At long last another blog.

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I'm sorry that this blog has been so long coming, I guess I've just been lazy.

It's hard for us to remember, sometimes, that this blog is you people at home's way of keeping up with our lives. We started this blog thinking of it as a "travel blog", but the longer we're here the less it feels like we are traveling and the more it feels like home. This is a good thing. We are comfortable here, and enjoy our lives, but it makes us crappy bloggers.

So, this blog is a recap, mostly pictures, of what we've been up to the past couple of months. This will catch us all up, and then, we promise, we'll update a little more regularly. Oh, and this update is not necessarily in chronological order. It's just a look into our lives of late.

We went into the city to see the Seodaemun Prison. This is one of the many prisons in Korea where the Japanese held Korean prisoners, dissidents, freedom fighters, and political adversaries. It is a horrific place. Terrible things were done here, and the prison is now a museum to commemorate the suffering and acts as a reminder so that no one ever forgets. It was at times a powerful place, but then there were strange things. Like the animatromic mannequins, like the pirates at the Pirates of the Caribean ride at Disney World, that tortured other animatromic mannequins, complete with recorded screaming. It was horrifying, but at the same time...almost funny. They were so over the top, with the painted blood and screams that...they didn't seem real. I don't know. I've thought about it a fair bit since and I still don't know what to think about it.

On our way home we stopped in to see Gyeongbokgung Palace. This anchient palace was the principal palace here in Seoul until 1592 when it was burnt down by invading Japanese. It was rebuilt in 1865. Most of it was demolished by the Japanese again, but now it is in the process of being rebuilt again. It is beutiful and sprawling. We didn't have near enough time to see it all, but it was impressive to just walk quickly through.

Not too long ago our friends Rob and Kat came into Seoul and we went for a walk along the Cheonggye Stream with them. Cheonggye Stream is interesting. It is a long stream that runs through several neighbourhoods of Seoul. It is nice, and new (it opened in 2005), but it is sterile and obviously man made. It was once a real stream, a polluted and dirty one that was lined with poorer neighbourhoods. It is now concrete and planted trees. It is pretty, but to build it some of the more interesting neighbourhoods in Seoul were knocked down to make a tourist attraction. I guess that's just progress, but I can't help but be disappointed to never have seen what was once there.

Erin, a while ago, decided that enough was enough and got her hair cut. She wasn't sure what to expect, hearing horror stories from some people about getting hair cuts here, but she was lucky. She found a guy who spoke english, and with some prompting and instruction was able to give her a cute haircut that she likes. I'm going to go to him to get my hair cut off soon, too. I'm really getting sick of it. I hope it turns out, but if it doesn't...whatever. It's just hair.

I think Erin may have blogged about hiking up the mountain with our friend Leanne before, but here are some more pictures of that. It's a nice break from the city to get up the mountain, even if you are on groomed trails with thousands of Koreans. They love their hiking, Koreans.

And the last group of pictures are from our few weeks of saying goodbye to our friends Lisa and Ryan. They finished their contracts and have left us for four months to travel Australia and Fiji and to go home to spend some time with family. We are looking forwards to having them back, but are happy for them to be taking such a fun trip. The pictures depict a few dinners, some nights out at the bar, some noraebong, and some time at the same park where we went bunjee jumping a few months ago. It was fun, but it was an exhausing few weeks.

And that's a few months worth of what we've been doing. Soon there will be a blog about our weekend jaunt to Japan, but i wanted that one to have an entry all it's own, so Hope you enjoyed it, sorry again for taking so long, and Talk To You Soon!

Jeffry

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