my collages

I finally got all of the pictures I wanted printed from our trip and hung on the wall.  Love my Korea art.

 This is my collage from our trip in 2009.

Slide show from Korea

It took awhile, but I finally decided I needed to make time to do this before it got away from me.

Seoul from a 10 Year Old's Perspective

Kaelin's old iPhone 3G (used as an iPod because we don't do cell phones for kids) bit the dust.  It never quite worked great since we got it in December and slowly lost apps as iTunes updated their software, but she dealt with it.  Last week it totally went dead and won't sync music or anything.  So we decided to take it with us yesterday since it has an Otterbox Defender and use it as a camera.  The camera on it does still work even if it doesn't zoom or anything.

I was cleaning off the memory and found pictures from Seoul that Kaelin had taken.  Kinda neat seeing her perspective of taking pictures.  I guess she found some of the things we bought fun because she seemed ot have spent a great deal of time photographing those items.

The seatbacks for Korean Air....AWESOME.....with USB ports.

Some goodies bought.

She even took pictures of her brothers playing pool at Fraser Place Central.

Randoms in and from our hotel room....the girls' room anyways.

This was probably on the bus on the way to Suwon and Yongin.

7-11 right in the alley of our hotel.  The kids liked to go there on their own for snacks and we could refill our T-money subway cards there.

This is the restaurant in the alley next to 7-11.  It was good, but kind of expensive.  The one on the other side of Lee Kwang Towers is less expensive and better.  The owners are so sweet.

Seoul Tower and our lock.  We're on the first tree to the left of the tower if you want to find it back.  She even got some of the graphics on the express elevator ride to the top.

My Prized Souvenirs from Seoul

We found this little shop in Insadong (not the one with the pottery that I broke and had to scramble to replace) and found beautiful art.  I could have bought a lot more, but could only afford to bring home (space and otherwise) and frame so much.  So, I settled on one simple, yet elegant painting that her husband did and one more traditional.  The simple one is usually one that she (the wife) would paint your name on, but I asked her to write family on it.  The other one is one material they would usually use for a scroll....the scroll would have probably been cheaper than having it special framed for it's odd size (food for thought for anyone going).  I put the cranes in my bedroom since I have no art in there and it's BEAUTIFUL!  The other one is in our entry and I'm going to print off some of the pictures from this trip (2009 trip photos are collaged on a different wall) in black and white in really simple box frames around the picture.  I can't wait to have time to do my photo editing and I already know some of the ones I will use.

Little Seoul Memories

There are little details from our trip that slowly fade in and out.  Things I probably didn't write down because I was too tired and there was too much to remember at the time.  But, now that we're home I have these little things I think of that just make me smile.  Like how our big boys drank Coke out of real glass bottles for the first time in Seoul.  You don't find that around here anymore and it made Brian and I smile when they brought them over.  Like how we almost didn't have enough luggage to get our stuff home.  I thought I was being so smart by packing every page very loosely and having 1 whole bag of things we'd be giving away.  When you bring pillows home, though, the room diminishes quickly.  Like when Cole and Chase shook hands for a picture at Trick Eye Museum. I have to smile every time I see that picture.  It's not something they do often.  I'm sure I'll think of other things as time passes more and more.  This memory of our trip to Seoul, Korea is just something that although it did cost a small fortune (to us), we will never regret experiencing this together.  I just put the photos in albums tonight and they've loved looking through them and they just smile the whole time.  I know this trip will always bring back memories we will treasure.  And just so we can always see the pictures, I found a photo frame (electronic) on clearance at Walmart and decided to buy it and only put on the pictures from this trip.  There were 498, so that's plenty for it to run through and it will always make me smile.  Notice how happy this trip made us....so much smiling.

Just walking around Seoul and Subways

The kids were so good at the subways.  They started to look like locals, checking out their iPods the whole way, just listening for their stop and Kaelin even fell asleep like the locals.

Walking around Seoul with Jane and Val.

 I was so hot and tired at this point, if we weren't going home the next day and I didn't have to worry about wet clothes, I would have definitely gotten in with these kids.