Seoul, I Hardly Knew Thee...

Seoul is freaking huge.

Or maybe the right worse is dense. But dense doesn't just cover it, because George Street in New Brunswick could be considered "dense," Seoul deserves the respect that should be allotted to a city that manages to be both dense and huge.

Seoul is freaking duge.

Take the most crowded street you can think of in Times Square. Then, in between every storefront on that street, cram in 3 more storefronts. Then pile three more on top of each, a couple down in the basement, and kick out the homeless guy in front and replace him with 5 streetcarts.

Now take that street and copy-and-paste it until you cover a land mass that's about four times the island of Manhattan, only breaking to throw in a street that's so crammed with vehicles that I saw two buses crash into each other yesterday in the middle of a four way intersection, and then keep going as if either one was just concerned with not having to clean up the side-view mirror that was now lying on the ground.

That's Seoul.

In a rush to get some laundry done and pick up some last miute things before our flight to Bangkok, so no time to put up pictures, but our walking tour/my semi-farewell tour to Seoul yesterday included the North Gate , a visit to an old-school outdoor market specializing in crafts, teas, and boiled snails and beetles, and a trip up to the top of Namsan Tower, a space-needle type tower located on a mountain that overlooks the entire city (did I mention it was kind of big?). We climbed a small portion of the mountain if only to re-enact the training montage from Rocky IV (DRAGO!!!), then caught the sunset up on top of the tower and watched the city pass over into nighttime.

And we're off.