KelPhotoBlog

We're back!

We had a great time but boy is it good to be home!  Katherine has been rediscovering her toys and she seems happy to be home too.  Here are a few more shots from the trip, I'll put the whole set up soon.

Katherine checking out some Dol-harubang (they're the lava dudes found all over Jeju island)

Palace in Seoul:

Katherine meeting her relatives at the big Birthday party for Joo-ok in Seoul.  She's wearing her Hanbok!

Yes, she had a blast!

A view of North Korea:

Katherine found a creative way to take her nap:

The fence at the end of the bridge on the South Korean border where people leave messages and flags for North Koreans, very sad.

Palace in the south-eastern part of Korea:

Alex and Katherine with a crazy fish:

Katherine comparing her Buddha belly to Buddha's Buddha belly!

Joo-ok demonstrating her water pouring technique:

Starbucks Red Bean Frappucino!

Katherine communicating with a dinosaur above her:

Playing in the hotel room - two purses, one of my shoes and a mirror, it doesn't get much better!

Our last night in Seoul!  We were treated to a tasty Italian dinner and saw some of the relatives one last time.  Hopefully they'll be coming to visit us soon!

A little bit of bizarre

We're back in Seoul again after a few days in other places - we stayed in a different place each night for 6 nights in a row and we're happy to be back at the Sofitel.  Alex's cousin In-jun put us up at the Ritz-Carlton on Saturday night though and we can't really complain about that :)  I haven't had as much computer time as I'd hoped and this is the first time I've been able to use Sophia's laptop again with a working internet connection and here I am, updating the blog with some pics! 

Your standard street vendor fare (rather than hotdogs, etc. you just grab some sea creatures):

One of our favorite signs that we see at museums (lean off!):

Growing corn in the streets of Seoul (why not!?):

Special Ninja kit in our hotel:

I know I need to include some Katherine pics, here's one of her taking her nap while we ate lunch:

Some more creatures of the sea from my mother-in-law's Jeju Island birthday dinner:

Our two hand towels in our hotel in Jeju for all of our towelling needs for me, Alex and Katherine.  We don't speak enough Korean to ask for more (by 'we' I mean 'Alex') and this is standard for most hotels.  This is all you get!  I'm impressed, I know most Koreans are smaller than us Americans but I don't know, they must not get very wet or something!

Teddy bears with machine guns!

This is one of our favorites - special wine set...I honestly can't think of two things that belong together more than a bottle of Bordeaux and a bottle of Dove body wash.

We're always seeing people wearing t-shirts written in English that don't make any sense. At least not to us.

One last pic of Katherine riding a camel thing with Sophia.  Note that she has a super-duper-never-ever-ever-letting-go grip on the steering wheel.  It took a while to get her off the thing, she just loved it!

We're here

We made it!  The flight was lonnnng and getting used to the 13 hour time difference has been challenging but we're getting there.  I only have maybe 3 minutes to post so I'll just get straight to the pics.  Excuse the quality, these are from our point and shoot!  It's craziness here, one minute we're hanging out having a leisurely lunch, the next minute we're being rushed out the door!  Hopefully they'll wait while I post these...

The view from our awesome awesome Sofitel.

You know it's going to be interesting when the toilet is a panasonic:

The control panel on the toilet.  If you have a toddler, you know how they are with buttons.  Katherine has been having a blast.  We still don't know what these do though (it seems that they don't work when the toilet lid is closed). 

And we finally found some diapers and wipes, if you read the Korean it says 'magic belt huggies gold'.  Wow, magic belt!

The last time we went to Korea

we had one of those small world experiences.  We went in 2002 and were there at the same time as the World Cup, not that it has anything to do with my story, but it was fun being there at that time.  Anyway, we'd been in Korea for a while and had taken a day trip from Seoul to Gyeung-ju (sp?), a city with tons of historic sites from the Silla dynasty.  It was a 4 hour train ride each way.  We had a bit of a rushed trip there, our driver would drop us off at an amazing site and we'd have only 20 minutes there to run around and take a quick look before getting back in the car to go to the next site. 

At one of our quick stops we were walking around an old old palace and I heard someone behind me say 'Kelly Moffat.'  I paused in disbelief and heard it again 'Kelly Moffat'.  I turned around and there was John Heidelberg, one of our co-workers at the time.  He was there with another co-worker, Ian, and they were both there for a conference.  We actually knew we were all going to be in Korea at the same time but we didn't think there was any way we could figure out the logistics of meeting up in Seoul.  But here we all were, 4 hours away from Seoul at a stop where we weren't spending more than 20 minutes, what are the odds?!  It turned out that John and Ian were actually staying in this town for their conference, but still!  We thought it was pretty crazy and it was so exciting to see some friends from home.  We talked for a bit and caught up on our experiences in Korea, took some pics and parted ways. 

Here's the only photo I could find on my old computer of the four of us, it's a bad photo and a horrible scan but you get the idea!