Korea Trip, 31Dec

Had breakfast at the buffet in the hotel and then took the subway to the Lotte Department store. Noreen's cellphone has a Seoul subway map and routing tool (put in the start and end stations and it gives you the route, where to change trains, etc) which made life VERY nice! Noreen needed long johns and I figured that Lotte would be the best place to look. We walked around Lotte and found the sporting goods/clothing area and bought her long johns. Lotte is orgaanized with lots of small "departments" - each brand more or less has its own department, like Ralph Lauren (men and women in their own dept), Burberry, etc. We then walked around an underground mall and Noreen saw a "Hello Kitty" handwarmer that uses Zippo gas at a Zippo store, so we bought that. (yes, the tiny store had nothing but lighters and accessories for lighters!) While walking around, Noreen mentioned that there was a palace near the City Hall, so we walked that way and had lunch at KFC. Paid the 1000 won to get onto the palace grounds (Deoksugung) and walked it and took a few pics. It was kind of dead there and not very interesting, and when we finished up walking it, we went into the tea shop on the palace grounds and had tea and Noreen got her hand warmer working. I made an off-hand comment that "this place would probably be interesting if something was going on" and we left the tea shop. As we walked out, I noticed something going on in front of the palace - they were doing a changing of the guard ceremony! It was very cool (see the videos) to see and there was ommentary (in Korean, Chinese, English and Japanese) explaining what was going on. Noreen and I had our picture taken with the sergeant of the guard and I used Noreen's hand warmer to thaw out my hand which was holding the camera and had frozen! I also ran into the middle of the street to take a picture of the mountains just outside of Seoul.

We then walked to the cable car that takes you to the base of N Seoul Tower (I think the N is short for the name of the park it's in, Namsan, also the name of the mountain it's on). You can also walk up the mountain to the base of the tower, but we decided to take the elevator/monorail - too cold and too far uphill. We walked around the base, took some pics/video and bought some schwag. Then, we took the elevator up to the observatory, which had a great view of Seoul. After the tower, we took the subway back to our hotel and took a nap - it had been a VERY long day and all that walking had worn us out! I woke up around 6pm and asked Noreen if she wanted to eat dinner, but she said she wanted to sleep some more, so I went to the Korean BBQ restaurant (cook your own meat at the table) in the hotel and then Noreen and I hid in the room for New Years Eve - we decided warm and sitting was better than out and about in the freezing cold with all of the drunk idiots.