Day 5
As we headed toward the subway station, we stopped by something that is very Korean: The PC Bang. These are large rooms, often underground or high up, which are filled with (often) high-end computers. For a small membership fee, you can game in the PC Bang for an hourly rate. They are often open 24 hours, and after school, fill rapidly with kids and teenagers coming to play games like Starcraft and League of Legends. They are popular because often, apartments in Seoul are very small, not a lot of room for a high-end gaming machine like you need. So the kids get out of the house and away from their family, to spend time at the PC Bang.
(The inside of the PC Bang. Not at all grubby, it was slick and modern and, when we went back in an evening to get pictures, very full.)
Our first stop of the day was the main palace, Gyeongbokgung, built in 1395, the main seat of the Joseon Dynasty (the dynasty after the Goreyo, which is after the Silla). The palace was demolished when the Japanese occupied Korea beginning in 1911, but has since been rebuilt.
As we went across the main entrance to buy tickets, our progress was impaired by large Korean school groups, often in matching shirts, who kept stopping us for pictures. In Japan, school kids will stop you to practice their English (often with accompanying little worksheets they have to fill out). In Korea, the kids practice their English…and their teacher also assigns them to get a selfie. It took us about 20 minutes to go 100 feet.
(Mr. S accosted by teenagers. Note the face masks, which everyone wore religiously…except when they were interacting closely with anyone else. Which kind of defeats the purpose, but oh well.)
Luckily, we had arrived just in time for the stately changing of the guard ceremony. There was much beating of drums, marching of men in flowing uniforms, and general stateliness.
(Unfortunately, it can never really beat the changing of the guard in Quebec City, which remains our favorite because the guard there have their own ceremonial goat, who is trotted out in his little uniform twice daily.)
The palace is a huge complex of buildings, each placed in a courtyard. In front of the main throne room, the huge courtyard is lined with little stone markers. These are so every courtier knows exactly where to stand when they all line up to face the king, each stone denotes the rank. The Joseon dynasty was very big on Confucian ideals, so rank became hugely important.
Behind the great palace lies the National Folk Museum of Korea, which provides a nice counterpoint, and is focused on the lives of the common people in Korea. There’s a large section on traditional agriculture, and a beautiful grouping of traditional building styles outside that’s well worth wandering around.
It also has a Children’s museum, outside of which is…the strangest children’s statue I have ever seen.
(Seriously, this is for KIDS?!)
We stopped for lunch at one of the many Paris Baguettes located in Seoul (and, to be honest, everywhere else). Mr. got a snack of potato chips that were “sweet cheese” flavored. They tasted…like you might expect sweet cheese to taste.
After lunch we headed to another palace (there are five in Seoul itself), Chandeokgung. The palace there is lovely, but we were there for the Huwon gardens in the back, a 78-acre expanse that the princes and women used to ride their horses through. We arrived just in time for the tour, and while it rained the whole time, we didn’t mind. The gardens are gorgeous, with small buildings and grottoes and even tiny channeled streams designed especially for a very high-class elite drinking game. The person at the top fills a wine cup, quotes a line of poetry and sends the wine cup floating down the stream to the person they picked. If the person fails to come up with a completing line of poetry by the time the wine cup gets there, he’s got to drink the whole thing. As you might imagine, once you start losing, you keep losing.
A note on coffee: People in Korea LOVE COFFEE. I thought Seattle was the coffee capital. I was wrong. In Seattle, you might see a Starbucks on one corner and a Peet’s on the next, and a Philz on the one after that. In Seoul? The Starbucks is next to the Coffee Bean, which is next to the Angel-in-us coffee, which is next to another small family-run coffee shop, all of which are doing a fine business selling coffee and desserts. Coffee shops here don’t appear to get super crowded in the morning, like in the US. Instead, they are places to study (as we saw), and also places to go on a date. We would stop in for coffee and see loads of couples glancing adorably at each other over big fluffy drinks and croissant. The coffee is hugely expensive. One small latte will run you around $6. However, this is also where I discovered the joys of drinkable yogurt. Why don’t we have more of this in the US! It was cup of delicious thick yogurt mixed with jam. Words cannot describe the deliciousness of this.
