Days 10 and 11: New Years in Seoul!

We arrived in Seoul early afternoon to spend our last full day in Korea with Ryan, but I quickly found out that my international cell phone plan was no longer working. Luckily, there is free WiFi almost everywhere in the city, so we were able to park at a coffee shop to get in touch with Ryan. After a few failed attempts, we finally found each other and grabbed some chicken, rice and egg for lunch.

We checked into our hotel near Namdemun market, a huge outdoor and indoor market selling everything from souvenirs, to clothes, to groceries, to fresh street food. It was a little overwhelming, but we managed to do some browsing and souvenir shopping.

Then we head back over to Hongdae to visit The Vault, a jewel-heist themed escaped room. My cousin, Kim's sister, gave us admission tickets as a Christmas gift and we were excited to try it out. We were a little worried that language might be a barrier, but all the clues were either numbers or in both Korean and English.

It was a lot of fun, but also pretty frustrating. There were three rooms where we had to pull paintings off the walls, unlock padlocks, and climb through lasers. We weren't able to finish after the full hour, and they didn't give us the solution at the end. Guess I may have to plan another trip to Seoul to finish...

We drowned our sorrows of failing with some soju, and an awesome barbeque dinner. You pick out what type of meat you want and they bring it to you raw, then you cook over a grill and finish off with a selection of seasonings and dipping sauces.

We said goodbyes to Ryan before he headed back to base for the night. Kim and I were planning on watching the sunrise in the morning, so had a very low-key New Year's Eve in the hotel room. We bought these two New Year Cakes. I'm not sure what the tradition is, but every coffee shop and bakery sold the cutest Christmas and New Year's cakes, and we saw tons of people carrying the boxes on the metro.

Bright and early, we head over to Haneul Park near the World Cup stadium to watch the sunrise. Apparently watching the first sunrise of the new year is a big tradition in Korea. It could be difficult depending on how crazy your night before was, but is a really cool idea I want to keep up in years to come.

We weren't sure where exactly where to go, so just used our trusted methods of following the crowds and hoping we ended up somewhere cool. Haneul Park overlooked the city and was packed. We climbed up a ton of stairs and staked out a spot among the crowd.

The sunrise was a little less than spectacular with the smog and cloud cover over the city.

We tried to head back to the subway, but couldn't make it down with all of the crowds.

But we did finally see the sun come out from behind the clouds while we were waiting. Complete with a chorus of "oooooh" from the crowd.

We grabbed free breakfast at the hotel - purple sweet potatoes, boiled eggs, and rice porridge.

Then it was off to the airport for 18 hours of flights to get home. We overestimated our public transportation abilities, and misread a bus line. We quickly readjusted and took the metro, but cut our flight extremely close. There was some running through the airport, but we made it in time! Here's the view over Japan on our first flight.

We finally made it to Dulles and arrived only 2 hours after we left! It's nice when the time change is on your side :)

The two weeks passed incredibly quickly - it seems like we were just arriving! I had the best time. It's so fun to get out of your comfort zone and we did that a lot on this trip - from eating incredibly spicy foods for every meal, to taking our shoes off every time we walked in a room, to trying to communicate with taxi drivers and waiters. I also really enjoy spending time in a place I really didn't know anything about before visiting. But the best part was getting to spend time with my cousin, and of course spending the holidays with a brother I don't get to see very often.