Our first entry finally!

We left for our big adventure to Asia and New Zealand on September 4th. It feels like we've been gone much longer than a week already, with all that we've done so far!

I'm going to have to catch up briefly in this one entry for all that we've done in the past week.Our first stop was San Francisco, where we stayed overnight, which was good to break up the flights. Wehuns surprised me with a nice hotel instead of a hostel for our first night, so that was a nice treat! It was a beautiful day, and we had a great time wandering around the city, riding the cable car, and meeting up with Dave and Anna for the afternoon.

The next day we had our first long flight out to Seoul. We flew with Singapore airlines, which was an awesome experience, besides when I was really sick from all the turbulence :( Once we arrived in Seoul we found our hostel and then set out for some dinner at a Korean BBQ place, which was quite a funny experience since no one there spoke any English. They have a pit of coals in the centre of the table, covered with a grill where you barbecue the meat yourself. They bring you a bunch of condiments and lettuce and other leaves, which we had no idea what to do with. They must have found it hilarious to see Wehuns eating some raw garlic and chowing down on some green onions straight up. Finally one of the waiters came along to gesture to us what to do. People speak very little English in general in Korea, so we had an interesting time food-wise the rest of our time there and so it helped going to places with the pictures and motioning to what looked good.

The next day we went to an ancient palace called Changdeokgung, which was interesting to see. Afterwards we met up with Wehuns' friend J. Dan who has been living in Seoul for the past 2 years, so it was nice to see him and to get the inside scoop on Korean culture and so on.
The following day we did tons of walking, in fact we happened to come across a walking festival randomly as we were going along at the World cup stadium, so we stayed and watched the festivities for a little bit! It was quite entertaining, with a marching band, confetti and cannons! Afterwards we met up with our friend Matt who has been teaching English outside of Seoul. He took us on a little tour of parts of Seoul, especially to check out all the good food to try, so it was great! My favourite part was seeing the stream called Chonggye that runs through the downtown core. It's really beautiful at night with all the lights illuminating it, and it's a really popular hang-out spot for locals.

The next day we headed out from Seoul by bullet train to Busan, where we stayed overnight. Busan is an industrial city on the southern coast, as that's where our boat for Japan departed from. Our highlight of our time there was going to the spa, or traditional Korean bath house. I was a little hesitant at first, seeing as you go totally naked, and also being the only non-local (and really standing out!), but in the end it was really great! There's an area that's separate for men and women where there's all kinds of baths...extremely hot ones (45 deg) to ice cold ones, jasmine, blueberry, grape and apple, whirlpools and saunas. There's also a common area which is co-ed, and they give you a little suit to wear for that area. In that area there's lots more to do - steam rooms, cold room, hyperoxygenated room, an aromatherapy room to name a few. It was a great experience and not too pricey, and we left feeling really relaxed, sleepy and feeling very clean!

The next day (yesterday) we left Korea on the hydrofoil boat over to Japan. We took the bullet train right away to Hiroshima, where we did a super quick tour of the atomic bomb museum in half an hour before it closed. It was very sad to see the horror and devastation that people had to go through. We then wandered around the peace memorial park which is very nice. After dinner we found a massive arcade...everything is so advanced here in terms of technology! We played a couple of games against each other then called it a night.

Today we took a ferry over to the island of Miyajima. It's a really nice little island surrounded by beautiful green hills, with tame deer wandering around all over the place! The main sight there is the famous torii, which is the Shinto shrine gate, which you've probably seen pictures of before.

We did a hike up the mountain, which was fun but tiring as it was very hot today. There were stunning views of the surrounding islands at the top, and at the top there is some temples with one that has a flame that has been said to be kept burning for the past 1200 years! When we got back to Hiroshima we had some sushi for dinner, and it was my first time trying actual fish sushi instead of just the california rolls, and I was pleasantly surprised, it was really good!
Ok, that's it for now! I realize that I was not so brief after all!