The Clan's China Adventure, Final Episode: Seoul-Searching

Three years, three months, and 20 days. The duration of our overseas adventure, over which period Cherry and the kids had been all over the world, but never back to the U.S. But, we'll get to that part later!

Heading to Pudong Airport together one more time...

Yes, because we had one more global adventure before heading back home. The destination? Home of some of the most beloved TV dramas in the world, the one and only Seoul South Korea!

We stayed at the Marriott Courtyard Namdamun - that's the South Gate of the old city, shown below. The location is quite convenient as we hardly ever needed to go very far to get to a bus or train that took us to the sights and sounds of the old city.

Namdameun, a few steps away from our hotel

Our first stop in Seoul was the Gyeongbokgung Palace, the main royal palace of Korea in about the 14th century during the Joseon dynasty. You could definitely see the Ming dynasty influence in the architecture, but it was interesting to note that the palaces in Korea on the whole looked very much like miniatures of, say, the Forbidden City in Beijing. This is not without any reason; connoisseurs of East Asian history will recall that for much of ancient history, many nations on the main continent tof Asia could be considered vassal states to Imperial China. As such, it would have been a slight for the palaces of a mere king of Joseon to be larger than those of the Great Ming!

Though the palaces were small, they were probably just the right size for munchkin sized travelers like Fifi and Lukas! Plus, no Chinese style "people mountain, people sea" was to be found here!

Note the short walls

Posing next to a statue of my Chinese Zodiac symbol

The northern part of Seoul - the part that isn't in the now infamous Gangnam region - is largely centered around the various palaces, but an interesting district is right next to the Gyeungbokgung Palace - an area called Bukchon which features traditional alley houses as well as a bevy or somewhat interesting art exhibitions and street performers. I have no idea what the kids in this sculpture are doing, but Fifi and Lukas didn't hesitate to join in...

Korean fast food can be easily found in Seoul, but per my initial observations, the variety isn't very robust. Pretty much every joint had the same major staples - spicy seafood soup, rice rolls, and, odd as it may seem, deep fried pork chops.

Towards the end of our first day, we headed to Cheongyecheon Creek, a manmade creek in the middle of northern Seoul with an interesting history in its own right, just in time to see a Thai-themed fashion show! However, it started raining so we soon headed back to the hotel.

Day 2 started with a trip to the Korean Currency Museum. This attractive building didn't actually show up in any prominent tour guides, but it was a hop and a skip away from our hotel and looked interesting, so we headed in. The kids had a lot of fun and it was actually fairly interesting learning about some of the history of coin and paper currency, both of which were quite widespread in the greater East Asia region for millenia.

Afterwards, we grabbed some lunch at another "Asian" classic - 7-Eleven! It's interesting how popular 7-Elevens are in East Asia!

Afterwards, we headed to the main shopping district, near the famous Lotte Department Store. However, I was more interested in the street food stands!

Day 3 started out with a bit of a blunder. We headed to the War Memorial of Korea. After getting off of the subway, we had a bit of a challenge finding the place, especially since surprisingly few Koreans speak English. I will say that I had an even harder time generally communicating in Korea than I did in the previous most challenging place for me to communicate - Japan. This is because in Japan, I could write something in Chinese as a last resort - not so in Korea!

Once I found the place, (a very impressive building that used to be the military headquarters of South Korea), we were disappointed to learn that it was closed on Mondays! In retrospect, this should not have come as a particularly big surprise as this seems to be standard practice for museums all over the world.

Although we couldn't visit the inside of the museum, we did tour the outside exhibits, a fascinating array of military weaponry from mostly the past 60 years.

That's right, more deep fried pork chop and spicy seafood soup...

We wrapped up Day 3 by visiting a site that is familiar to K-drama fans - the N Seoul Tower!

Locks o' Love

Day 4 started out with a visit to a nearby palace - the Deoksugong Palace. This palace is of interest to me because I know of its early history as a "refugee" residence of the Royal Family during the Japanese invasions of the late 1500s (in a somewhat unknown in the west, yet quantifiably epic event referred to as the Imjin War). It turns out the palace also is famous for the short-lived "Empire of Korea" in the early 1900s and features a lot of interesting European influence in its architecture.

After the visit to Deoksugong, we decided to try something different for lunch - deep dish pizza! Korea is apparently a big fan of pizza, especially the deep dish variety. Personally, I much prefer thin crust, be it New York style or Italian style, but I had to give it a shot - when in Seoul, do as the Seoul-ites do!

For dinner, we decided to go back to Korean BBQ. Admittedly, Korean BBQ really is better in Korea!

