Two Adventures Turned Into Four

I went on a multiplying adventure today!  I had wanted to go to this museum in my neighborhood that deals with the occupation of Korea by the Japanese and later a palace further away to see the blossoms of late spring.  Added into the mix was a hillside park right by my school campus at Yonsei University and a night of Mongolian food and visiting "Mongolian Town" and "Russian Town."  Here's a map of my main adventures, (1) An-San Park to (2) Seodaemun Prison to (3) Changdeokgung Palace:

The park had a pretty cool set of stepping stones in the river to get across before you got to a water wheel and then a hillside garden and trail.

My main goal today was to get some good pictures of Spring and the blossoms on all of the tree. Mission accomplished:

From there I went to the Seodaemun Prison History Hall.  It was an old prison that was used from 1908 until 1945 to house political prisoners and rebels who opposed the Japanese.  It was pretty neat and had a main museum part and bunch of side buildings with prison cells or recreations of the work factories prisoners were forced to work in.

They also had an exhibit displaying all the methods of Japanese torture (which were many).  There was a big group of kids going through the basement torture exhibit, and they seemed to have a blast playing in the different torture mechanisms!  I got in the uncomfortable holding cabinet and one of the kids' chaperons closed the door on me and laughed a lot!  Good times. I'm glad I'm not horribly and debilitatingly claustrophobic.

Then, I went from there to Changdeokgung Palace to see Cherry Blossoms and cool architecture followed by a surprise trip to eat Mongolian food.  They seem to really like meat (lamb and beef), potatoes, carrot, cabbage, gravy, and random bits of Asian influence like noodles...which I'm always down for (meat especially).  I'm pretty sure Mongolian grills are horribly, culturally inaccurate.  I had lamb and homemade noodles with some pretty good homemade bread.