A new bucket - by Sofie

 We’re back buddies!!! 

This trip we are wandering over to Asia. We took the duke point ferry to Vancouver and stayed the night there before getting on a flight to Beijing. The flight was 14 hours so we watched some movies to pass the time. We stayed in China for less than a day and then hopped on a 2 hour flight to Korea. While we were in China we learned about the government and how it’s run - the differences there are to Canada and how we live compared to how we would if we lived in China.. We also ate so much Peking Duck and wandered the cold, snowy streets lined with big, boxy concrete buildings. We were excited to get to Korea and as soon as we got there  we met up with besties Katlyn and Roger at our BnB. They had arrived the day before us. 

The next day we wandered the streets of Seoul and ate everything we came across. One of my favourites was the gas station Gimbap which we ate for breakfast. To Bashas annoyance, dad had about 10 coffees with the help of Katlyn’s encouragement. He had a lot of energy! We visited busy markets and hiked up 700m to the Seoul Tower lookout. The love locks from XO Kitty and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before were there as it was very colourful and exciting to see a place that’s been on shows we’ve watched. We took the gondola, and then a funiculare down the mountain and made quite a scene when we all had the giggles so hard eating our new favourite peanut butter chocolate snacks.  We stopped for dinner in a traditional Korean hot pot restaurant. It was a busy, bustling restaurant in a very old part of town called Hanoc Village. Along with braised beef we had kimchee, soup, pickled veggies and gochujang. We got 25 000 steps in that day so it was nice to get back to our home in Seoul. I thought I wasn’t jet lagged but I fell asleep at 7:30pm and woke up the next day at 5 am. But not before snacking on lemon cream filled ritz crackers, wasabi chips and seaweed crackers  

We had snacks and Gimbap for breakfast again and headed to the Gwangjang market. Most Koreans dont have a big breakfast. We ate the most delicious truffle cream garlic bread from a stall called Garlic Boy, and accidentally wandered into a Michelin restaurant called Buchon Yukhoe. We decided to have the apparently famous octopus and beef tartar. To our surprise the little octopus legs were still moving as we nibbled on them. Roger and I carried the table and finished the whole thing.  We walked off our huge meal and ended up in Gangnam after going on multiple subways. We went to a big beautiful Buddhist temple and a famous enormous library and decided we were hungry again. To finish the day we ate at a Korean barbecue close to our house. We cooked our pork belly on a little stove in the middle of the table. 

Tomorrow we are flying to Kathmandu to prepare for our trek. We’re going to miss the heated toilets, the food, our weird little shower bathroom, and won’t miss the smell of our little home away from home.