Itinery change and super hospitality

Yesterday was another awesome day! Dae Gyu picked me up from the hotel and we headed off to Gyeonbok-Goong (old king's house). It was unreal! Absolutely huge, and such beautiful buildings! We watched a re-enactment of the changing of the guards, and checked out the museum. It was an awesome look at old Korean culture!

We then detoured from the itinery to visit the aquarium- also very impressive! Saw heaps of unreal fish and other sea creatures. Unfortunately, also got to see some sharks eating some of those cool fish :( It was a huge aquarium.

Our trip then took another detour. We were gonna go to the Korean Folk Village, but when we were still in Seoul, Dae Gyu's car started smoking! Doh! But it did create another fun experience for me - got to ride thru Seoul in a tow truck! Hope his car doesn't cost too much to fix! So he rented a car, and, as we were out of time, we went straight to his mum's house in Yoe-Joo.

Talk about hospitality!! She is a beautiful woman, who greeted me with a huge warm hug like I was a good friend she hadn't seen in ages! And then we sat down to a home-cooked Korean banquet!! She had made heaps of different foods for me to try, and we sat around the table eating Korean style, which is everybody eating straight from the dishes in the middle. There were 3 kinds of kimchi, 3 kinds of soup, 2 famous beef dishes, 2 fish things (which I enjoyed cuz they were cooked!), some green leafy vegie things, and some lettuce-y stuff that you could eat alone or with bean sauce and some of the beef stuff (I'll have to get Dae Gyu to write down the names!) and of course rice. It was SO yummy!

I was commenting on how much I loved the cutlery - silver chopsticks with a turtle carving and a matching spoon - and so she wrapped up a set and gave it to me!!! I was like, no way, Dae Gyu tell her she can't give me part of her cutlery set!, but he just laughed! LOL! How sweet is she!

After dinner I had a shower, and we sat down in the living area in her room for desert. Quite yummy, and yep, made of rice! What an unreal experience!