Happy Birthday Buddha!

This weekend I visited one of the local Buddhist Temples with my new friend Catherine. Yes, she is the one I've been out with a few times now. Anyway, you can see in the slideshow that the temple looks very festive. This is all for the big guy's birthday, which is a holiday next saturday, May 2. If you see all the paper lanterns hanging with writing hanging from them on ribbons, those are peoples names and wishes.

So last weekend my new best friends (don't worry, the ones back home aren't being replaced, just think of it as proxy) took a trip to Seoul, the capital of South Korea. Friday night we took the KTX bullet train from Busan to Seoul. The only problem was we took a 9pm train and apparently it was the silent sleeping train. We were enjoying ourselves, talking, but not too loud, and playing cards. Well, the train workers came by like 6 times to tell us to be quiet and wouldn't even let us play cards. But, we eventually got there just before midnight and went out to explore the city a little before crashing at our hostel.

Saturday we took a subway and then a bus to go play paintball with a bunch of other foreigners. (This was the main reason we came up.) It was pretty fun, they had a nice course laid out. That night we went to Itaewon, which is like the big foreigner area of Seoul. It was so weird because there were so many waegooks (foreigners). It didn't even seem like we were in Korea. We got a nice steak dinner though at a place called Hollywood Bar & Grill. Then we were exploring the area and walked up the wrong road which was where the hookers were out on corners. Female and Shemale variety.

The next day we visited a really cool palace called Changgyeonggung Palace. Supposively there was a zoo there when the Japanese controlled the area. But it was huge and very cool! After that we hit Seoul Tower. There were cable cars that took you to the top where there was a space needle-looking tower, but that cost extra so we stayed where we were. Despite the smog there were still some great views. By this time we had to leave to catch our train home. Oh and we met a French guy at our hostel who is going to school in Japan but was on vacation in Korea. He hung out with us all weekend. Nice guy!