Day 5: Hiking Day! I always try to get at least one day of hiking in when I go on a vacation. Last summer it was Mt. Laoshan in Qingdao. This year, we headed to nearby Bukhansan National Park. Bukhansan is notable in that it was a large defense project initiated by the Joseon dynasty after repelling the aforementioned Japanese invasion of the Imjin war. However, the defenses never got to see live action. Still it made for a nice hike!

Day 6: We returned to the National War Memorial, this time when it was open! And boy am I glad I did. Inside we found a fantastic exhibit of Admiral Yi Sun-Sin's famous Turtle Ship, from... wait for it... the Imjin War! With this vessel, as well as the rest of his small fleet, he wreaked havoc on the Japanese navy as it tried to reinforce the initial Samurai invasion on the mainland!

Aside from the ancient military exhibits, the other main attraction of the War Memorial was the Korean War. So much so, in fact, that it made up approximately 70% of the whole museum. Apparently, it's a popular field trip among modern Korean soldiers as well!

An insightful exhibit - the names of warriors who fell during the Korean war. Lots of American and Korean names, but a good deal of representation from all over the world.

We closed out Day 6 with another museum, the National Museum of Korea. This museum is reputed to be the physically largest museum in Asia, and yet I did not think there was nearly as much content, interesting or otherwise, as many of the other museums that I've visited in the region. It did have a very nice Children's museum, though!

After a long, but fun, week, we finally headed back to the airport, by way of the Airport Express train...

... and headed to the US of A as a family for the first time since March 18, 2014, on a 787 Dreamliner no less!

And not a moment too soon! I received word that morning that North Korea had conducted its first of several ballistic missile tests of the summer... a bit of an edgy time to be a mere 50 miles away from the DMZ!

And that concludes the Clan's China Adventure. I hope you enjoyed this extensive series, and look forward to bringing you more adventures in the future!

The Clan's China Adventure, Episode 31: The Happiest Place on Earth... in Shanghai!

For the past several months, we haven't done much in the way of travel, either domestically in China or internationally. In fact, ever since coming back from Thailand last Christmas, outside of a few business trips to Beijing, Chengdu, and Wuxi, we haven't left the city of Shanghai at all.

One big contributor to our lack of family travel is the advent of the Season Pass at Shanghai Disneyland! Shanghai Disneyland opened last summer (on Cherry's birthday no less), but until recently, we had not dared to visit, amidst stories of horrible queues and poor behavior from domestic guests. However, when the deals for discounted Season Passes to Shanghai Disney started to appear, we jumped at the opportunity!

We're heeere!

Arrr matey!

Lukas loved meeting his heroes

Shanghai Disney has some of the most advanced rides of all the Disney parks!

Truth be told, the Star Wars exhibition area was pretty lame, but sitting in the Millennium Falcon is a dream come true...

The canoe was one of the kids' favorite rides!

Fifi liked the drawing classes

Tomorrowland at night!

Shanghai Disneyland's Fairytale Castle is the largest of all the Disney castles

At first, we feared that Shanghai Disneyland might be a poor visitor experience. There was a lot of negative press when it first opened nearly a year earlier, with horribly long queues and poor behavior from many of the guests, who were from more remote parts of China.

However, we found that the experience, at least in April, was quite nice. The park was immaculate and queues were quite acceptable, maxing out typically at the 45 minute mark. The ride we went on most over the last few months was the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which has been completely redesigned and is totally different from the Pirates rides at the other parks. Typically our wait time at Pirates was under 15 minutes! Similarly, using the single rider line at Tron got us on in just 5 minutes!

Some of our other favorite attractions were the Stitch encounter, where visitors got to interact with a digital Stitch in the theater, the Buzz Lightyear shooting game, as well as the Pirates of the Caribbean stunt show, which featured one of those indoor skydiving machines. Shows are a highlight of Shanghai Disneyland, with a good Tarzan show and various shows that took place on the pathways as well.

Some interesting observations - Turkey legs are a huge hit - the line for those things was often longer than the lines for the attractions! The line for the Chinese version of Soaring was almost always ludicrously long after our initial visit - most of the time over three hours! Also, I can't quite figure out how the restaurants stay afloat. Most of the local visitors seemed to bring enough snacks to keep them fed through the day. Early on there were reports of the food being sold in the park being overpriced. While high, I believe it was still lower than Disney food in the US parks, so it didn't seem completely unreasonable, although I will say that the quality of food did seem to be lower.

It was also super convenient for us to get to Shanghai Disneyland. We typically took a cab or got dropped off at the Metro station, and from there it was a mere 15 minutes away from the park. Sure beats driving over an hour to Orlando and parking miles away!

