On Saturday we went to Lotte Department Store because I still have a gift certificate one of my students gave me on Teacher's Day. However, it didn't take me long to realize I wasn't going to find anything affordable even with a gift certificate in a store that makes Nordstrom's look more like Target. Luckily the gift certificate can also be used for groceries at Lotte Mart so I think I'll take the cash to Namdaemun instead! Speaking of Lotte Mart we went there yesterday too and saw Elizabeth (my kindergarten student) with her mom! She seemed shocked to see us at first but then got very excited. This isn't the first time we have run into students outside of work, especially at the stores close to home. Now on to our adventure of the weekend...
We decided we wanted to take a trip into Incheon this weekend and try to go to the beach. Since we live about as far east in Seoul as you can get and Incheon is outside of Seoul all the way to the west it was quite a long ride on the subway. Fortunately the subway wasn't overly busy today so we were able to get seats pretty much the whole way! After about an hour and a half on the subway we arrived at Incheon International Airport where we were supposed to be able to take a bus to the beach. We found the bus that clearly said "Eulwangni Beach" on it in both Korean and English so assumed that was the right one. But like a few of our other adventures it didn't turn out quite as we planned. We rode on the bus for quite a while, never coming to a stop that looked like it could be close to the beach so we just kept riding. Finally when we were the only ones on the bus I guess we got to the end of the route because the driver turned around to look at us and said "goodbye" in Korean. We assumed that was his way of saying "this is the last stop so get off" so we did. We still saw nothing that looked like it would lead to the beach but we were right in front of Chinatown so we decided to walk through there instead. It was filled with many Chinese restaurants and little shops selling Chinese things. There was a nice park nearby where we could see the Korea-USA Bicentennial Monument and a statue of General MacArthur. We decided to board another bus that would take us to the Wolmido Boardwalk where we could at least see the sea even if we couldn't be on the beach. There were some carnival rides and a lot of restaurants up and down the boardwalk. However, not feeling much like having sliced raw fish for dinner we got on a bus that would take us back to the airport. For some reason we found walking around the very large air conditioned airport rather entertaining and a good place for people watching. It was also nice to figure out exactly where we need to go when we leave for Thailand in exactly three weeks! We even had dinner at the airport too before boarding the subway for the trip home. Not quite the day we had planned but fun all the same. It was actually really nice to just sit and see the scenery from the subway (since most of it was above ground once we got out of Seoul) and the bus. Incheon is still a bustling city but not like Seoul. It's also a big port town so the scenery was quite different than what we see here and the sky was SO blue. Although the sky was fairly blue in Seoul yesterday, it is normally pretty hazy and appears cloudy most of the time.
Korea-USA Bicentennial Monument. The sky was so blue in Incheon!
General MacArthur
On the Wolmido Boardwalk
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