Gyeongbokgung Palace

Hello all, Mike here.
Wednesday was our first tourist day of the trip. Paul took us to Gyeongbokgung Palace in downtown Seoul. For those of you who don't have the slightest clue as to what that is, the brochure says.

"The Primary Palace of the Joseon Dynatsty"

For those of you who don't know what the Joseon Dynasty is, the brochure says

"The Joseon Dynasty was established in 1392, and started building the Palace around 1395"

OK enough of the history lessons how about some pictures.


Kendra and I at the front gate.

Korean Party Pavillion called Gyeonghoeru. Built on a manmade island. Note the "ice". Yes Kendra wants to point out that it is that cold.

Paul and I getting some good Korean food from a Street Vendor.

The next day we took a boat tour of the Han river that runs through the center of Seoul. It was a very cool trip. We stopped at a downtown Budhist temple that is a 1000 years old, and which provided some cool photography, Old vs. New.


Its been pretty busy this week so far, this weekend is the Lunar New Year so maybe we'll see some dragons, don't know.

Take it easy.
Mike and Kendra

Sleep Deprived & Love Motel

We have made it!!! Today is our first day in Seoul, South Korea. Maybe we shouldn't have stayed up until 5am on Friday night and 2:30am on Saturday, because holly crap did we have a lot to do before we could leave. Between packing our bags, packing the house, cleaning, doing some last minute paperwork, we were still going strong at the eleventh hour. With no sleep we left for the Calgary airport at 3:30 on Monday morning. We flew to Vancouver, San Fransisco and then the 11 hr flight to Incheon. If you ever fly to Asia, you have to fly on Singapore Airlines. It was a great flight - they really know how to take care of you. Great food, free wine, our own personal TV's with on demand movies, tv shows, games, definately made the time go by quickly.

Mike's brother, Paul (who has lived here for 3 years, and the reason that we went to Asia in the first place), picked us up at the airport in Incheon. We took a overheated bus to Seoul and a taxi to a hotel area in Seoul. Hotel rooms were $100 Cdn per night, so Paul found us a "Motel Love Letter"at $40 for the nite. We're pretty sure that we could have rented the room by the hour if we wanted! Actually the room was pretty good. We slept from 8:30pm until 9 the next morning, so I think we won't have jetlag. We're waiting for our first Korean meal to arrive and then we are headed to meet Paul's girlfriend.

Talk soon

Baby names and Snowmobiling - Almost

Its been cold up here in Yellowknife. Suprise. Suprise. No day higher than -20°C yet. Its Monday now and we have only 3 days left before we head back for one more high paced weekend before we leave to Korea.

The aforementioned baby is doing fine, there have been plenty of pictures and plenty of ooo's and aaa's. She's adorable! and its official, the name of the lovely girl is
"Kylie Skye Bujold"

Yesterday Jeremy and I went out for some snowmobiling, however, before we got the chance...well see for yourself.

Thats right, we had a bit of an accident on the way to the trailhead. This obviously cancelled all snowmobiling activities and created a whole new itinerary including RCMP visits, insurance calls and car estimates, a very shitty deal. For the record, another car towing a sled on a trailer came at us from around a corner, we missed the truck but hit the trailer at the same time we hit the ditch. Fortunately no one was hurt.

So it looks like snowmobiling will have to be saved for another trip.

That's it for now. Take it easy.

Yellowknife - Cold and Babies

We made it to Yellowknife with a balmy temperature of -24°C (missed the -3°C heat wave the day before). Along with our arrival we discovered a 5-0 victory by Can....oh yeah...sorry Kendra, we discovered that Kendra had a new baby niece on the way. The official birthdate and time is January 6th at 2:29am. The happy parents have not named the bundle of joy yet although she's been nicknamed "monkey" (something to do with the way she looked right after birth...I don't know I wasn't in the room!) until they can agree on a name. There's ten fingers, ten toes, blue eyes and a full head of hair. Everyone is healthy and are expected to be home tomorrow morning.

Quote's of the day

"Carrie, your a Mom!" : Kendra
&
"There's a medical name for it but I just call it black tar!" : Jeremy (a.k.a. Dad)