It was hard to take too many pictures of the different houses.  Since people do live in them, the fancier houses are blocked off by gates and its hard to get any pictures that turn out well. Anyway, most of the houses look something like this one.  The village itself is so cool though.  Its a lot of hills and a lot of little streets and alleys, but its a really cool place to walk around.  Plus the weather was really nice when we went! 

Maybe its sorta hard to see, but our group of people were pretty much the only people on the streets.  Completely different from the Seoul I live in and am used to! I know I said I was going to go on a bike ride along the Han River, but that never happened. The people who wanted to go with me wanted to go in the morning so they could see the sun rise over Seoul, but it’s still a little bit too cold to be out that early in the morning.  I think I convinced them to wait a couple weeks til it warms up enough to enjoy it.  Instead, my friends and I went to Myeongdong, a popular shopping district in Seoul.  They have lots of clothes and makeup stores… girly things.  Apparently all the Japanese tourists who come to Korea loveeee Myeongdong. All the signs are in Korean, English and Japanese.  While we were walking around we stumbled upon this cookie stand where two Korean guys were talking to us in English.  He asked us if we had tried them before and we hadn’t so he gave us a little show:

I didn’t let the video go long enough for everyone to see what the finished product looks like, but if you look here, you can see what they look like.  There’s an almond, peanut, or walnut mixture inside them and you’re supposed to eat them when they’re frozen.  It’s soooooo good.  The guy told me they stay good for up to 2 weeks meaning I can bring some home with me!!

Once again, I had my four days of class, then on Friday I started my weekend.  A friend and I went to the Seoul Zoo.  It’s such a nice area and the Zoo itself is really really big so it took a long time to walk around the whole zoo, which we didn’t do.  We decided we could go back again because it’s so cheap! The entry ticket to the zoo is only 3,000 won (about $3.00!!).  We decided to get the package that let us go to the Dolphin and Seal Show for an extra 2,000 won.  The dolphin show was really cool though.  I didn’t have really high hopes for it because I’ve been to dolphin shows before, but the dolphin show here had 5 dolphins performing at once!

It was hard to get a picture of them all at once because I couldn’t use flash inside, but I think you can see most of them.  While we were at the zoo, we went to the baby animal nursery, where they have the babies that are born inside the zoo.  They had mostly baby monkeys, but my favorite babies were these guys

They were sooo cute and sooo playful.  They’d follow people walking along the glass and they’d jump up at the door.  A little boy was standing next to me looking at the lions and everytime they’d jump up he’d sorta squeal and laugh and it just made everything that much cuter.  

The next day, we went on our HUG trip outside of Seoul.  Unfortunately I wasn’t too impressed with the area outside of Seoul.  Lots of the places we drove by were really dirty and there isn’t any grass anywhere, just lots of dirt and hay.  It’s nothing like driving through the country at home.  The air quality was still bad, because we weren’t that far away from Seoul, but you can’t even see things when you’re in the country.  Anyway, we went to a “beach” but it wasn’t a beach like you’d normally think of.  It’s was low tide, so there wasn’t any water hardly, and it was a cloudy day which made things cold. 

Even though the beach itself wasn’t very nice, we still had a good time! After we were at the beach, we went to the house our group rented for the night.  It was on a lake, and it was just a cool place to hang out for the night.  We played dodgeball, with the strangest set of rules ever.  They played with only one ball, and boys couldn’t hit girls, and girls couldn’t hit boys.  Once you were out, instead of sitting in jail, you got to go stand on the sideline on the opposite side of the court and throw the ball to get people out still.  None of the Americans really liked this version because it took sooooo long especially since we had to wait for the ball each time someone threw it.  Anyway, my time ended up losing 🙁 Since we lost we had to wait to eat dinner.  Most of the people who ate got Korean barbeque, but since we had to wait til the winners finished eating, we got a little bit of the barbeque, then we got some hotdogs.  I don’t really like hotdogs anyway, but these ones were really terrible.  Losing really sucked that night.  Luckily, the house itself was really cool! It was a giant boat!

I wasn’t able to get a picture of it, but at night there are lights all around the outside of the boat, but it was really cool!  That night they played games and people drank, but we all ended up sleeping on the floor, mostly because thats all there was to sleep.  The next day, we got to do something really cool.  We went to the Unification Observatory, an area where people can use viewfinders to look at North Korea.  It was a really cool thing to see, and we had someone from the Korean Marines who told us about his job and the significance of the area. He was actually a graduate from Sogang University!! 

It was really cool to get to see North Korea, but I don’t think I’ll be making any trips there anytime soon. The strangest thing we saw at the observatory had to be this:

The big news for now though? Going to Thailand for Easter!! I’m really excited! Thats all for now though, I’ll post something again soon! Love to all!!!