Vacation Vacation!

Making plans for my trip to Korea. It's a little hard to figure out what the best way to travel is while I'm there. I want to see Seoraksan National Park, Samcheok, Gyeongju, Busan, Jeju-do, Gunsan and of course Seoul and its surrounding cities.

I think I might try the KTX to Busan, take a domestic flight from Gimpo to Jeju and then back up to Gunsan...The rest of the time I will probably take the bus, taxi or Subway to navigate.

My friend Sejeong helped me download this amazing iPhone application that tells me which bus I can take while I'm in Seoul and its surrounding area as well as when it comes and where the bus is along the route. I also downloaded a map of the Seoul Subway.

I'm starting to feel the crunch of needing to make plans...it dawned on me today, that my trip isn't really that far away now. It's coming up fairly quickly!

Sicky

I hate being sick. I cough...I sniff...I generally feel awful. I've been fighting off a cold for the past week...I think my body is beginning to give in. I had my normal bought of sneezing over the weekend, but now I'm feeling weak and unhappy. Perhaps it's time to stay home. :-(

In other news...I had a fantastic weekend in Spokane. A part of me wants to live there so I can spend time with Bean all the time. But then there's the part of me that loves being out here. Someday I will make up my mind and figure out where I want to go and what I want to do. I took a lot of pictures this weekend. It was so much fun to have a model or two for pictures. I got to try quite a few new things...night photography has never been my strength, but I'm quite thrilled with how some of the pictures turned out.

We drove around for forever...trying to find lights that I had seen on the drive to Bean's apartment from the airport. When we excursioned back out...Bean made a few wrong turns...we ended up in a really creeptastic area of Spokane. But we survived and trekked on...eventually decided to just go out I-90 towards the airport. Turns out the trees with lights were the driveway entrance to the Hampton Inn in Spokane. I got to run around like an idiot taking pictures and standing in odd positions while Bean sat in a warm car. My hands were definitely jealous. It also snowed this weekend in Spokane so it was really exciting to be able to go out in the snow. You can't really do that in Seattle. LAME!

The white lights were beautiful in the snow...if only there had been more to have a fight or build a snowman. I saw a group of kids rolling a ball around...it was mostly full of leaves. fail.

Nonetheless...check out my Flickr Pics!

San Francisco

So I'm going to San Francisco this winter. I'm pretty excited to go since I haven't been there before. Katie and I will tour around to see all the sites. We currently have tickets to go to Alcatraz Island.

Everything I know about Alcatraz is from either A) The movies or B) Mythbusters. Hahaha, so not much. :) Doing a quick readup on the island...it was first discovered by a Spaniard who called it: La Isla de los Alcatraces - rough translation, Island of the Pelicans. I guess there's a lot of birds in the area. Wouldn't surprise me...not since SPU developed a demonic crow population.

We all know Alcatraz was a former prison...but what you may not have known is that we didn't set up the island for miliarty purposes until the end of the Mexican-American War. Makes sense since that's when we got the Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico territories at that time. The Island was then used as a Military Fort at that point and the earliest prisoners were put there during the Civil War (1861). Dang! From there it turned into a Federal Prison in 1933. I guess that history is the stuff that most of us know...the various escape attempts and notorious prisoners held there like Al Capone, The Birdman and more.

I'm terribly excited to go...and I can't wait to see more of San Francisco.