Friday, October 2, 2009

Hwaseong Fortress


Hard to belive today was Friday, since we had it off for Chuseok (Korean thanksgiving... kind of). We were supposed to go to Manilla, but because of the storm and the flooding in the city and the newest typhoon set to hit on Saturday, we decided to cancel our tickets and stay away. This did, though, give us an opportunity to see something we've been talking about seeing for over a year. Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon. We took the train to Suwon Station on Line 1 (about an hour outside of Seoul) and hopped on a bus labed Hwaseong Palace.

We knew it was time to get off the bus when we saw Paldalmun (발달문). Here is one of the main entrances to get to the fortress wall. First we had to conquer quite a few stairs to get to the fortress wall.This is the view of the city after we conquerd about half the stairs to get to the fortress. We still had a while to go at this point...


Finally we reached the top and found a nice, leisurly path along the wall with an amazing view of the city. We had no idea how big Suwon was!


The two hour walk treated us with lots of interesting things to see. Finally the wall abruptly ended and we found ourselves in the middle of a market in downtown Suwon. We walked back towards Paldalmun through the market when I saw this guy making stamps in the street. It looked cool, so I took a photo.
We were about to head back to the bus when we stumbled accross pizza school and couldn't resist the temptation of Korea's only good and cheap pizza. How can you turn down a pizza for 5,000 won? We got the extra cheese crust, and a combination veggie and meat pizza, along with three sodas and it came to less than 10,000 won.

If you want more info about Hwaseong, you can visit their website, it's pretty good: http://hs.suwon.ne.kr/

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