It's cherry blossom time...

In the past fortnight or so Seoul has started to come back to life from the brownness that is symptomatic of the dry Korean winter and the magnolias, forsythia and more famously the cherry blossoms are coming into bloom.

This past Wednesday was a holiday for a parliamentary election and although I wasn't entitled to vote, I still got the day off. My wife had come into some coupons entitling us to up to KRW400k worth of food at the Walker Hill Cherry Blossom festival and despite the fact that the weather was cloudy with rain predicted we decided to chance it.

I've never been to the Walker Hill before. It always seems well out of the way of anywhere but actually it was only 10 mins from Gangbyon (line 2) or 5 minutes from Gwangnaru (line 5) by hotel shuttlebus. We started off with some lunch and owing to the coupons we could pig out although the food was pretty expensive if you were paying (hotel prices I guess). It was pretty tasty especially since the chefs were effectively cooking out of garden sheds. After lunch, it was time to look at the cherry blossoms. Not much to say about them, so I'll just post some photos and let them speak for themselves. It was difficult to take decent photos because it was so cloudy which made the light was so flat and difficult to see the hues of the cherry blossoms. Plus my camera is quite a basic one. Of course there were other flowers around too. Here are some cherry blossoms framed by forsythia... And some magnolias...would it be blasphemous to say that I actually prefer magnolia to cherry blossom? Shortly after that it started raining and we headed home...