Seoul Day 1

After going to church in a ward Bob once served his mission in we hopped on a bullet train and headed for Seoul.  This was my first time on a bullet train.  I didn't get any pictures but it wasn't really that eventful.  We stayed at the hotel on base and it was really nice.  I especially loved how close it was to the gate.  We had been gone for about a week at this point and were getting tired of eating out so often so we headed to the commissary and picked up a few things.  I mainly wanted cereal.

Below is the view from our room.  The hotel also had a really good size gym and a pool.  It was great.

We went on a couple group tours while in Seoul and the first one was to a big and famous Buddhist temple.  

 It was so much more colorful than the ones we see in Japan.

People were buying water bottles and bags of rice at the store and giving them as offerings to the buddhist statue.  It kind of seemed like a scam to me.  I'm sure the store just picks them up every night and puts them out for sale again.

 They had just finished lotus season and there were still a few around.

After that we rode the bus with our group over to the big palace.  They had a guard changing ceremony that we got to watch.  We learned a lot about the history of the palace and government, most of which I have already forgotten.  There used to be like 400 buildings but most of them were all destroyed so they are now rebuilding.  

We even got to see the Blue House, which is equivalent to the White House in America.

That night we went to the show Fanta Stick.  It was similar to the other one because it was a lot of drumming and very little words.  This one was a little more out there with the context though.  There was a storyline with spirits and different cultural things that I didn't completely understand.  It was pretty fun though.

 On the walk home we stopped and checked out the Korean War Memorial.

 These statues were huge.

There were tons of planes and tanks just sitting there for us to look at.  Bob really liked seeing them all.