Oh my goodness! It has been quite some time since the last post! This will be a pretty quick blog post, since I am working on our next blog post, which is about our weeklong summer break! This summer here in Korea has been a hot one. We have been in a heat wave warning for almost a month now and Casey and I are both waiting impatiently for the temperature to drop. The coolest night we have had during the heat wave has been 77 degrees (but the heat index says it feels like 87), so there is just no escape from the heat, even at night. Anyway, on from the heat! We had an awesome opportunity to go to the small town of Buyeo. A lot of people usually don’t make the trip to Buyeo, but we happened to know a friendly local who lived there. So long story short, we made friends with the guy who sells us our fruit on the corner near our school. He sells whatever is in season and we had been going to him weekly for about 4 months. During one of our weekly visits to his truck, he told us about a lotus festival in his town. He invited us to the Buyeo Seodong Lotus Festival with his wife and child. We of course accepted the invitation and decided on getting a rental car that weekend instead of taking the bus from Cheonan to Buyeo. That way on Sunday we could go to another national park that was hard to get to by pubic transit. We arrived in Buyeo just before 11 AM. Our fruit guy, Jae Young Park, was waiting at our meeting point. We followed him to his apartment block where we were invited in to have a drink before we all headed to the lotus festival. The lotus festival was gorgeous and it was great to see the whole town out supporting the community. Next, Jae Young Park and his family took us to Baekje Cultural Land. It is a large venue that talks about the Baekje Kingdom, which was one of the three Kingdoms in Korea. They made some replicas of buildings and there was a large museum dedicated to the history of the Baekje Kingdom. It was getting late, so we said our goodbyes to the Parks, but we will never forget the special day we shared with them. The next morning we were up pretty early and we made our way to Songnisan National Park. We started at Beopjusa Temple (which we visited after our hike) and slowly made our way through the park. There was a temple about halfway up the mountain (which I didn’t get the name of) and also a huge rock called Munjangdae. It was SUPER windy at the top of Munjangdae Rock! We then made our way down the mountain. While we were driving home from Songnisan we saw a lotus field on the side of the road so we of course had to stop and take some pictures! Another one of the weekends we decided to do a day in Seoul. The heat wave was really starting to kick in so we figured a slow day might be nice. There are five palaces that you are “supposed to visit” in Seoul and we still had two more on our list. We decided it was a great day to mark these off the list. The first palace we went to was Changdeokgung Palace. It was a gorgeous palace that was constructed in 1405. We took our time wandering the grounds. The second palace we visited was Changgyeonggung Palace. This palace was first constructed in 1418 which was during the Joeseon period. This palace was constructed by King Sejong and he constructed it for his father, King Taejong. This palace was less awe -worthy, but we still enjoyed our time there. Lastly, we FINALLY went back to Independence Hall here in Cheonan! It was a super hot weekend, but one of my elementary school friends, who just finished med school, got stationed at Osan Airbase here in Korea! We got in contact with each other and he came up to Cheonan to check out Independence Hall. It was great to see him!
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