Day 3-- Seoul, Korea

We visited all of the Korean Palaces in Seoul today-- so a lot of subway trips and A LOT of walking and stairs! They were all beautiful and it was fun to see them all but boy were we tired at the end of the day! It was interesting that these palaces were usually in a busy part of town where the big, tall buildings went right up to the fence of the property of these palaces. You can see tall buildings in the background of most of these pictures! It's nice that they've preserved these properties! The traditional Korean clothing was worn by men and women at a lot of these sites because you get free entry if you do! We saw a lot of beautiful dresses and their hair and makeup were done so beautifully as well! We met up with one of Ben's friends from HS and his wife at the one we went to just before lunch. They were on a layover after visiting Bali and wanted to see one of Korea's palaces. That was kinda fun... they said goodbye and we took a bus to our lunch and lo and behold-- we saw them walking while we were on the bus...THEN, they came into the SAME restaurant where we were eating! So crazy-- I mean Seoul is a HUGE city! They must've looked up a good place to eat after Todd told them the kind of food to eat while they were here (and that we were going to be eating for lunch) ... and they found the SAME restaurant where we were eating! The restaurant was pretty small too! It was so good though-- it was chicken with cheese melted and cooked together with a lot of other ingredients in a pan on the table--only it was pretty hot! (spicy) We chose medium heat, but my mouth was literally on FIRE! (It was yesterday at lunch, as well!) So we decided when we have a choice, to always choose mild from here on out! It was also very hot temperature wise because it was cooking while we were eating it, so I had to make sure I cooled it off really well before eating it because it was burning my tongue! My eyes were watering and my nose was running because of all the spice and heat! Koreans love their red pepper! It was another really heavy meal and I don't usually eat lunch at all, so I am getting plenty of food here in Korea! After lunch, we took a walk through a street fair and got some street food... ice cream wrapped and cooked in a marshmallow! We ended the day at another palace that had a beautiful lake, as well. When we finished at the palace, Brooke was on the hunt for some more hotteok and we were having a hard time finding some in the street markets-- they were all sold out! We walked forever, until we finally found a vendor that hadn't sold out yet. It wasn't quite as good as the homemade hotteok the missionaries made for us, but it tasted pretty good. We had fun walking around the night market-- I think it was in the Myondeong district where the night markets were. (And I don't think I spelled that correctly!) So the palaces that we visited today were the Gyeonbokgung, the Changdeokgung, the Deoksugung and the Changgyeonggung palaces-- now that's a mouthful. I'm not sure which one was which for the pictures, though.