A fabulous extended weekend

Today is a holiday in Korea. It's called Foundation Day. It's supposed to celebrate the founding of the Gojoseon kingdom in 2333 BC, which is the "start" of Korea, I guess. I don't know too much about it, and it doesn't seem to be a terribly big deal. Most of the stores and such are still open. But it means a day off of work, so I'm not complaining!

With a weekend that now extends from Friday night to Wednesday, I've been enjoying some time to hang out with lots of friends. On Saturday, I spent some time with some girls from my new church. It was nice to get to know them a little bit more! Saturday night I taught a group of men how to bake chocolate cake, which was an experience in and of itself... Sunday was church stuff in the morning and hanging out with people in the afternoon. Sunday night, my friend Veronica came and stayed with me. She lives far up in the Northern part of Gyeonggi province, and it takes her about 2 hours to get into Seoul. She was in the city, and we decided to have a girl's night complete with an Audrey Hepburn movie.

These are some of the other things our girl's night included ;)

Today, my friend Stacy and I went to Children's Grand Park in Seoul. This park is amazing, and I can't wait to spend more time exploring it. Here's a little bit of what we saw. 

This figure is called "Daechi", and it is the official symbol of Seoul. These things are EVERYWHERE. However, there was a long line of them that had been decorated by different artists. It reminded me a lot of the flying pigs that are scattered around Cincinnati!

We also unexpectedly came across some pretty cool animals. This poor polar bear looked so ridiculously hot though. He was far away, and we couldn't be quite sure through the glass, but it almost looked like he was foaming at the mouth he was so hot. 

There was also a big seal and a baby seal that were trying to hang out away from the heat. It wasn't even very hot today. The high is somewhere in the mid 60's. 

There were some bulls with very large horns. They were right next to the zebras, rams, deer and kangaroos. Find the logic in that setup ;)

There were adorable bench carvings all over the park. Who wouldn't want to sit next to a giant snail with a brightly colored shell?

Near the monkeys, we came across this vending machine. We couldn't quite figure out what it was supposed to be selling, but for some reason, we were highly interested in the contents of this vending machine. Since whatever it was was only $1, we decided to buy one.

It turned out to be animal food. We bought one that was for monkeys and one that was for grazing animals. This was the monkey food.  

There were lots of monkeys kinda hanging out near the edges of their cages. Some of them were actually catching the food people threw at them. Stacy and I both tried a couple of times to get food to the monkeys, and we failed miserably. Then we went back to the grazing animals. We figured surely we could get some sheep to come eat! However, we failed there too. They wouldn't come anywhere near us. So we tried throwing the food over by where they were. They wanted nothing to do with it. We felt like complete failures at the whole feeding animals thing. Oh, well. 

Of course, this being Seoul, there were lots and lots of people hanging around. I actually ran into one of my former students, which was a bit strange. 

Other highlights of the park included the birds and "ferocious animal" sections of the zoo, a highly disturbing park with statues of naked people, a cool "barefoot park" with lots of different textures in the sidewalk to massage your feet, an amusement park, and cotton candy sellers! Any day that includes pure sugar that comes in cloud form HAS to be a good day, right? 

Speaking of pure sugar, we saw this little bunny at the park and thought that it looked like a marshmallow. 

Perhaps I'd had a bit too much sugar at this point, but we thought it would be a brilliant idea to try to look like a fluffy marshmallow bunny ourselves. The only problem with this is I look far more like a squashed marshmallow than a fluffy marshmallow.