Fun, Fun, Fun

Hi all.

It's been way too long since our last post. Sorry about that. Deb and I have been busy with school. Homework every night! Classes ended this past Friday, so we have our evenings and days back again. Now we have to get out there and practice all that Korean we learned...

We are all doing well. The weather has been getting warmer (low 30's) but evenings have been cooler, until the last few days. We are learning how the air conditioner in our apartment works.

This weekend we wanted to have some fun. Especially for the girls. We've dragged them around sightseeing or shopping most weekends so thought let's just go play. As luck would have it the outdoors pools in the Hangang River Park system opened up this weekend. So we decided to go the nearest one, called Jamwon which is located just across river from our neighbourhood. It wasn't quite as easy to get to as we thought it might be. The subway lines run east-west around here, so we'd have to go out of our way and transfer to another line, then walk down to the river to the pool. So I figured let's just get a cab, go directly there and then subway home (with our new "command" of the Korean language, we could easily ask directions to a subway station, "odi-eh ji-ha-chol-yawk?"). No probs, except once I got the pronounciation of the place we wanted to go right, the cabbie couldn't figure out how to get into the place. Thats the one problem with this riverside park concept, expressways or train/subway tracks run along between the park and the city so access can be a bit tricky. We eventually found our way into the park and the pools. Good to see that the locals can be just as confused as us getting.

The pools were great! Especially on such a hot muggy day. There were 3 large pools: a wading pool, an adults only pool, and a family pool no deeper than 1m. The capacity of the place is listed at 3,000. I guess maybe only half that were there on Saturday. Bet it is packed in mid-summer! Here is the picture of our 2 happy swimmers. Nice caps!

Everyone has to wear bathing caps, but we hadn't brought any (except for swimmer Deb). Luckily for us they had some for sale at the pool. Not so luckily for us, it cost us $20 to outfit the girls and I in our new hats. And entrance to the pool for the family was $16. At least the umbrella rental was free. We all loved the swimming! It was well worth the money. I'm sure we'll do it again during those long hot summer days to come.

Today (Sunday) we had to do some grocery shopping, but promised Jin and Lili that we'd go to a playground first. We read on a website that there was a good playground in a park at the World Cup Stadium on the west side of the city. The stadium is also host to a large HomePlus department and grocery store. So we could go have some fun and get our shopping done. Bonus!

The stadium is very impressive. It was built for the World Cup of Soccer that Korea hosted in 2002. The parks around the stadium were either old gravel pits or landfills. They have done a remarkable job reclaiming these lands and turing them into useful recreational areas. The park is beautiful, and most importantly to our girls, they put in a fine playground. Here are some shots of the park and playground and a couple of happy campers.

After fun in the park and an ice cream bar/popsicle (which are pretty tasty and cheap here) we reluctantly headed up to the stadium and the World Cup Mall to brave the sunday afternoon shopping crowds. Here we are, before we got to the mall, still happy after our fun-filled afternoon.

The store was crazy! Folks here drive shopping carts just like they drive cars. What rules of the road?! And it was very, very busy. We decided to save our shopping trips for mid-week in the future.

Thats all for now. Have got a couple other posts in the works. Hope to get them to you in the next day or two.

Bye for now,

Derek, Deb, Jin and Lili