First Sightseeing in Seoul!

First thing we like to do in a new city is a hop-on-hop-off tour. We loved the ones in all the large European cities that we visited, so we ventured out to find on in Seoul. Luckily, there is one and it is relatively inexpensive, about $11.50/person. That gets you a full tour of the city, all the palaces, city gates, Namsan Tower (Seoul Tower) and goodness only knows what else we saw that day. We did the tour the third day of being in Seoul, and let me tell you, 14 hour time difference takes more than three days to recover from.

We hit the bus stop at about 10:00 am, not knowing exactly when it would begin. Seoul isn't really an early rising city, but we needed to get out early because the heat is killer! The buses give you a free set of disposable headphones to listen to the tour info. I think this tour had the native language, Japanese, Mandarin, English, German and a few others. It's always easy to find your language on the system.

We enjoyed the air conditioning of the bus for several stops. Boy Child doesn't always like sight seeing unless there is something in it for him. The first place that perked his interest was Namsan Tower. This tower was a beacon for us the night we came into Seoul. It is high on a hill and lights up with different colors. The bus climbs the hill and drops off passengers about 100 meters from the tower and shopping. One of the fun things about the Tower, is that a few years ago they started putting locks on it, like the bridge in Paris. (lots of things are borrowed in Korea) We didn't add to the fence, but posed for selfies and took some pictures of the smoggy view.

The Tower has some shopping, food stalls and sit-down restaurants in it. We sampled a few of the food stalls, found some things that were sweet enough for Boy Child and filling enough for us to get us through the rest of the day. Many of the foods were fried, but we were pretty sure we were sweating fat away.

We spent about 90 minutes up there, enjoying the view and people watching then hopped back on the bus. We were so happy to have seats and air conditioning.

The next spot we hopped off was the Changdeokgung Palace and Huwon. Husband and I could have spent hours there, even fighting off jet lag, mosquitoes and swamp ass. It was an amazing place, well perserved, taken care of and beautiful. Boy Child had a bad case of Jet Lag Crabbiness and we only spent an hour here. It is a place that we will venture back to, probably on a day we have a sitter or that Husband is off work and Boy Child still has school. If we are lucky enough to get some snow, this place will be amazing for photos.

After waiting 30 minutes for the bus to come for us, we hopped on and completed the tour circuit. There are many places that we didn't hop off for, but should have. Jet Lag Crabbiness hit us all on the bus and we called it a day. Honestly, the heat of the day was coming on, and that wasn't going to be good for any of us.