Seonyudo Park

About once a month, the teachers in my office, the 교과실, are allowed to leave campus in the afternoon for a "team-building" experience. I recently posted about our trip to an art museum--a couple of times last year we went to see a movie. Anyway, yesterday, we went to Seonyudo Park. Some things that end with -do in Korean are islands, and that is the case here. But don't get it confused with the one in Gunsan 군산 , on the west coast. This Seonyudo 선유도 is a small island in the middle of the Han River, north of Yeouido; it was once the site of a water purification plant, but today the entire island is a park.

Walking across the pedestrian overpass to the island has some good vistas of the city,


...but I liked this shot with the leafy frame.


As I've noted, it's springtime, and there were lots of blooms (azalea, peach and lilac, not sure about the next one offhand):


The last one above is a Japanese red maple--it's always like that.

The park has numerous features, including an aquatic garden, a couple of greenhouses, and this:


And of course, walking paths. Here are my co-workers ahead of me on one of them.


Finally, a pic of me in the greenhouse.

Signs of Spring

1) Blossoms - if you've come to the Seoul Patch with any regularity, you have seen hundreds of flower photos. You're about to see a few more, these from my school, and the hillside directly across the street.


2) Baseball - went to a preseason game a little while ago in Incheon with an old buddy and a pair of diminutive tagalongs. On the promenade from the station to the stadium (or vice versa) there is a series of engineered photo-ops. I think this is the best one.


3) Soccer - though FC Seoul is off to a really terrible start (they finally won a game last week against Pohang, on their seventh try!) going to soccer games here is easy and fun!


4) Student elections - many schools seem to elect a new student government every semester, and while they enjoin their friends to cheer for them at the school gate in the days leading up to the poll, they put a lot of effort into a poster which identifies their main platform planks:

2018 Yeouido Flower Festival

Despite the impoverished levels of attention the Seoul Patch receives from Tuttle these days, it would be more than remiss of me to skip the annual Yeouido cherry blossom festival post. The festival officially opened on Saturday, but the weekend weather was less than ideal, so I finally got there yesterday after school. There were plenty of people but nothing like what you would have seen on, say, Saturday at 2 PM. The cherry blossoms don't really care how many people are looking at them, they bloom anyway.


The cherry trees run around the north end of Yeouido Island, immediately adjacent to the Korean Legislature facilities. This time, the gates were open, so I wandered through the park area and got a couple of shots of statuary:


That last one is just titled 대한국인 Korean Person.

Before I come to the final, obligatory shot of myself on the sidewalk with the cherries and the city blossoming behind me, I want to point out to anyone that's new around here that they can see lots of pictures of each previous festival since 2009: just click on the cherry blossom festival link in the tag cloud on the right side.
In fact, that might be a good idea, because a) this was a quick visit, and b) I came directly from work so I did not bring my Nikon. All these pics came from my iPhone.