-like design was on the inside of the building:

And here's a painting of some dragons. At least, I think they're dragons.

Below, a mini-palace elsewhere on the grounds. One of the queens was assassinated here by Japanese ninjas. (I swear I didn't make that up, it's actual history)

 A different color scheme on another building...

I took so many pictures like this one below because I just could not get over the colors.

And look! There are magpies in South Korea! They didn't make a caw-ing noise, though, these ones sounded much more shrill than I remembered.

At night, we went up to N Seoul Tower. I kept thinking the "N" stood for "North", but I'm pretty sure I was wrong about that. We went up to the observatory deck for a view of the city.

Our next palace was called Deoksugung. It was one of the smaller ones, but it was still pretty impressive. It was snowing on the day we visited.

I really liked the fence on this smaller building:

Next palace: Changdeokgung! There are a lot of palaces in Seoul...

In the main gate,

then through a courtyard,

and then we got to the first of many buildings.

This one actually had chandeliers. 

The grounds were really beautiful, with all the fresh snow. It was a very bright day.

I got hung up on the roofs again...

And here I am with my travel buddies, Jessica (center) and Lisa (right). Jessica works at my Board of Education, and Lisa is a friend of hers who lives elsewhere in Japan.

We actually went to one more palace, Changgyeonggung, but my pictures there weren't all that interesting, so I'm skipping over that. 

During an afternoon where I went off by myself for a while, I went to a cat cafe. Basically, it's a place where you can go to play with cats (in theory) and drink coffee, tea or juice. This one had what more or less amounted to an $8 cover charge, with one free drink included. The only problem was that the cats really were not interested in playing or being petted, so mostly I just got to watch them sleep.

Two cats in one box.

A really BIG cat with his face squished against a scratching post.

And me with a rather disinterested cat. I petted one or two cats, but they mostly would just slouch out from under my hand.

We also went to the War Memorial and Museum. It had exhibits on ancient as well as modern wars in Korea.

This is a replica of a turtle ship. 

And last but not least, the dog cafe. It works under the same principles as a cat cafe, but with dogs. And since dogs are more apt to enjoy attention from strangers, the concept worked a lot better. It was pretty chaotic, though, since the dogs also wanted to play with each other. In the large dog area, there was a lot of roughhousing between two English sheepdogs and a husky. And in the small dog area, two of the Pomeranians were pulling each others' tails. But all in all, it was quite fun.

A Newfoundland, I think. You can't tell in this picture, but he was MASSIVE.

Jessica petting a large black dog that walked onto our table.

This dog was my buddy while I was in the big dog area. He sat next to or on me the whole time and let me scratch him. He was definitely one of the calmer dogs.

While I was in the small dog area, I took off my coat, and an ancient chihuahua and a dachshund decided to take a nap on it. Good thing it seemed to repel hair pretty well.

So, these are the best of my pictures. Hope you enjoyed!