WALKING AROUND SEOUL

Every morning when I wake up, I look out the window and I can see these grandpas and grandmas walking the trail high up on the hill which surrounds our school.  Every morning I think to myself, ooh I really want to see what's up there, maybe I should go for a walk, but it normally just fades away once I start getting busy with something else.  Yesterday I decided that I would climb the mountain in the morning today, so this morning me and Randy (exchange student from San Diego) met up at 8 am and endeavoured to climb this hill and see what was on it.  

Unfortunately, I didn't actually know how to get up there.  I hadn't seen any trail leading up to the top, nor had I ever seen anyone coming down, so we kind of just cut through the forest at the back of the dormitories and went straight up instead of starting at wherever the start is.  It was pretty slippery with all the leaves and dirt around, and I think I've bruised my kneebone (is that even possible? can bones bruise?) when I slipped on a rock.  But once we got up to the top it was a pretty easy trail.  As we arrived at this pagoda area, we saw these exercise machines just randomly sitting in the middle of the trees.  I've seen this kind of thing in Hong Kong before - there was a park near my apartment with exercise machines planted along the jogging path.  We tried to figure out what each machine did by looking at the pictures but I don't know if we got it right or not.  The view from the pagoda structure...thing...was amazing.  You could see the whole of Seoul from that one point - it even had a map to tell you where everything was.  

Once we decided to come back down, we realised that we couldn't go back the way we came back.  We kept walking and walking until we finally came to some steps which led down to this playground.  It was such a cool playground.  It had everything I loved about playgrounds - swings, seesaw, slippery dips (one of them was made of metal rollers which really hurt my bum) and even exercise machines for the adults.  

After lunch, a group of us went to visit 창덕궁 changdeokgung (Changdeok Palace) which is one of the many palaces situated around Seoul.  There were a lot of families and groups of children with a teacher walking around.  I normally don't have an interest in historical buildings like such, but it was interesting this time because now I could see the buildings which I've seen in historical dramas.  I know, stop talking about dramas so much and live in reality, right?  But I honestly believe that it's because I've seen so many that I can find Seoul so interesting and want to learn more.  Anyway, we spent about two and a half hours walking around the palace when some of the girls were getting cold and so we left.  We split into two groups - one left to go back to the dormitory while the rest of us went to visit the largest music shop in Asia and then get some dinner.  

All in all it was a looot of walking for one day, and my legs are actually kind of tired.  But I'm not as tired as I thought I would be, which is excellent news since we're going to visit Seoul Tower tomorrow and plan on walking some more.  I'm going to be so super fit :)