Goodbye Cherry Blossoms!

Cherry blossom season has ended... :(

The petals have fallen and the trees are now a beautiful bright green.  We were warned that cherry blossoms only last for a week (or two at most).  Unfortunately, a random weekend of rain happened to speed up the process.  Although the season was short lived, I managed to take tons of photos.  Enjoy the beauty of Korea's spring~

White cherry blossoms are amazingly beautiful. For some random reason, I always feel like I'm in black and white film when I see the white blossoms.  They were completely breathtaking, but I have to admit that I adore the pink blossoms!

 

Thankfully I went on a walk with some friends and snapped some good shots before the rain came.  :)  Otherwise, I would have been so sad!

I also decided to press some cherry blossoms in wax paper.  Hopefully those turn out okay... if they don't, at least I have these photos to look at and remember how beautiful Korea is in the springtime!

Namsan Tower: Love Locks!

This past weekend was amazing. Friday night was a relaxing one in the saunas at the 찜질방.  Saturday was a fun-filled day at the park watching our friends bungee jump and watching Hunger Games at night. But the best part of the weekend was on Sunday!  We went to Yeouido for the Cherry Blossom Festival, but there were no cherry blossoms.  So we went shopping at Times Square and Gangnam before meeting up with some friends who wanted to go to Namsan Tower!  If you didn't know, that was #1 on my To Do List for Korea.  :)  So we hiked up to see this beautiful view!

{Somewhere in that general area is Bundang!}

Then, of course, we had to see the Locks of Love/Love Locks!  Couples bring padlocks with their names or a message on it and secure them on Namsan Tower.  It is amazing how many love locks are here.  It's so beautiful.

Of course, I went trigger happy when we came here.  It took a couple minutes for me to come back to the real world and realize that we needed our own locks!  So Daniel and I bought our lock, wrote a message to each other on it and secured it on the tower.

{Securing the lock!}

 {DK & CM 11.06.07 (our anniversary date)}

 After we watched the sunset, we headed back down the mountain... but not before getting a couple night shots.  :)

{N Seoul Tower}

{The breathtaking view of the city at night.}

I am so glad that we got to go up Mt. Namsan to N Seoul Tower so early in our trip. Even though it was sort of a spur of the moment thing and we didn't expect the hike to be as tiring, seeing the view of the city and experiencing the love locks was amazing. :)

Spring is here!

This week, it has started to warm up and the cherry blossoms are starting to bloom!

 The theme for today’s class was “Fireworks”!

So of course this meant that I had to connect it to Disney! I showed them videos of Disneyland’s shows. I tried to show them the Believe fireworks show, but they didn’t know a lot of the songs. So I switched it to the ending of Fantasmic! where Mickey is dancing and shooting fireworks from his fingers because they all know and love Mickey Mouse!  Aaaaand on break, I played for them and they were in complete awe.  It made me miss Disneyland and home, but I had a lot of fun sharing the videos with the kids.  :)

(Photo source: Disney Traveller)

Yuldong Park.

It was our friend's birthday last week, so on Saturday we tried to go bungee jumping!  Well... not me (nor Daniel)... I'm terrified of heights. But I went to cheer people on and take photos.  Unfortunately, the whole day was booked.  Everyone was pretty bummed about not being able to jump or not being able to cheer from the bottom.  However, it was such a beautiful day and we were at a huge, gorgeous park so we decided to walk around! 

They had statues all over the park!  It was amazing.

They had this maze called "Book Theme Park." There were interesting things etched into all of the walls.  My personal favorite was the one with AstroBoy and Dooly!  It was really fun to walk through.  Afterwards, we headed towards an old house. We weren't allowed to go inside, but we could walk up these uneven stairs around it. There was a graveyard on the side, which was both strange, but kind of cool.

Needless to say, I think we made the most of an unfortunate situation.  Plus, it was just nice to be outside and breathing fresh air. Spring is almost here, so it's been slowly warming up.  The weather was so nice! I can't wait for it to be warmer here. We will be going back to Yuldong Park this Saturday for the bungee jumping, but this time we will be prepared with food, games, frisbees and kites.  :P

Aliens.

Daniel and I are officially registered aliens of Korea. After two trips to the Seoul Immigration Office (>1 hr to get there, waited ~3 hours both times), we finally got our cards!

Yay for awkward mug shots! :P