Watkins Cruise Africa to China

Incheon and Seoul, Korea. We came in through the locks at 6:30 in the morning, really bitter cold, right around freezing temperature. We are shipping four pieces of luggage from this city as they do not have the restrictions on the content as we would face in Beijing, ie: nothing but clothing. This turned into a nightmare as no one seemed to know what was going on and the customs officials seemed to be arguing about it. We had been told that we would need to identify our bags on the dock at 8:15 but they had not even been taken off the ship by that time and the passengers were starting to leave for the early tours so the crew was waiting for the line to stop which was not happening as they just kept calling more tours to the buses. Finally the cruise director stopped the line of passengers so the bags could be off loaded. Tom went into theater to wait for our tour to be called and Noel went out to the dock to "id" our bags. It was really freezing outside. Noel waited for 20 minutes, turning into a popsicle, and no one seemed to be around and the bags had been driven off in a truck. Tom finally came with the tour tickets and we decided to just go ahead and leave. Later we found out that other people sending luggage had been driven to the customs office in a van to id their luggage and send it through the scanner. Luckily one of the other passengers knew us and when they were going to leave our luggage he told them it was his and was able to get it processed. We really owe him big time! Thanks John!
On our previous visit here, Tom visited the DMZ and Noel had taken a city tour so we took a city tour this time. We say the Jogesa Buddhist temple, The Presidential compound, Insadong shopping street, and the Deoksugung Palace. We had a good tour guide and he gave us a lot of his personal insight into the situation with North Korea, most interesting. Only two days left, but we are ready to go home.

Colorfully decorated Buddhist Temple