A walk about town...

I really did nothing to celebrate Easter, but that just seems like how I've been living my life in the past few years. I did, though, take a nice long walk in the opposite direction that I usually head. We got on the Chongyechong further down near Seongsugyo Bridge (I might have that bridge name wrong... but it's something like that) and walked for a bit down that ways. We were hoping that we'd see some cherry blossoms down there and beat the crowds in Yeoido. No such luck though... it was still kind of grey and brown looking down there...

There were twice as many bikes as people, and it was actually a little scary, dodging bikes when the bike path wasn't separate from the walking path.


Finally we came to the point where the Cheongyechong empties out into the Hangang. We crossed the stream on a pedestrian bridge and followed the Han east in the direction of Ttukseom.


We walked for a while down there. We were actually hoping we'd see some cherry blossoms, but no such luck... it was still a little dead over there. After walking for about an hour, we found a park and sat down to take a rest. Here's some photos from the park:

Rock Climbing Wall... never seen one of these in Seoul before...

After sitting around here for a while deciding what to do next, we decided to get on the subway to cross the river (for lack of a way to cross by foot) and head to our friend's house in Jamsil. She lives a 3 minute walk from the lake in Seocheon.. aka where Lotte World is. We knew we'd be able to find some cherry blossoms over there... though it was getting to be dusk. We didn't know where the subway was, but we just walked a little more and found ourselves at line 7, Ttukseom Resort... though, we were really hoping for line 2. Before we got on, we caught a good glimpse of Olympic Stadium from across the river.

We got to Jamsil and we had to walk around the lake to get to our friend's house. Here we finally found our cherry blossoms. You can see the Lotte World castle in the background here too. No Disney ripoffs here...
Here's another Lotte World sight. The giant raccoon. Doesn't he just make you need to check out Lotte World??
After some coffee (actually, I had a smoothie, I don't like caffeine) the sun went down and we headed through my friend's neighborhood. There is a local Buddhist temple here. The whole place was all decked out in lanterns lit up. Never seen this before around here. But there are lanterns strung up all over the place? What's this all about? They went up a week or two ago around Wangsimni too (but those ones don't glow like these). Is there some holiday that I don't know about? I know Buddha's birthday is coming up in May, but this is April...

Anyway, they were still cool to look at!