Eric and Stephanie's Korean Adventure: A Day at the Zoo

Today we went to Seoul Grand Park, which amidst many other things is also home to the Seoul Zoo. The Seoul Zoo is in the top ten zoos in the world when it comes to size and scale (3400 animals and 360 different species). We could definitely tell this was true since we were there for almost four hours and didn't even see everything! The zoo has an interesting history to it. After the Japanese occupation of Korea began, the Japanese government decided to create a zoo on the grounds of Changgyeongung Palace in Seoul as a way to insult the Korean people in 1909. The zoo stayed and was even maintained by the Korean government later on, all the way up until 1984 when the zoo was relocated to Seoul Grand Park so that restoration of the palace could begin.

The zoo has a botanical garden, numerous flower gardens, an elephant tram, dolphin and sea lion shows and even a sky lift. Outside of the zoo in the rest of the park is a large pond and even Seoul World (which looked like a very pathetic version of Disneyland. I think we will go with Lotte World for our amusement park of choice here!). We went on the sky lift which allowed us to see some of the zoo from above and did a ton of walking around the zoo to see many different animals . However, we will be going back at some point since there were still many animals we missed.. Like Eric didn't get to see the snakes or turtles and I didn't get to see the dolphin show and panda bears.

It's back to work tomorrow to start our tenth week already. Another field trip this week too! Time is sure flying by. It won't be long before we are already back home. But for now we enjoy the time that we have here in this busy city we currently call home.