Suwon

Last week we made a daytrip to Seoul's neighbour city Suwon. There are over 1 million people living in Suwon which makes it quite a large city. Anyhow at least Seoulers consider Suwon just a suburb of Seoul where "nothing ever happens". And the suburb thing has some truth in it. When travelling there you don't get the feeling of going to another city. The tall buildings and houses continue all the way there. But I guess it's the same in all the metropolitan areas. Even Helsinki has fused with those kinds of "suburban cities"; Espoo and Vantaa.

Seoul metropolitan area is the second largest in the whole world with 20 million people. It's interesting that almost half of the people in South Korea live in the Seoul metropolitan area.

Although no one seemed to consider Suwon an interesting place to visit we wanted to check it out. Our destination was a UNESCO world heritage site Hwaseong Fortress.

Transferring to the right subway. Outside the city center the subways go on the ground which is nice cause you can see the surroundings then.


Suwon station. It was also a mall for expensive brands. If you're a westerner you can walk into really expensive stores and the staff doesn't look weirdly at you.



From a local tourist info center we got these pieces of paper to show the taxi driver. The taxies here are so cheap compared to Finland... well in Finland they're just ridiculously expensive. The starting price here is 1 €. oO

Before sightseeing we needed to refuel ourselves. The café-culture here is huge. On every corner you can find cafés, bakeries and pastery shops.

Mmmm...


On the ground in front of the Hwaesong Haenggung there was I guess a story about some war or something.

A popular TV show is filmed in the castle and we got to pose with the characters.

This pic turned out to be naughtier than it was suppoused to be...




Kimchii! (Korean version of "cheese" when taking a picture)


Photo art again.

The frotress was on a hill behind the castle but we didn't find a proper path there. So we ended up walking up a very steep slope...

...but got to our destination.





View to the city.

There were some hideous clusters of buildings around.


A local ninja doing her excercises.


We walked along the wall that surrounded the castle.







You see signs with swastika pretty often when you walk around. We westerners immediately think of Nazis, but actually it is commonly used in buddhist churches.




Tryin to be tall...


Our university's second campus is in Suwon and we of course also wanted to see it too. The campus looked like a pretty traditional university campus but the main attraction was the brand new Samsung library. (Samsung sponsores our university and builds fancy buildings on our campuses :P )

Near the gate to SKKU.


The library.



Inside the library. There were all kinds of media facilities: computers, music and movie centres and so on... The only thing we didn't come across with was books :)

It was kinda late when we started to head back home. The subway took 1 and a half hour and for the first time here I felt a little homesick. But interestingly not for my real home in Finland. I felt homesick for my room in my dorm.

I guess because I don't have a possibility to just go back home, my mind doesn't even bother me with feelings of yearning there. But that night I felt homesick because we were away from our "haven" here in Korea.

Tired travellers returning home.