Today Alison and I went to the Suwon Fortress. We had to take the subway there which, gratefully, was in English as well as Korean. When we got off the subway, we got on a bus to the fortress. The bus driver was very nice and told us when our stop was. We walked around the area around the fortress for awhile before stopping inside a Tourist Information Booth. There, these two Korean men sat us down to tell us the history behind the Suwon fortress. It was a bit random, since the one man was telling us the story and the other man behind him kept taking our photo. At the end of his lecture, he beckoned us to follow him. His English was very bad so we weren't really sure where he was taking us, but we ended up at the palace inside the fortress walls. There was a stage there with traditional Korean dancers, and inside the palace we got to see the old suits of armor and other war/kingdom stuff.
After this, we walked to the wall. The stairs to the top of the wall were EXTREMELY long and steep and we felt quite dehydrated by the top as it was very warm today. The view on top of the wall though was beautiful, you could see the entire city of Suwon. I wish I could post pictures, but those will come soon enough. :)
We took the bus back to the subway station after this and we somehow ended up getting on the wrong train back! We got on the "rapid" train instead of the normal train, so it took us straight from Suwon to Anyang, completely skipping our stop. It was only about a 15 minute train ride though, and we didn't have to pay to get back to our stop. We finally got back around 4:30 and decided to explore our area of the city some more. We walked downtown and decided to go into this Korean restaurant that appeared to have pictures of their food on the menu. We thought this would be relatively safe so we went in. The menus turned out to be entirely in Korean, and our waitress didn't know any English either. We asked her if she had an English menu (by pointing at our menus and saying, "English?") and she went over to a fellow customer and dragged him over to talk to us. He pointed at the three sections on the menu and said, "Meat, noodles, drink." So we ordered off the "noodle" page and waited in confused expectation for our food. We both ended up getting some Korean spaghetti dish, so that was fine.
Tonight I think we are going to retreat back to one of our apartments and watch some "Friends" on DVD and eat green tea ice cream. :)
My first "official" teaching day is on Monday. So exciting! I'll be sure to update about that as soon as possible.
Love you all.
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4 comments:
The trip to the fortress sounds like so much fun. I can just see you climbing up a ton of stairs. I am glad that you are able to get around even if you don't know the Korean. And hey more adventures in food is always a good thing. I always tell Darya that she would like half the stuff that she says that she does not like if she did not know what was in it.
Love you tons!!!
Martha
i have a new blog, too! :) love you!!!! :) good luck today! (erm, tomorrow, here...)
I am going to be so excited when you can post pictures! Have fun teaching! (: Love you!
-steph I
i wish we had fortresses around here. That would be amazing! I'm pretty late on reading this to wish you luck for your first day, but I will wish you luck anyway. you can choose when to redeem the luck...
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