Inchon

Our last full day in Seoul. We took a city tour to see the Blue House, where the President lives. After a slight stop when the police caught one of our group taking a photo out the window of the van (they almost confiscated his camera), we headed to the Kyongbokkung Palace. It was built by the first Yi dynasty king and was the royal residence for 200 years. Before 1592, there were 500 buildings on the grounds. The Japanese destroyed most of them. But, in 1872, they had restored about 200 of them. But the Japanese returned, the occupation of 1920-1945) and the Korean War resulted in another complete destruction. Only 10 buildings survived. On the grounds was the National Folk Museum.

From there, we headed to Chogyesa temple, the only major Buddhist temple in Seoul. The last stop was a mandatory shopping experience- so we bolted.
Then we hopped a train to Inchon, the site of the famous Douglas Macarthur landing in the Korean War.
We dragged up a huge hill in the heat and humidity to find the statue of General Macarthur in the Chayu Park. After searching and asking everyone we could find, we finally stumbled on it ourselves. Communication in Asia is difficult if not impossible.

We grabbed a cab to Yonan Pier, the “raw fish restaurant place”. Every menu was in Chinese with no pictures and even with our magic picture book, we couldn’t get across the concept of grilled fish.

So, we grabbed another cab to Wolmido. Wolmido is a Jersey-esque re-do of the Inchon Landing site. Rows of restaurants with the same menus (either bad American food or unintelligible Chinese fish menus), party boats blaring rap music taking Koreans out for harbor cruises, and families strolling the waterfront.
We had fish- fried, not grilled, at a nice restaurant overlooking the harbor. All through dinner we watched this young Korean couple fondling their cell phones, talking about their cell phones or stroking each other with the antennas of their cell phones. The have an entire generation who are mesmerized by their cellular telephones.
We headed back to the train/subway and 95 cents later, we were back in our hotel.