Friday in Seoul

Today we made the rounds and saw everything we wanted to see in the city. We walked a million miles and rode every subway line. When we got back to our hotel this evening, the mall next door was hosting the premier of Tom Cruise's new Mission Impossible flick. So we got in on the action and snapped a few pics of him. He spent a lot of time talking to people and signing autographs. A lot of ooohing and aaahhhing was going on. No one swooned and no paramedics were needed, but it was touch and go. Apparently there's a fan base here.

Christmas decorations are already up all over the city. Since there's a little bit o'Irish in each of us, the holidays sometimes get confused in the translation.

We toured the Deoksu Palace. The biggest and most famous palace, the Changdeokgung Palace, we didn't get to see because they only give guided tours and the English tour was not until 2:30 and we were there at 1:00. It was too cold to stand around and wait, and there was too much to see. So we moved on.

McDonald's delivers!

We toured the Namdeaemum Market, street after street of everything you can think of. They say if you can't find it here, it probably doesn't exist. We tried lots of interesting street foods.

We also toured the Namsangol Hanok Village, where we saw how the Korean people lived. We wanted to hang around downtown and take the night bus tour, but it doesn't start until 8 pm, and we were finished with our touring at 5:30. After all the street food, we weren't hungry enough to go hang out at a restaurant for 2 1/2 hours, so we headed back to our hotel. Augie discovered a really cool area near our hotel last night, so we may go out again later.

Tomorrow we plan to take a long train ride to the Sawon Fortress and another Korean Folk Village.