안녕하세요!

Hey Everyone! So as you can see from our little travel tracker on the plane screen above, we safely arrived in Seoul last night at about 7 PM! The flight was a long 12 or so hours but I comfortably managed to snore my way through almost every minute of it. It's around 8:20 AM now and I just came from breakfast in our lovely hotel called CasaVille (What? South Korea? CasaVille? Okay...) Everything seems so unreal so far, we're smackdab in the middle of downtown and just one look out of our window gives us this view:

Incredible right?

We start getting our first official tour in a few hours today seeing things like the Changdeokgung Palace, a War Memorial and the N Seoul Tower and I can't wait to finally be getting taught some official culture points and start being able to fully understand all the new sights that I've been taking in. This is so unlike anything I've ever experienced in my life and I don't think I've ever felt like a bigger tourist but I guess that's why I'm here to learn.

I went wandering with a new friend Sara from Colorado (whom I met on the plane) just browsing the streets around our hotel and we managed to make acquintance with a friendly store manager as I was trying to take her picture and he ran across the street waving and motioning that he wanted to take our picture together and most importantly in front of his beautiful fish store. So we were happy to help him advertise and spend 10 or so minutes in sign language trying to motion on how to use my SLR after he struggled for the longest time, refusing my help, until he realized that it was switched to 'off.' We had a good laugh, said a big thank you and good night to him and headed off on our way, it was fairly late at the time and we both decided to head back after only 45 minutes or so seeing as the 15 hour (eek!) time difference was wearing us down and we thought it best to get some rest.


As for now, some interesting cultural/travel points thus far:

There are swastikas everywhere... At first we were all a bit concerned and asked around as to why they were flying from every corner around the city, but some googling eased my mind as I realized that in Asian popular culture they're actually used to denote Buddhist temples and are a much older symbol then when Nazi Germany picked it up. Still a bit of a shocker to get used to, but thought it was interesting the different perspective this culture has on what we view as such a horrific symbol.

Also, travel point for ladies (and some guys I guess) this is just from my general experience with traveling as a whole, but beginning right now, start learning to love your natural hair. Yup, get used to it. Because no matter what transformer or adapter plug you purchase and no matter what country you are visiting, I have never been able to successfully use a US hair straightener or blow dryer while abroad. Plug it in, it works for about 5 minutes and then short circuits. HOWEVER, if you think it's worth it to visit a market and purchase a local appliance from a store that might be your only hope, but if you're never really planning on being in that country again, 15 bucks on a straightener just for 10 days might be cash that you could have used to purchase much cooler things.

Anyways, so I could write for hours, but I am just itching to get back into downtown and start my adventure. I'll update everyone again as soon as possible and will hope to have some interesting new stories when I return :)