Wall Saturday, rainy Sunday

Ok, a weekend update :)

Yesterday, Saturday, was a lovely day. The weather was really sunny and warm, and I met up with Jennifer, a girl I have met once before, to explore the Suwon Hwaseong palace and fortress wall. We caught the train 15 minutes north to Suwon, and then got a taxi to the outskirts of the palace area. The bus was going to cost us a dollar each, or a dollar fifty for the taxi, so we went taxi :) We got to the palace right in the middle of some sort of martial arts demonstration and it was awesome! So much better than the boring guard change ceremonies I've seen before. The consumes looked good, and the fighting was exciting. Then, they put out all these sheaths of hay and swung really sharp swords to slice right trough the bundle! Sometimes multiple bundles... the swords must have been so sharp, and I reckon you'd need to have some skill to do that!

The palace gate

Epic action shot!

Left is the hay.

And this is what happened to it!

Me and a guard.

This was a particularly pretty building in the palace.

I can't resist these yellow trees. This one was showering leaves down.

Then, we went and explored the palace, which looked (to me) just like every other Korean palace, but it was a pleasant wander. Then we went to find lunch. My Lonely Planet Seoul book recommended this restaurant that server 'galbitang', which is this beef rib stew thing that is a speciality of the area. We looked, but couldn't find it, so we asked some Korean's for help. They were very nice and tried to call the restaurant to find it for us, but the number had been disconnected. I guess the restaurant has closed down or moved. Anyway, we found a really nice regular Korean place to have lunch, and I just randomly ordered glabitang on the chance they served it, and they did! And it was only $4.50 including rice and side dishes! All the food was three to four dollars! If I find a place like that around home, I probably won't cook hardly at all! Anyway, the galbitang was nice, a mild garlic peppery soup with leaves and beef ribs. It wasn't very Korean tasting actually, but was very pleasant.

The galbitang's on the left.

After lunch we went and found the fortress wall and had a walk up and along it, admiring the forest, the view, and all the autumn leaves. We caught the taxi back tot he station, and the train back to Osan. It was a lovely day, and Jennifer was great company :) We were going to go and see the open mic night thing, but I was so tired after waking up at 5.30am to Skype mum and then walking around all day.

View over Suwon from the fortress wall.

These amazing purple berried were in the forest.

Me with the leaves!

Steps along the side of the wall.

Sunday it has been raining all day. I was going into Seoul today, but my main destination was an outdoor art market, and I didn't know if it would even be open in the rain (and probably wouldn't be much fun even if it was), so I explored Osan with my umbrella for a bit instead. I found the knitting store and got some needles and wool, and have started knitting a scarf the colour of wasabi :)