Interestingly, as the season went on, we were never able to have as short queues as we did during our first visit in the spring. We got a weekday pass, which appeared to actually be a mistake. I installed the Shanghai Disneyland app, which tracked queue lengths throughout the day, and it actually seemed like everyone assumed lines would be shorter during the weekdays. In fact, they seemed to definitely be shorter on Saturday and Sunday!

Even so, we got to do every attraction at least once except for the Rocketship ride, and several twice or more. The kids wanted to do the Dwarves Mining Train (the Shanghai Disneyland equivalent of Thunder Mountain) one more time, but I couldn't tolerate the typical 2 hour queue for that ride after our first visit. All in all, a fantastic value as the tickets were just over 900 RMB for adults, and I believe about 600 for Fifi. Lukas was completely free!

The Clan's China Adventure, Episode 30: Missions to the Celestial Capital

Readers well-versed in the history of the Orient will immediately recognize the title's reference is to none other than Beijing, arguably the greatest and most famous of China's so-called "Tier 1" cities (its primary competition, of course, being our beloved Shanghai). Shanghai is certainly the more stylish of the two, with its stunning skyline and river view, but it is hard to make an argument against the sheer historical and cultural Goliath that is Beijing, in spite of its somewhat bland (and very Communist-looking) architecture.

Typical modern Beijing building. Grandiose but somewhat bland. Masks are much more commonly needed up here in the North...

SOHO always has interesting buildings

Very "Communist looking"

After having been living in China for over two years, I finally had several opportunities to visit the Celestial Capital for the first time in 13 years (my previous last visit was in 2004)!

As with everything else in modern China, things have moved quickly, here in Beijing as well. One of the first interesting things I noticed, which might be different from days past, is the abundance of Hyundai model taxicabs. Using my powers of deduction, I was able to correctly determine that Beijing has a Hyundai plant, much like Shanghai has a Volkswagen plant that feeds most of its taxi fleets.

But beyond these mundane observations, the biggest overall changes are freshening up of some old streets, and of course the giant 2008 Olympics grounds:

The revamped pedestrian street at Nanmen

Drum tower? I think?

No post about Beijing would be complete without Peking Duck!

Yes, that is duck. The whole plate is of course edible.

The "Bird's Nest" Stadium

The "Water Cube"

Back in the old days of Grant's China Travel, I hit mostly the well-known spots in and about Beijing like the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. But in my more recent travels, I've tried to find obscure, out-of-the-way attractions. One very cool attraction introduced to me by my friend Bill was the China Aviation Museum, tucked away in a cave dug into 小汤山 (xiaotangshan, or Little Soup Mountain), to the north of the city. This gem is straight out of a 1960s cold war movie scene - a hidden aircraft hangar stocked with first generation fighter jets and WWII era bombers and weapons. What made our particular visit even more entertaining was the group of Russian military officials that decided to tour the museum on the same day!

A trip to Beijing is never complete without seeing various live critters on kabobs:

Of course, you can't really go to Beijing several times and NOT see the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and the Summer Palace:

Just one of the huge plazas in the Forbidden City

Striking a pose at the Temple of Heaven

The huge man-made lake from Empress Dowager Cixi's Qing Dynasty Summer Palace

The Summer Palace's rendering of the water towns of southeastern China (like Suzhou and Wuxi)

Water lilies at Beihai Park

Getting to and from Beijing is also much easier than it used to be. Back in the day you had to take a 15+ hour train ride, with or without seats. These days, you can get there in just 6 hours by high speed rail, or if you want, you can get a pretty comfy sleeper car that will get you there in about 12. We decided to do that for the kiddos this past Chinese New Year:

 One big surprise about travelling to Beijing over Chinese New Year was how few tourists there were, and how little pollution there was! The city itself tends to empty and most factories are given the week off, making the air quality pretty great. The Great Wall at Mutianyu was spectacular!

Look at that blue!

I love this toboggan ride, only available at Mutianyu!

 We also made it a point to visit somewhere I'd never visited before - the Old Summer Palace. This palace was destroyed around the time of the Opium Wars when the Europeans and Americans discovered that the Qing Empire could not defend itself. The ruins there are pretty awe inspiring, and it's easy to see how grand they once were. But, for the kids, the most fun was being able to stand on the frozen water in the many ponds and creeks on the grounds!

First exposure to frozen ponds!

I would have never believed that this was Beijing...

A maze in the garden

Some of the once spectacular and still awe-inspiring ruins

After having been in China for three years, I do have to concede that Beijing definitely trumps Shanghai when it comes to basking in thousand-year-old Imperial Chinese culture and history! It took me THREE visits to the city to collect all the photos in this post!