Eric and Stephanie's Korean Adventure: Living with 10 million people

We always knew Seoul had a large population, but we never knew exactly how many people lived here until we looked it up the other day. 10.2 million. 10.2 million people in a city that is twice the size of Portland, but has 20 times the amount of people. The population density is eight times that of New York City. Needless to say there are a lot of people here and this weekend we began to feel a bit more "crowded" than we have before. During peak hours in the subway stations you can look up the very long escalator from the bottom and see people packed shoulder to shoulder all the way up. You better push your way onto the escalator too if you ever want to get up! Crossing the ten lane streets during a busy part of the day can be interesting as well with a massive amount of people going both directions. Once again, you better push your way through if you want to get across before the cars start going again. That is if the cars decided to stop at all. Just like New York, red lights are suggestions. Additionally, turn signals are basically non-existent and sometimes I'm not even sure which direction is the "right" way when cars decide to go both ways in the same lane. We are both very glad we will never have to drive here!

We went to Namdaemun Market this weekend. A market similar to Saturday Market in Portland but on a much, much larger scale. The alleys of vendors were pretty narrow, especially when a large amount of people were trying to go both ways and you were standing right in the middle. Sometimes you might be walking behind a person that was moving quickly and then all of a sudden just stops in the middle of the sidewalk. Good thing they are used to being bumped into. Not far from Namdaemun Market is Deoksu and the Deoksugung Palace. We got there just in time to see the ceremonial changing of the guard. There is always a guard standing outside of the palace grounds just like when the palace was really in use. The guard would stand outside to protect the King and anyone else inside the palace. This palace was used during the Joseon Dynasty which lasted from 1392 until 1910 when the Japanese took over. It was last used by King Gojong from the late 19th century until the end of the dynasty. We were not able to take pictures inside the palace but did get many pictures of the guard changing and the outside which you can see below and more on our Facebook pages.

We also discovered Itaewon this weekend. A small area with many western restaurants. I was extremely excited to find Taco Bell! Though we opted to have a Mexican dinner at Taco Amigos instead, it was nice to find Taco Bell, McDonalds, Subway, Burger King, Baskin Robbins, Quiznos and many other western restaurants all on the same street. There was also another market on the streets with many, many people all going different directions. Fortunately, we have not lost each other yet! With all the western food in Itaewon it is the place the foreigners hang out. We saw more foreigners here than we have seen the whole two weeks we have been here. There might be over ten million people in this city but even on a crowded street we can pick out a single foreigner instantly. Now we know how much we stick out too!

Oh and if you include the populations of Incheon and Gyeonggi Province with the population of Seoul, you have 25 million people living in the small Northwest corner of South Korea. That's a lot of people!