Kristen in Korea

Golden Week is the big holiday/travel week in Japan, and this year I hopped on a plane over to Seoul, South Korea. The trip was absolutely amazing, and my friends and I had a fantastic time.

We stayed at a little hostel that was really, really nice for only about 20 bucks a night.


Though of course we paid in Korean won. The exchange rate from Japanese yen is a good one, but it took a day or so to get used to the large denominations. The trick to mentally converting to US dollars is to drop the last three zeros. So the 1000 bill is about a dollar, and the 50,000 bill is about $50.













And everything was so cheap! Take the subway, for example.

You can get pretty much anywhere for only about a dollar. In Japan, I have a pay almost two dollars just to get one stop over.

One of our first stops in Seoul was Gyeongbok-gung, a historical palace.

This guy was the first sight to greet us outside:

And the palace grounds were enormous.




There were these little statues everywhere which I think were supposed to represent the Chinese Zodiac, but I'm not sure.

There's the horse:
The rooster:
The...tiger? I dunno, does this look like a tiger to you?
The...hmm....
Um...
Okay, this one's just freaky:

Never mind. Here's more of the palace grounds:






And this post has gotten long, so I'll break the different sections of Seoul up into different posts. Tune in later this week for more!