Glamorous in Retrospect

South Korea - Random shots from the mom's visit

At the end of October, my mom had the opportunity to come to Korea to come visit. I'm incredibly slow, so I'm just getting these posted now, but here's a selection of my favourite pictures from her trip. Some of these may look familiar, but I like the new angles.

Suwon Buddha hand detail

Insadong, one of the guys who makes cookies out of 32,000 strings of powdered honey

Gyeongbokgung

Palace details

Tiger overlooking the palace grounds

Roar!

Steadfast

Feet!

Look familiar? I can't imagine why... (I couldn't pass up the blue sky on this day, I had to re-shoot this)

The Princess' Pagoda

Elephant at Jogyesa Temple

Free hugs! Apparently this is some big worldwide campaign. My mom saw it on Oprah when she got home from her trip.

Grrrr I'm on this site already!!

Grrrrrr ME TOO!!

You weren't supposed to take pictures inside this temple. So I found a crack through a side door and shot from there. I kind of like the effect that the doors had on the sides of this shot. The monk who came out the door didn't seem so impressed, though...

Temple detail (oh yeah, these are from Gyeongju)

The hungry goat at the Suwon folk village. It might have been my fault that this thing ate a pamphlet... but I blame the goat.

I was just waiting for one of these kids to fall in... none did... I suppose that's a good thing.

Doing a traditional farmer's dance - sorry, there are a lot of pictures, but this thing was great.

North Korea and China

Last week I finally made it to two places I've wanted to see for a long time: China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, aka: North Korea.

Our visit to China was short but sweet, and left me excited to get back again in February. Click on the link for the pictures here:

http://chinaonlyglamorousinretrospect.blogspot.com/

The DPRK can't be described in a few short words. Here's my visa to enter the country - there is no official record aside from this. Nothing in my passport and nothing I could show you except this picture.

Here are pictures of my trip to the Axis of Evil:

http://nkonlyglamorousinretrospect.blogspot.com/

Hagampo, Taean

This weekend we made it out to the west coast and visited Hagampo beach, outside Taean. It took some time to get there, but it was well worth it. (Especially as the weather was beautiful, and it continued to rain in Osan.) The weather was good and the water was ridiculously warm.

Here's a shot of the sunset just outside of where we were staying. I'm not going to bother with descriptions of every picture here (because it's obviously a beach).

High tide, late afternoon

These zigzagging fences along the shore marked where the tide crashed

Jeff would have hated this. A little girl kept chasing the seagulls down the beach, and there were TONS of them.

The island later at sunset

The next morning the tide receded and left these tidal pools across the beach. The island that seemed miles away the night before, but here we could walk straight out to it.

An old woman clamming among the barnacled rocks

The clouds were unreal, and I loved how they reflected on the wet sand

We found this starfish on the sand - about 20 minutes earlier, we saw it floating in the water, puffed up and looking like it might have been a strange ashtray... then we found it again when it had returned to its normal shape. We might have poked it for awhile...