The Garden of Morning Calm

For "Children's Day" (May 5th), I went with two of my coworkers, English names Ritta and Grace, and my neighborhood friend, Becky to a beautiful garden area outside of Seoul. The Garden of Morning Calm is a 330,000 sq meter space filled with various gardens and greenery (a stark contrast to the gray, urban jungles of Seoul and Incheon). According to the web site, Professor Han San-Kyung conceptualized the garden and it now has 20 themes and receives upwards of 600,000 visitors each year. It's open year-round and it's a wonderful escape from the city, although, the day we went it was packed, so the hustle and bustle of people everywhere was still present. Read about it on the Official Site of Korea Tourism or in this 2007 Korea Times article.

The trip to and from the Garden was quite the adventure! 

We took Subway Line 1 almost to Cheongryangri Station, then got a train to Cheongpyeongri Station. Grace prepared some incredible food for the train ride. My favorite:

These are a traditionally Japanese dish, fried tofu with sushi rice inside

We then packed onto a bus, missed our stop, exited and started pegging. We were still about 4.7km away (keep in mind, both of my big toenails were on their way outta there) when we hailed a cab, which took us almost to the entrance. The pedestrian traffic was unreal because of the holiday.

My amazing coworkers, Grace and Ritta

After our peaceful walk through the gardens, we were given a lift by a nice family down the road to the dark galbi restaurant!

It was delicious! Me and my Irish bestest, Becky

spicy, cold noodles... very delicious!

bean sprout soup... tastes exactly as it sounds, but it sure grows on you

 
After lunch, we ran to the bus stop and thankfully caught a bus fairly quickly. The entire bus ride (which was almost standstill because of the traffic), Becky was practically harassed by the elderly, drunken, benevolent Korean man next to her. He meant no harm, but he kept yelling, "K-O-R-E-A". (Thank you sir, we speak English fluently.) From the bus stop, we got a taxi to the train station and literally ran to the tracks- we got there exactly, to the minute, of our train departure. Thankfully, our train was running late. The seats were all sold out, so we spread out some plastic bags and sat for the 1-hr train ride back into Seoul!~