Happy Sean's Birthday

a.k.a. Valentine's Day

I've always wanted an unforgetably romantic Valentine's Day. I've been creating them for myself on an doff for a couple years. This year I planned a most romantic trip through Seoul. I was going to meet Jen at her door with flowers and chocolates. I was going to take her to a palace with a 'couples garden' and then to Insadong for to the Flying Bird Cafe, something dinner-y, and then to Namsan Tower to watch the lights turn on over the city. Then bring her back to my place for a romantic dinner of western food from Costco...Not the way things turned out. Not one of those things happend but it was even better.

In the morning I went to the Moran Market to try and find some flowers (I waited until the last minute because she'd already gotten a really nice bouquet from her school and I was really really tired saturday evening). Now, the Market is open on days ending with 4 or 9. I went before noon and there was only a handful of stalls, now I don't know if it's because it was before noon (a lot of things open late) or because it was Lunar New Years, but there were no flowers. Not a one. I tried. I walked the collection of stalls and nada, what I did find was almost better. I found a solar powered perpetual motion bumblebee. Very cute.
I made it to her door with chocolates and a bee and it was wonderful. Then we met up with Veronica(who also got some chocolates) (quite the powerful triumverate the three of us!) and rode the subway coming up with cultural differences for our incredibly inapropriate drinking game.
We arrived in time to see the tail end of the changing of the guards at a nearby palace and then headed to Gwanghamun Plaza and all the amazingness there. We saw things like this:















Then we had lunch at KFC followed by a little more wandering around and headed to the next hot spot. A traditional Hanok village. Old style Korean houses. Good stuff. We went to see wrestling but did a good job of getting lost and saw a Popeyes. Popeyes is a fried chicken chain that Veronica has been looking for since she got here. Every time she's seen it it's been right after she's eaten. Even worse this time it was right after she'd eaten chicken! Oh no! Eventually we found the village but alas we could not find the wrestling. We meandered our way through the place but everything was closed down. Here's some of what we saw:








After that we went and enjoyed ourselves the movie Valentine's Day. A cutesy chick flick.