We finally went to Seoul!

Last Saturday we went to Seoul as tourists.  Some people who visit South Korea never even leave Seoul, but we had been here over a year and have barely seen anything of the world's second biggest metropolitan area (Wikipedia).  It worked out really well.  I looked online and the top things to do in Seoul were things like "try the food" and "look at traditional dress."  All that we had left to do was visit historic palaces and visit our friend Sunny who had recently moved to Seoul for school (actually, this was more of a visit Sunny first and see historic stuff on the side). 
We went to the famous palace in Seoul, Gyeongbok Palace.  This was the last palace the king and queen of Korea ever lived in.

See all the pretty umbrellas?  It was pouring rain.  This turned out to be good, there were less people to wait behind to see the thrones.  We also got some free middle school tour guides to tell us about the palace.

The two girls on the ends were our tour guides, and the girl in the middle is our friend Sunny.

It was a really neat place.  We learned that the queen wasn't allowed to leave the inner palace, and there was a stream that commoners weren't allowed past into the outer palace.  They also had palace guards like they do at Buckingham palace, except their facial hair was painted on.

We then went to a historical area that had a lot of old restored buildings.  It was a nice place, full of winding roads and nice buildings.  They were all privately owned, we though it would be a nice place to live.

So, Seoul was a really nice place to visit.  They have 5 palaces in Seoul and we only got to see one.  We may have to go back and visit Sunny again.

Korean Roadkill

You can tell a lot about an area by what kind of roadkill it has.  Riley and I have been exploring the country roads around Daejeon lately on our bicycles.  In the city I have only seen a few mice and bird roadkill (the tiny dogs here seem well behaved and don't run out into the street much), but in the country I was shocked by the clean roads.  There were no funny smells along the way.  In the first trip, for the first part the biggest roadkills I saw were praying mantises.  After a while I finally saw a small snake squished in the road, but there wasn't anything big at all.  They don't have possums or armadillo-type animals, so that means less roadkill.  Their larger mammals (deer and racoon dogs) aren't very abundant, so I suppose they don't get hit much. 
On this latest trip I saw another small snake squished (it was really pretty, I think it is called a flower snake), but I also saw the most exciting roadkill yet!  I saw a very flat weasel!  I didn't even know they had weasels in Korea! 
Since I have seen little roadkill in Korea, I don't think there is abundant wildlife, but at least there are snakes and weasels!

Korean Red Pine

The Korean Red Pine is Korea's favorite tree.  If you see Asian pictures with the mountains and twisted pine trees, those are usually red pine.  I picked up a book about them recently and discovered something about the Korean ideal of forests that was completely different that what I had ever experienced in America.  For those of you who are not familiar with forestry, I will start at the basics.  The trees that make up a forest can tell you how long the forest has been there.  Fast growing species indicate a young forest, while slow growing species mean its been there a long time.  This is why most of the wood we use is pine, pine grows very quickly. 
I bring this up because in Korea, the red pine forests started appearing around areas of agriculture and towns.   The forests were logged for buildings and then continuously picked over for wood and cleared for farmland.  Pines were the trees that came back quickly and could be maintained to provide constant wood supply.  They became the symbol for civilization in Korea.
Since Korea stopped burning wood so much, the forests are turning back into the slow growing tree species and the red pine forests are starting to disappear.
The most interesting part of this story was the final chapter of the book I read.  It was all about how if we don't do something soon, all the red pine forests will disappear.  The Korean red pine forest is the ideal forest for Korea.  I was always taught that this natural progression to a climax forest dominated by hardwoods was inevitable (without regular fire anyway), and natural.  Instead of wanting to go back to the pre-people era of Korea, they want to go back to the wood-burning era of Korea.  The idea of how forested Korea should look is different than I am used to.  Its another interesting culture difference.