Seoul Tower

Our first view. Hiked to the top unwillingly!

Partial view of Seoul. Ansan is behind the mountain.

  The millions of steps!

At the very top of the mountain!!

We went to Seoul today to go do some tourist stuff. Our destination was to go to Namsan Park to see the botanical garden and the mini zoo. Well, we saw neither. :) Instead, we found ourselves walking up a steep hill trying to find Namsan Park. When we saw the entrance to the Children's park, we figured that wasn't it, and kept walking....further up the steep hill. We were sweating so bad, it was ridiculous! It was very obvious we haven't lived in Korea long. When the Namsan Public Library came to view, we decided to go that direction to see what we could see. We found more stairs to climb. :( We kept on pushing, hoping to find something cool to see. We saw more statues, men playing checkers, rocks with Chinese writing, and another building. We headed back to the road to try to discover more things. We came upon a wannabe waterfall, but it was just run-off coming down a fancy architectural display. :) I wanted to take a picture, but as Jeremy was walking towards a sign, a Korean man asked us, IN ENGLISH, if we were going up the mountain. I was like, "uh...", and Jeremy was all for it. The Korean pretty much led the way making us follow him. Found out he had lived in California for some time (explains the English). He told us it would take 30 minutes to get to the top. I thought I was going to die! It was very pretty though! Certainly beat taking the cable car up, despite the millions of steps and me wearing flip-flops. We finally made it and it was pretty neat seeing the sights from the top. We head back down, which turned out to be almost just as hard. We even passed a pregnant woman going up! Crazy! We head back to Seoul Station to go home dripping wet with sweat, literally. Good thing the subway ride was only just about an hour long. I'm sure we smelled. :) Oh well, it was fun!