Seoul Tower

Greetings readers!  My, my, it has been quite a while.  There is much to tell and little time before my eyes start to droop and I find myself asleep with my face on the keys.

A few weekends ago, my friends, Amber, Tiya, Rachel and I decided to visit the famous Seoul Tower.  Seoul Tower, also known as Namsan Tower, is a tall communications construction on top of a mountain in the middle of Seoul.  It stands a little over 2,000 feet above sea level and gives a spectacular view of the city at night.  The pollution is too thick to enjoy anything during the day, a sad reality, but the view at night is breathtaking.  We met up at a restaurant at the base of the mountain and had some delicious bulgogi and bibimbap.  Then, we caught a cab to take us up the mountain and apparently we were pretty lucky because the taxi driver told Tiya that cabs were not allowed to take people up the mountain unless they were foreigners.  So, for once I found myself more useful than a Korean.  The road up the mountain winds around it a few times and we finally got all the way up.  

One pretty interesting tradition that is observed at Namsan was nauseatingly adorable.  Let me explain.  Couples hike the mountain together with a padlock.  There is a fence at the top that guards one of the observation decks and once they make the hike they put the padlock on the fence together.  The hike symbolizes the long journey and the padlock is the permanence of the relationship.  There are thousands and thousands of these locks on this fence.  I say "nauseatingly adorable" because this was right before Valentine's Day and I was, yes shocking, without a Valentine.  But, nonetheless, the fence was quite a sight to see.  Literally, thousands of locks all with love notes scratched on them were on this fence with an amazing view of the lights of Seoul just beyond them. Pretty amazing.

There was also a laser show, but it wasn't as cool as the fence.