Seoul

They eat things here like live octopus

We miss Vietnam already. In Vietnam, we were warm, with temperatures in the 80's and 90's. Here we're freezing, with temperatures during the day in the 30's. When we arrived yesterday, it was pouring down rain. We took a bus from the airport to the Times Square area of Seoul, where our Courtyard Marriott Hotel is located. We have more luggage now than when we began, so manoevering around in the rain was very difficult. Augie waited under an overhang while I went around trying to figure out where our hotel was. I discovered that there is an underground shopping center under this entire area, so I led Augie down an escalator and we were able to drag our suitcases through a huge mall towards our hotel. A man came up and asked if he could help, and he carried one of our suitcases for us and led us to our hotel.

We quickly found that if you stand around with a lost puppy look on your face, someone will come up and ask if they can help.

In Vietnam, we were accustomed to paying $5 - $10 for an entire meal with drinks. Here, not even our breakfast is included and a drink is at least $5 and a single item on any menu is about $8. Luckily, there's a MacDonald's across the street from our hotel, so that's where we had lunch.

Since it was still raining after lunch, we decided to stay out of it as much as possible. So we took the subway to the downtown area and bought tickets for the hop on/hop off bus. It takes at least two hours to make the entire circuit. During the trip, Augie and I were both so exhausted from last night's red eye flight that we kept falling asleep during the ride in the nicely heated bus. So we got off after one circuit, bought tickets for tomorrow to tour the DMZ, and took the subway back to our hotel.