We had an extra day off this weekend since Buddha's birthday was
celebrated on Friday. We decided late last week that we wanted to get
away for the weekend and had originally planned to take the train down
to Busan to go to the beach. However, due to a mistake we made when
booking the train tickets we had to cancel that plan and scramble to
make a different one since we were just feeling so desperate for a
change of scenery for a couple days! We decided to just take a simple
trip to another part of Seoul. We booked a hotel a short distance from
Bukhansan National Park in the northern part of Seoul and just spent a
couple days away from our apartment and neighborhood. The hotel was
nothing fancy but it worked for a change of scenery. After getting
checked in we took the subway the rest of the way to on entrance and
mountain of Bukhansan National Park. It was Friday afternoon which
meant the serious hikers were already on their way back down the
mountain and there were definitely a ton of them! Definitely not a
vacation away from the crowdedness of the city but still nice to be
surrounded by trees and plants! We did a short hike up to one of the
temples on Dobongsan. Since it was Buddha's birthday the temple was
quite busy with ceremonies, candle lightnings and people praying inside
the temple, but the decorations around the temple were also quite nice.
We made the mistake of taking a taxi back to our hotel after our
hiking. Even the hotel was only a few miles away, it was a Friday, a
holiday and during afternoon rush hour so it took almost an hour to go
those few miles! But we did find a very good Korean barbeque restaurant
near our hotel for dinner.
Saturday was kind of our
spontaneous day. We started by going to a different entrance of
Bukhansan where it was much less crowded, we only saw a few other
hikers, but the hiking was much more intense, almost like rock climbing
at times. Again it was nice to just be out in nature and the quiet so
we enjoyed it even if it was a tough hike. We decided to turn back
after a while and ended up heading into Itaewon, known as one of the big
foreign hubs, where Eric ordered some custom shirts he's been wanting
for summer and just walked around. We headed back to our hotel for
dinner where we had the best burgers we've had in Korea. The look of
the restaurant almost even reminded us of Burgerville as we think they
were trying to go for a classic diner style. It was quite delicious
though and we enjoyed just walking around the area after dinner and
relaxing in a bar and grill when it started raining. It wasn't the most
exciting weekend but we both really enjoyed just spending some time
together in a different atmosphere for a couple of days.
We
are hoping we will be able to get down to the beach one weekend here
soon when it will be much easier and cheaper to get train tickets and a
hotel. Eric is starting to plan a trip for himself during his summer
vacation and we are planning to travel to China together in September so
we do definitely have some traveling plans to look forward to!
For
some reason blogger still won't let me upload pictures to the blog...
(it's really starting to get annoying!) but I promise to post them on
Shutterfly this week!
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