"Where in the World"

Seoul Tower

This weekend we were due to visit a small town south of us with Emily and a few of her friends to do some cave walking. This didn't come about as Jenna was very sick all of Friday and when she asked the director to go home he was very unhappy as she had previously taken half a day sick that week as she had been suffering from a cold. To the point where he said he had to think of his school and that if she was sick again he'd have to seriously consider her position. The Koreans dont take sick days you either have to be at work or you have to be in the hospital. Many of the teachers and students come to school with colds and flu's which is silly because they just make everyone else sick and dont give themselves anytime to get better. I have little kids coughing all over me all the time yuk!

So saturday morning we realise that Jenna cant make it and i had no way of contacting emily once i got there on my own so we decided we'd take the morning easy and then head into to Seoul to do the tower and my first real bit of doing the tourist bit. Now the plan was that this would be nice an easy seeing as there was a cable car. As you can probably tell this story did not go as well as we had hoped. The subway map told us once we came out of the subway to walk for 10 min and we'd find the cable dock. So we walked and couldn't see the cable dock but found some stairs we thought led up to it as we could see the tower in the distance. We came to a road at the top and there was loads of people around so we thought they were ones coming down from it. After we'd been walking for about 45min and realising that the tower seemed to be getting further and futher away, we tried to work out where we were. We didn't want to turn around incase we were close but we didn't know if we were going in the right direction, we decided to press on. After we'd been walking for over an hour we decided we were really lost and found a man selling some food on the side of the road (now when i mean road there were no cars just people using it to keep fit.) We asked him and he pointed to yet more stairs shouting "tower, tower." Jenna was feeling pretty rough by now but we figured we'd come this far. We reached the top and paid for our ticket and went up to the observitory. It was very beatuiful because it was so dark you could see the whole city and beyond lit up beneth us. We could even see the road we had walked up which turned out to be about 3,000m at least we would have burnt off the Macdonalds we had, had earlier. There were the directions of all the countries on the top of each window so naturally we had to have our picture taken on the one facing London.

I managed to pick up a postcard whilst I was there that had all the tallest towers in the world on it and what made Jenna and I laugh was that the smallest one on the list was Blackpool Tower, dont think that the Koreans would find that very impressive, but bought it for novelty value.  

• Posted by k_millington on 13/12/2006.
• k_millington's site