Heading to the island :)

Before I start my blog, I would like to take a minute to say to everyone who laughed at us because we tied (ahem specifically skins and cowboys fans): EAGLES ARE IN THE PLAYOFFS! Here is some light reading for your enjoyment...

And on to life in Thailand!

After 5 days in busy, polluted Bangkok, we are ready to go to the island and relax! Like I mentioned before, I'm not sure how Internet will work out there so I might be m.i.a. for a while!

Yesterday, we went in to Chinatown and it was pretty crazy! It was so busy - in some parts of the streets and alleyways we could barely move through the crowds. We did a little shopping here, and afterwards we took a boat up to our next destination. We didn't get to see the solid gold Buddha, but we did end up going to a huge temple, Wat Pho, which held the World's largest reclining Buddha in a building made just big enough to fit it. I have some great pictures of the temple complex, which I will post when I can. After this we just walked around the amulet markets, bought souvenirs, ate some delicious street food, and took another tuk-tuk ride through the streets of Bangkok.

Tonight, we are leaving at 8pm for Krabi. After a 12 hour bus ride, we will take a ferry towards Koh Lanta, and halfway to Koh Lanta we will catch a long boat that meets us in the water to get to our bungalow on Koh Jum. Here is the island website if anyone is interested - it gives weather updates and has some basic info: http://www.kohjumonline.com/ Also, this is our bungalow's website! http://www.kohjum-joybungalow.com/

Have a Happy New Year if you don't hear from me! (and of course, go eagles!!!)

Bangkok...

After taking it easy on Christmas day, we have spent the last few days seeing things in Bangkok. We bought our bus tickets to the south, which was a small adventure as we needed to find the bus terminal and deal with the language barrier. We did get to take a long tuk-tuk ride to get there, which was pretty crazy! Drivers in Bangkok take way too many risks :)

Aside from that, we explored the city and also went to the huge weekend market slightly to the North of the city (a 20 minute walk from our hostel!) The market is made up of 26 main sections, plus about a dozen sections on the outside. This thing was huge. It was filled with tourists and Thai people alike, and sections included everything from clothing to jewelry to housewares to woodwork to pets. The puppies were so cute....we saw a lot of people buying them and taking them home. We also saw some rare animals, such as a little lemur. We were able to try some different Thai foods from the street vendors at the market. This was so busy and crazy, but we were able to get a few souvenirs to take home with us! Side note: Street vendors are EVERYWHERE in Bangkok! You can't walk a block without seeing one along the side of the road or seeing a vendor riding by with his food on the front a bicycle or motorbike.

Today we are heading to Chinatown to look around and also see the world's largest solid gold Buddha statue, and then we will head to the Temples. I am not able to put pictures up here due to our connection, but hopefully I'll be able to soon!

Merry Christmas!

It is Christmas morning here and we arrived at our Hostel in Bangkok last night. This place is awesome... it has free internet, a pool!, free washer and dryer for use, a pool table, a bar downstairs, and a restaurant. No tv or AC, but we will live! :) It is going to get to about 90 today; I haven't had a warm Christmas since visiting my grandparents in Florida growing up! So this will be very different than what I am used to :)

The final days of our trip to South Korea were enjoyable - We went to a fortress south of Seoul, along with a village, and ate a lot of Korean food. South Korea was clean, friendly and so easy to get around in...I would recommend visiting to anyone!

I am going to go each some breakfast and enjoy the day here. I hope everyone reading this has a great Christmas! Email/post a comment if you have a second, I already miss hearing from people back home!

Gyeoungbokgung, Insadong, Jogyesa and more Markets

On Sunday we once again woke up early (still aren't used to the 14 hour time change!) and went to Gyeongbokgung, translated as "Palace of Shining Happiness." The palace was gorgeous, and covered a great amount of land.

I took a lot of pictures (which can be seen on Picasa) but here are some of the best ones!

The main gate of the palace

A throne inside of one of the main buildings

A side walkway leading back to the main gate of the palace

A Palace Guard

Right next to the palace sits the National Folk Museum of Korea. This was a great escape from the cold -1 degree Celcius temperature! There were some pretty interesting things to see here as well, and the building itself was impressive in its own right - there is a good picture on the site linked above!