(Promises, promises)
Day 6
In the morning we headed to the Jongmyo shrine, a large shrine devoted, not to Buddhism, but to Confucianism. The style is absolutely austere, and dedicated to the kings of the Joseon dynasty. Each has a little room in the shrine decorated, not with gold or silver or anything but with tablets telling the stories of what the royal person had done to make them a great ruler. The whole is surrounded by a forested park and is a lovely walk. If you go on a Saturday, you don’t have to join a tour, but can wander the grounds on your own.
We were lucky enough to go during a display of Korean…music? Opera? Musical theater? We couldn’t really tell. Some dudes would get on the stage in costume and declaim to each other in stately tones. Then there would be a long musical interlude with a woman dancing in a very painfully slow manner with a sword. Then more declaiming. A recording of one of the songs is below:
Afterward we stopped for a lunch we had seen many locals chowing down on: toasted sandwiches. Ours had, as far as we could tell, two slices of toast, an egg, a little bit of cheese, lettuce, and a random sauce. But they were very tasty and great touristing fuel. Also only about $5 for two (yup, we are cheap travelers).
We then headed toward one of the big hanok villages. This is an area of Seoul where the traditional architecture has been preserved, with lovely groupings of hanoks running up and down the hills (Seoul, and Korea in general, is some very hilly country). We were in search of the FAMOUS Museum of Chicken Art, which I had been dying to see. Sadly, it turned out that this famous museum had closed down some three years before. So if you’re looking, spare yourself.
It didn’t matter, though, we were in the middle of a stunning hanok village with a free map that gives you a walking tour of places of interest, complete with carpentry workshops, art galleries, and other traditional arts.
(I just loved these guys. I don’t know why.)
We stopped in for a tour with a man who explained to us the art of printing gold leaf on to fabric. Formerly used only for royalty and very special occasions, there are now only a very few (possibly only one?) masters who are still using the traditional technique (as there is now no royal family at all, you can buy items embossed with gold leaf). Our tour guide was an apprentice in the trade. He had been studying the art for 5 years, and had another 6 to go. I asked him why he liked it, and he told me that all his life, he had just been fascinated by patterns and symbols. The gold leaf applique is always put on in a series of traditional patterns and symbols, all of which have their meanings. (Bats are lucky!)
We also stopped by Topgol park, the site of a very ancient Buddhist shrine and also the site of the Student’s Rebellion of 1919, in which the Students wrote their own declaration of independence from Japan, which is now written in stone in the park (in both English and Korean).
Finally, we headed to Seoul’s Mt. Namsan (which is not actually called Namsan, the mountain has another name). This is one of several peaks that surrounded the original city of Seoul, which has now expanded far, far beyond the original borders. You can hike the more than 1,000 meters of stairs, or pay a little money for the cable car to the top. We took the stairs, and were some of the only people doing so. Just…take the cable car. It was a challenge, especially since you take the stairs only after you’ve hiked up the bottom half of the mountain. But the top is well worth it for the view, and for the places to eat on the top. You can get a beer and hang out for a while, people watching and peering through the haze over Seoul.
As we headed down to find dinner, we encountered the Nandaemun market, a series of tiny streets lined and filled with shops and stalls. Sections of it are open at all hours. We grabbed a few dumplings and marveled at the ginseng stores. Ginseng is big business here, with huge, decorative jars containing one giant root for sale. I still regret I didn’t get to take one home.
A note on Korean breakfast: In Gyeong-ju our breakfast was provided every day, and it was always…peculiar. There’s no real devoted breakfast food here as far as I can tell. Instead, it was usually yogurt (though sometimes a fruit cup), and a sandwich that we could split. The sandwiches were often hilariously bizarre, like BLTs, some sort of potato salad, or something involving cheese sauce. I tend to pack Powerbars, dried fruit and nuts enough for every trip (especially if we will be walking a lot and hiking, which we almost always do), and I didn’t regret it, they basically ended up being our breakfast for the whole 14 days. Because while tiny yogurts and a sandwich are fine and fun, they aren’t really enough when you plan on hiking 10 miles and not eating lunch.
