Parks of Seoul

Today I would like to pay a tribute to the beautiful parks here in Seoul.  Of all the places I wander, these usually end up being my favorites. I have been impressed by how many small parks there are spread amongst the 522 dong or neighborhoods. The larger parks are less common but much more impressive for the unique ...

Olympic Park: Built in honor of the 1986 Asian Games and 1988 Seoul Olympics, this park has huge sports facilities and then a large park surrounding them for biking and running (although I have yet to see a non-foreigner run). It's very far out on the eastern side of the city, so I probably will not talk myself into the 22 stop trip out there again, but I am glad I went to see it.

All of these plants are rose bushes. It was pretty as it was, but I can only imagine how cool it would look in full bloom.

This piece is called Zen for VW or VW for Zen. The park was full of scultpures, but this was my favorite.

I thought of the Netherlands here.

The Olympic Arch.

Haneul Park: I only meant to take a quick walk in the park around World Cup Stadium before going shopping at Home Plus (as convenient but less disheveled than Wal-Mart), but then I found out it is actually four parks connected to each other, so I ended spending all morning there. I always pick the wrong days to wear white pants.

Not sure what they're called, but this may be my new favorite flower.

The view.

  Seonyudo Park: This park is an island in the middle of the Han River and is somewhat designed as a water purification area. We went here our first week late at night, and it had a very different feel being there by ourselves (we kind of felt like we were in Jurassic Park), but I made us go again so I could take better pictures. 

When we came the first night, we could hear hundreds of bull frogs in these ponds

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There was this whole area of planters like this, and then there were walkways above us that made a very cool maze, so now Dane wants to buy paintball guns and come back.