Seoul Part 3

So our second day in Seoul, we met up with Marc and Kyle.  They were high school friends with Laura and became my friends during college.  They both moved to Korea shortly after our wedding so they are coming up on their 10 year anniversary of moving to Korea.  We had hoped to meet up with their wifes and kids, but with both of us being under the weather and Marc's wife being sick as well it probably wasn't the best of ideas.

We started off the day with some light walking (which was needed after the gluttonous feast from the prior day) and visited some historic areas as they gave us the lay of the land directly around our hotel.

 We stopped by the main Buddhist temple as they were getting ready for Buddha's birthday by hanging lanterns up.

 They were also dying scarves to wear around your neck to prevent bad spirits from entering your soul.  They may have been just making that part up, but it sounded believable enough.

 The main entrance to the temple.

 Marc and Kyle then took us to a restaurant to have Marc's favorite Korean meal.

He told us 10 times what it was but I forgot it.  Let's just call it "Marc's Korean Surprise".  It was chicken, spices, rice cakes (not the cardboard stuff you eat here, but compressed rice), rice noodles, and veggies all cooked in a pan in front of you.

 The next stop was a Korean baseball game to drink a few beers and catch up.

 The only way to describe baseball in Korea is if you took baseball and added European soccer fans.  They sang and chanted the entire game even as they were getting destroyed.

 After the baseball game, Kyle had the idea to hit up a karaoke bar called a no-rae-bong in the Gangam district.

 So we had a few more beers and sang some songs.  This was the most acceptable picture, because it takes a lot of practice to make a good face while singing.  The cool thing about these places is when you sing into the microphone it will auto-tune you so you don't sound terrible.  However, when you walk out of the room, you don't hear the sound coming out of the speakers, you only hear the real singing.  So when I stepped out to the bathroom and came back, it sounded like someone was shouting into a bag of angry cats.

 But it was still an awesome time.  A must do experience in Seoul.

 We tried to do the dance on the stage, but our profiles didn't really show up in the light.  Trust me...we did it.