Hooray for Korea

First pictures are up here http://picasaweb.google.com/heman8400/Korea

We've been to the old palace, the traditional market, and some of the shopping centers. We've spent about half our money, but we have about 90% of what we wanted to buy here. Andrea's gotten some clothes and some scarves, and a purse. Still looking for shoes though. Jeehyun's mom wants to take her to a nice store and buy her something, so she'll probably manage. I've gotten a set of 4 korean spoons and chopsticks, yes they're different. Spoons have very long handles and the chopsticks are flat, makes em hard to use. Real ones are silver but those cost 10x as much as the stainless steal ones. I'll let you guess which ones I bought. I got some matching celadon chopstick holders, as well as a very nice tea set. I bought a mug at starbucks covered in korean. Jeehyun mentioned she had to memorize it in school, but I'm not sure what it is at the moment. Andrea also got a miniture folding screen. Made of wood, like those giant screens people put up to divide a room, Randi has one and should know what I'm talking about. Its very small but very nice looking. We're going to go to at least 9-12 more places before we go, depending on how long we spend at each one. The subways here are very fast and are much cheaper than japan's trains. I'm not sure how they compare to the subways there, as I haven't taken any. We should be able to visit 2-3 places a day for the next 4 days. We'll see what happens. I wanted to visit the DMZ, but some of the tours are off limits to korean nationals (I would suspect it has something to do with the politcal implications of letting them into neutral locations that the north agreed not to let their citizens enter, but I can't find out for sure). We'll probably skip it though just because its expensive($50+ per person, depending on the tour) and really only interesting to me. We'll get to see some other cool things though, so it doesn't bother me. We're busy enjoying the food here, though we've only had one real korean meal. time for bed, we'll see what tomorrow brings!!!!

(SIDE NOTE: I found out 99.9% of sold celadon pottery is not real, but recreations using the originals as designs. They're made the same way, but the real ones cost thousands of dollars for even the smallest pieces. So they're "real," just not the originals.)