Beautiful flowers on the walk to the Bongeunsa Buddhist Temple in Seoul
Kalia and Shayla at the Buddhist Temple. The architecture was amazing.
Beautiful lilypads and ponds scattered throughout the temple grounds. It was very peaceful and serene, right in the middle of huge skyscrapers and big-city busyness.
I think a miniature of this elephant would like nice on my front porch :)
The paper lanterns were EVERYWHERE, and so beautiful!
They had shoe-cubbies outside the temples, and after removing our shoes we could enter and sit inside the temple. People were praying on red rectangular prayer mats. They would stand with their hands together in prayer, and then bow low to the ground, then kneel on their mat, and then repeat. Kalia was fascinated watching them, and then started copying them. I think Shayla has the footage of her praying just like the Buddhists. I'll have to add that here...it was so cute!
This shows how this temple is in the heart of Seoul, with skyscrapers everywhere.
Such a blending of the old and the new.
This monk was singing and playing a drum as he prayed.
Miya--someone had just given her a chocolate treat (can you tell?) Koreans love children, and they are so kind, always trying to give the kids a treat or just pet them on the head and tell them they are cute :)
This statue was huge!
Kalia is really good at posing for photos :)
Leaving the temple--across the street was the Coex Mall.
We went there to find some lunch...
Ordering at the mall was a feat! We finally figured out that they had one main cash register where you ordered all of your food for the whole food court. They gave us a different pager for each restaurant, and then when the pager went off we had to go pick up our food from the right restaurant. Most of it was not written in English, so we were trying to match Korean characters from our receipt with the right restaurant sign. We were so proud of ourselves when we finally had retrieved all of our food! Pictured above is Shayla, Ty and Kalia eating seaweed soup, some tofu and radish sides, and Bibimbap (I think...)
Miya and Garrett enjoying some potato dumplings. The rest of the food we ate before I could take pictures. We were hungry.
Taking the subway back home...
speaking of which, when we had been in the country only a few days I took the kids out on a subway adventure to visit an outdoor Korean market. We made it there just fine, but coming back it was super crowded. I was so scared we were going to be separated somehow, so i was carrying Kalia, and herding the smaller kids in front of me, with Ty and Shayla behind me. Well, Ty was being a gentleman, and offered to let someone on the subway before him, and then a bunch of people pushed past him, and the doors closed before he could get on the subway. I tried not to panic, Ty and I made eye contact through the closed doors as the train pulled away. He mouthed that he would meet us at the next stop, and I mouthed back that we would wait there. We then proceeded to pray our hearts out that we would be reunited somehow. Seoul is so huge and busy (25 million people), I was so scared we wouldn't be able to find each other. After waiting at the next stop for the longest 10 minutes of my life, the subway pulled up, and Ty got off. Oh the joy!!
We now have an emergency plan if we get separated again. Luckily it was Ty I lost, and not one of the little ones.
We went whitewater rafting on the Song River (I think that was the name). It was a 2 1/2 hour drive east of Seoul. Such a beautiful river and scenery. The river was kind of low, so there were a lot of rocks to maneuver around. Luckily we each had a foot strap on the bottom of the raft, that we kept our feet in, or there were a few times that we would have been thrown from the raft. Actually, our guide WAS thrown from the raft once. That was super scary as we tried to navigate the river to safely get him back in the boat. Luckily he was okay, and as he climbed back in the boat he reminded us to keep our feet in the foot strap :)
I wish i had pictures of the river, but we didn't have our waterproof camera. It's somewhere on our boat shipment on the way here. Next time...
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