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DMZ (or DMZed if you're me)

Getting out the house

Starbucks for breakfast

Bus with lanyards

DMZ Tour run by the Korean military

Paju Imjingak – big park

Fried chicken and "Ambasa: Just the softness of carbonated milk"

our tour guide: Yu Okyeung

She recommended these K Dramas:

Mr Sunshine

Crash Landing

Paju City, NW side

Jokes about defecting to North Korea

Extreme Propaganda film at th DMZ

Sadie's observations

The food is amazing

Things are really cheap

I'm very tired

Poppy's observations

Korean people love their iced americanos

Liv's observations

nobody wears shorts. It's mostly pants and skirts. "Oh my god, I'm the only one in shorts"

Our plane crew is on our DMZ tour. We are pretending to not recognise them

Long long walk down a steep incline to visit a North Korean tunnel. We wore helmets. I bonked my head numerous times.

Highlight, for me: the observatory. You can peer into the Hermit Kingdom. Feels illegal.

Our guide congratulated us on our timing; the conditions were perfect.

The Davies Shaws are here! And they're just down the hall?!

And they're so tired.

We went to Myejongdong Kyoja

Myeongdong Kyoja Main Branch

서울 중구 명동10길 29

We got in and got served in no time flat. We ordered way too much. The waitress spilled soup on my phone but it's OK.

Then we strolled around Myeongdong and marvelled at the sights. Poppy and Sadie got caricatures.

We finally bought Sadie a toothbrush.

Back at HQ and Poppy is planning to catch up with Kate, her Santa buddy who lived in Seoul for a few years.

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We hit the Ghibli Museum, a sprawling building devoted to the films of Studio Ghibli, whose best known director is Hayao Miyazaki. He created classics such as Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle. 

The museum is full of treasures devoted to animation, including flickering zoetropes, spinning friezes that strobe into life, and rooms stuffed with books, illustrations, and rare objects from all over the globe. There was only one gigantic robot, disappointingly, but the cafe served their own beer – Kaze no Tani, which I think means “Valley of the Wind” – which assuaged my fury at the lack of gigantic robots. A bit.

A spiral staircase took people from the ground floor up to explore the top levels. I stepped inside, but quickly realised that I’d  get wedged in halfway up and would require the Jaws of Life to be liberated. Poppy galloped to the top, while Liv escorted Sadie at a slightly-anxious-two-year-old pace, much to the dismay of the dozen of so people who were following them and presumably weren’t anticipating such a glacial ascent.

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Obedience = Ice Cream. And vice versa.

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Three weeks in Japan with these lunatics is about to commence. What. Have we. Done.

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#tv

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Sunshine + ice cream = religion

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Does it have a lot of people on there?

Kelly

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Kilroy was here (Taken with instagram)

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Pretty cute till you notice the dead baby floating in the background (Taken with instagram)

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Liv attempts to check her email (Taken with instagram)

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Plotting some dastardly scheme, probably (Taken with instagram)

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I’m with Cupid (Taken with instagram)

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First Christmas, so far so good (Taken with instagram)

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Monster hand (Taken with instagram)