Korea

Having travelled from Seoul to Sokcho, having hiked in Seorak National Park, having slept in a temple near GyeongJu and having spent some days in Busan it is now time to move on. The highlights were certainly the different hiking trips...Korea is perfect for that. There are thousands of possibilities and many parks even in the city centers offer the opportunity to hike. National Parks are, of course, even better.

Busan is a nice city at the souther coast of Korea. We enjoyed our last days here pretty much even though the weather was quite bad today with a heavy wind and some rain. Tonight we ll take the night train to Seoul, arriving there at 4am. From there we take the plane to Taipei.

The night we passed at Golgulsa Temple is probably THE highlight because it was something so different and new. We learned a lot about buddhism and about the history of monks in Korea. Korean history is very interesting and full of wars and battles. Some museums we have visited are definetly worth the visit (Seoul Museum of History for instance). GyeongJu, the old capital of the Silla dinasty, is still full of historic places and a walk through the city center is a must.

For those not so much interested in history, nightlife is great, many streets have thousands of bars and coffee shops. Shopping facilities are everywhere, the world's biggest shopping mall is in Busan and you can find everything...

Korea

Finally I can access this blog again and can write something about Korea. When we arrived in Seoul on Monday we had the impression that we just landed in paradise. The city seemed so well organized and people seemed just normal...that does not mean that Chinese are not normal but some of the habits in China were simply not easy to adapt to.

Anyways, Seoul kept us busy cause there are many things to see and we only had little time for all the stuff. The flight arrived around lunch time if I remember well. As soon as we found our Hostel which was next to one of the univesities (something with S but names are too complicated to remember here), we started walking around. We went to a palace, a park, saw some of the famous shopping streets and so on...Next day was busy as well, went to two other palaces, the Seoul museum of history (which is great), assisted an architectural event (we kind of slipped into that event by error and stayed there...there was a huge building and the architect said that it could change its face by simply moving the building, like a dice or a cube, on another face. He demonstrated it by letting some cranes push the building on another face...quite interesting to see), went to a big market quater with millions of small shops and walked to the Seoul Tower which is on a little mountain.

During that day we met many people, most of the time Koreans who wanted to share some of their culture with us. One guy talked to us at lunch and told us to see some coupleof things in the city. One person we met during dinner spoke pretty good German. The language skills of Koreans are definetly good, and they are all very nice.

Yesterday we moved on to Sokcho which is at the Korean East Coast. The Seorak national park is next to that small city and we wanted to spend a day here and hike through the mountains. We did that today and it was amazing. You can see pictures on picasa.

Tomorrow we move on, we go to Gulgasa, which is a temple north of Busan. We stay there over night (templestay program). After that we might stay a day in the region and continue our way to Busan. It s a pitty that we only have 10 days for Korea. Have the impression that I could spend a year here.