Monday, June 25, 2012

Just Beachy

This is playing a little blog catch-up but it was a summer highlight so I can't not post about it, even if it did happen a few weeks back!

A dear friend (and mentor) of mine planned a family beach trip and invited Caleb and I along.  It was our first time to the ocean in Korea!!



Now, the ocean is absolutely one of my favorite places EVER and this particular family is a family we all love being around so there was no way we weren't going!  It was still pretty "early" in the summer so we held our breath for good weather and the Friday we went turned out to be great.  It was still fairly cool and somewhat overcast but it wasn't raining and wasn't cold so we were good to go!  We packed in their big van, drove an hour and half of beautiful mountain scenery and arrived at the beach around 10am.  We had a total blast. Caleb never stopped playing and running, barely wanted to stop to eat lunch and tried to grab fist-fulls of sand "to bring home and play with later" when it was time to go at 5pm!




Caleb and Aaron

Caleb and Morgan

Caleb and "the boys"


Caleb and Elijah


Beach Basketball with Luke



Look at those purple lips - cold water!

Wet and Cold, warming up



Jordan

The mommies 



"bye bye Ocean!"
Caleb's only regret of the day was that we had to leave and he "didn't find the Nemo Fishie."  He has a book about Nemo and was sure he would meet Nemo Fishie at the beach!

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Seoul Zoo!

Last week we left Songtan early in the morning, headed to Seoul and spent Steve's day off at the Seoul Zoo in Seoul Grand Park.



  I think it was one of my favorite outings we've done in Korea yet, for sure up in the top 10!






The Seoul Zoo was a lot nicer than I was expecting.  It was huge and full of all kinds of animals, with lots of room to run, climb, swim and hop.  The zoo itself was nestled in the mountains, so we were completely surrounded by beautiful landscape and felt separated from the city itself.




I'm really undecided as to if I enjoyed the mountains and surrounding scenery or the actual zoo more....



 The other great thing about this zoo was how active all the animals were!  I'm not sure what is wrong with the animals in all the zoos I've been to in the States but these animals actually were doing things and interacting, not just laying around!  The hippo's swam over to us, the bears were fighting over food, the ostriches and flamingos were running around, the tigers were fighting and prowling around, the giraffes were eating and playing and so forth. I've never seen so much activity at the zoo before.

Not zoomed, this is how close we were!



Caleb was a little nervous about the dolphins at first....


baby elephants!



"Hi Caleb Giraffe!"









Caleb's "victory" signs 
These monkeys were not in cages, just out hanging around!

The other fun and unexpected thing about this zoo was that they had feeding times scheduled throughout the day and you could go watch the different animals get fed (or feed them yourself in some cases).  We were able to see the tigers and lions get thrown whole (dead) chickens and chunks of red meat, the bears were given their daily fruit, the dolphins fed fish and we got to feed the giraffes!




 "Come here giraffes, giraffes, giraffes" C uses the plural 




Steve got licked.


It was pretty cool getting to see, touch and feed them up close! Caleb hasn't stopped talking about it or pretending to be "Caleb the Giraffe" which comes in quite handy when trying to get him to eat his green leafy veggies!


Trying to join a hogwon
Making friends


Caleb the Tiger




the "zoo tram"


Pretty much sums up the day!