After walking through the entire Palace complex, we went to the National Palace Museum of Korea. This housed many more artifacts from Korean history, but the thing I thought was most interesting was the large water clock inside. My pictures did not turn out well, but here is a link that explains it. We were there for the 10:59-11:00 time changing, and it was pretty cool to see that this huge (and very advanced for the time it was created in 1436AD) clock worked on schedule!

After our morning at the palace we went to Insadong, a market area filled with great deals and also a lot of street vendor food. We came here in search of a good authentic Korean restaurant, and found one! We ate bulgogi and a seafood/noodle dish, along with the provided norm of kimchi and other small appetizers. We also tried some new Korean beers, OB and Kass, and decided Kass was definitely the better of the two. Below is a picture of the main street in Insadong.

After lunch we went to the Jogyesa, Korea's largest Buddhist temple. The temple compound was flooded with people on Sunday afternoon, and there were lines waiting to make donations, buy calendars, and enter varied buildings at the temple. We looked in at the three large Buddha statues inside, and the smell of incense was potent all around the temple complex.

The above picture is a view from the outside of the Jogyesa. Directly to the right was a makeshift temple, also facing the Buddhas, which was also filled with people praying (shoes left outside the temple, of course!) This is also where the lines of people I spoke of earlier were. The side doors each had signs posted like the one below:

Finally, we took a walk down to the market close to our Hotel. I noticed that these are usually full of older Koreans rather than younger. We ended up buying dinner, splitting what I can best describe as a potato/veggie/onion fried pancake with a soy sauce-like sauce; it was delicious! Old Korean men walked by and smiled at us as we ate our dinner on the steps of a closed shop. One of them gave James the thumbs up sign... they loved seeing us enjoying traditional Korean food.

The DMZ

Today we went to the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), the 4 km of divided area between North and South Korea. We were actually able to step inside North Korea, so I can add another country to my list! We took a lot of pictures, so these are probably the best way to describe the day. Check it out below!

First, we got a briefing by an Army Sergeant and had to sign a form saying that we were not representatives of the UN or South Korea and anything we did could not be linked to them. This was basically to protect them in case we did anything wrong or caused death/injury/anything that could be interpreted as insulting that could cause problems during our visit.

We were then able to continue on to the JSA, the most fascinating place in the DMZ in my opinion. The pictures below show the view of the North Korean side, looking out from the South Korean side. The blue building (T2) is the one which we entered.

This is me in North Korea! The cement line seen on the ground out the window is the line which crosses between the North and South Korean sides of the buildings here, dividing the country. South Korea has three buildings built across this line, and North Korea has two.

Here is James standing next to a South Korean guard

Being here was very odd. The South Korean soldiers seen in the above pictures in the traditional Judo pose come out only when tour groups or others are visiting the DMZ. The North Koreans have watch towers positioned in order to watch the South Koreans and those on the South Korean side at all times. We were warned not to point, jesture, or try to communicate with any North Koreans while there. It was a very strange place, and you notice when you are there just how inappropriate the name "demilitarized zone" is for this place...both countries are ready for war at any second, with guards and soldiers stationed nearby at all times.

This is a view of North Korea from one of our stopping points. I am sure on a clear day this would be an even better picture!

The below picture is of "Propaganda Village," which was built on the North Korean side shortly after the DMZ was created in 1953. Until 2004, loudspeakers would play propaganda messages about Kim Jong Il and other North Korean messages for 6-12 hours a day. The strangest part of this is that the town is mostly deserted. It was built mostly as a show for the South Koreans. The North Korean flag seen in the picture has a weight of 600pounds, and our guide explained that if soaked, the flag pole would not be able to hold the weight of the flag. We were lucky to catch it on a windy day! The flag pole seen in the picture is the largest flagpole in the world, at 160M tall. The South Koreans previously had one larger at 100M, but shortly after that went up, North Korea built this flag pole to display their flag more prominently.

The bridge in this picture goes across the DMZ line...I was able to get a pretty good picture and on a dreary day like today, this bridge and entryway into North Korea looked pretty desolate.

