Thursday - the trip to Seoul

This is finally being finished on test day, Friday June 8, 2007. The kids are studying, and soon I will hand out the tests. I love giving them study time. It just means less time I have to come up with stuff to do after the test. hahaha, I am a lazy bastard.
So we arrived in Seoul in the late afternoon, and it was just starting to rain. However, by the time we got to the Hotel Rainbow (my Seoul hotel of choice!) it was really starting to come down. We headed back tot he hotel, and we agreed to head to Outback, conveniently right across the street for dinner that night. The original plan had called for Outback on Saturday for my usual birthday dinner of "Prime Minister's Prime Rib" (A tradition I hoped to extend to a second year) with cheesy fries. But we decided that it would be better to do foreign (Thai or Middle Eastern) while Carol was there, so Outback got bumped up.
On the way, we bought umbrellas at the 7-11 store near the hotel, which mom really got a kick out of. I guess they don't have umbrellas at convenience stores at home. I never really noticed, I drive everywhere at home.
Outback was good as ever, but there was some disappointment when I couldn't find the "Prime Minister's Prime Rib" anywhere on the menu. I settled on the equally body-damaging "Huge hunk of meat with mushroom crust on top". Apparently crusts now include almost exclusively BUTTER. Didn't know. Anyway, I ordered it medium, and it came back blue. I mean, literally, definitively blue. The meat hadn't even gone grainy yet from heat. It was cool in the middle. You know what I mean? I sent it back, and it came back very rare, again. So rare that it still spilled blood all over my plate. Gah! Anger!
Sent it back again, but it worked out all right. I had wolfed down some cheesy fries, and was actually full. So the break that sending my food back allowed me was actually a very good thing. haha. By the time the steak came back for the third time, it was done enough (still not medium) and I had made some room for it. Mom and Mel polished off a few drinks, and then we headed back to the hotel.
Mom was still jet-laggy (and maybe a little tipsy) so she turned in for a rest. THREE HOURS LATER, Mel and I decided it was probably a good time to go and wake up mom. So, around 9:30 or so, we headed out, and we walked around downtown Seoul together.
I can't remember the order of things anymore, but we wound up walking through Namdaemun area, but unfortunately the market was closed. We walked through to city hall (the sense of direction was working well that night) and by the nearby old palace and down the street that leads to the NANTA theatre, which is charmingly lit with lights embedded in the ground and stone ladybugs that keep cars from careening onto the sidewalks. After that we just kept walking, we wound up walking right by GyeongBeokGung palace, by the Korean Government buildings and to a new area I had never been before, where they have a large "Sejong Culture Complex" or something by a similar name. It looked really good, and I made a note of it so that we could return to it later, because I saw a sign for a gallery, and it seemed interesting.
We got into a nearby subway stop and took the train back home, just barely making it on one of the last available trains for the night. Mom headed to bed, Mel and I stayed up and chatted for a bit, and then we too turned in, exhausted after our over two-hours long walk.