namsan baby

Now that I have been living in the HBC for 8 months, I deemed it time to finally climb Namsan. Don't get me wrong, I took a bus up there with Jen when she visited and took the cable car up with my parents, but I had never actually walked up the mountain and it's literally in my backyard.

Today I was out for a run, well more of a walk, and I went past the war museum. There were probably 20 police buses on either side and loads of cops just standing around (I'm still not sure what cops do here in Korea). Then I get to the front of the museum and there's hundreds of ajusi wearing red vests with flurescent green headbands. They're just sitting around drinking Cass and Hite listening to some sick chant. Not a clue what it was all about, but they seemed happy, and they all said hi as I walked through the middle of their little pow wow. Protests are no unusual here. I see people all the time just sitting in lines banging drums and chanting about something, but it's usually just a couple people. This thing was huge! The cops get even better. On each side of the protest there were riot cops with full on robo-cop gear and sheilds. haha I know a riot when I see one, and this is not it my friend.

So after walking through that, I decided I didn't want to run back through on the way home like I usually would. So instead I kept walking, went past Seoul Station, and decided to head up Namsan. It's probably 1.5km to the top and it's all paved which is nice. It really was quite lovely. You forget sometimes that there are trees and birds in Seoul. Got up, ran back down, went home, and found that I had done 9k. Go me!