Finally, our last stop was the Third Tunnel, where we were able to walk 350 meters underground at about a 15 degree incline through a South Korean tunnel to the end of a huge tunnel the North Koreans had built, reaching from North Korea under the DMZ line to the South Korean side. This tunnel was built around 1972, 19 years after the treaty between the two countries. It showed that the North Koreans had plans to attack, and would have allowed for an army to travel from North Korea to South Korea in one hours time. Pictures weren't allowed here, but this was a pretty cool part of the tour too.

At the Tunnel stop, we also went to the DMZ tourist information center. Here, we were shown a video created by the South Koreans, capitalizing on the fact that the two countries were working on reunification. It described the DMZ as a happy place full of growth and beauty, and no longer a sign of war or separation. We found this interesting simply because after a day of seeing and hearing about nothing but North Korean propaganda and the separation of the two countries, we were told that everything we had seen wasn't correct. This video was another piece of propaganda, and I decided to include a picture of the statue outside the center (at left).

Our day on the DMZ tour was awesome, and we had a great time! Just being there and seeing this was so cool. I have added a few more pictures on picasa if you would like to check them out. Hope everyone is doing well back in the US!

Markets, Guns, etc

After a day in NYC and a 15 hour flight, we arrived in Seoul at 6am on Thursday morning (4pm EST on Wednesday night). Four hours later after figuring out customs/baggage/buses/etc, we ended up at Euljiro 4 subway station. Finding our hotel from here turned out to be pretty hard... after walking down several alleyways and backtracking once or twice, we finally found it and checked into our hotel and took an AWESOME 5 hour long nap.

Our first night in Seoul, we stayed in our hotel area which turned out to be full of markets. We walked through a huge market that had everything from vegetables, to squid and other varied sea creatures, to football-sized cooked cow hearts, to boxes of nuts and bolts, to gloves and coats and hats, to boxes full of rubberbands. These markets have just about everything in them! (Although really, boxes of rubberbands?!)

Here are two pictures of James and I, standing by the river down the street from our hotel in the heart of the market district where we are staying.

Thursday morning, we were both awake by 5am (jet lag killed us!) so we started the day early and decided to head to the Korean War Memorial and Museum. After figuring out the crazy subway station (click here), we spent the morning there, checking out Korean War memorabilia and aircraft/weapons from different times throughout Korean military history. This was a really cool museum! Below is a drum which commemorates the 60th anniversary of the war. This was right in the main lobby of the museum.

Finally, here I am putting on my "I'm scary, I'm going to kill you" face and posing with a pretty cool weapon in the outdoor area of the museum.

After the War Memorial/Museum, we spent the afternoon in the National Museum of Korea. This was a more traditional museum, full of art work, pottery, jewelry, weapons, etc, some dating back to as early as 800AD. We also had some delicious Udon Noodle Soup here for lunch :)
That is about it for today, we are doing the USO DMZ tour tomorrow so I will try to post pretty soon thereafter. Hopefully I can get a good picture or two of some North Korean soldiers while we are there!

Philly, NYC and then Seoul!

Tonight I am writing this from my parents house in the Philadelphia suburbs. Tomorrow, my mom is driving James and I up to NYC (she conveniently has a meeting there tomorrow!) We will spend the day there, and then leave late tomorrow night from JFK.

I just wanted to post to say that I hope everyone has a great holiday season! I didn't get to say goodbye to too many people as I have been pretty busy leading up to this point, so this is the final goodbye before we are gone! I will be reachable through my gmail account and also comments on this blog, so please stay in touch!

Merry Christmas!

One Week to Go!

In case anyone hasn't heard my most recent update, the big news is that I will be leaving DC in mid-December and heading to Southeast Asia for a few months! Yes, this does mean that I will be missing Christmas in Philly. But it also means that I am doing this once-in-a-lifetime trip with my boyfriend James, and we plan on going to Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and hopefully also Australia and one or two other countries. Suggestions welcome :)

Officially leaving on Tuesday night (12/16) for Seoul, South Korea, and then heading to Bangkok on December 24. After that, we will be travelling (via bus, tuk tuk, ferry then long boat) to an island in Thailand called Koh Jum to live in a bungalow similar to the one pictured below. Can't wait!

More to come soon!