Gyeongbokgung/Seoul 2

This weekend, following a phonecall to my father at 2.30am, I got up at 7am to go to Seoul to see Ben. We went to Gyeongbokgung again, seeing as the weather was dry, and took some more photos. At least Ben did, because as per, my camera battery gave up the ghost at the begining of our tour. Ben kindly took photos for me on his camera instead. Please click on link above...and scroll to "computer mayhem".



The grand entrance to the palace...when not raining. Doesn't it just take your breath away?



This snub-nosed beastie is one of a pair (male and female) that was guarding the throne room. The throne room is protected by many pairs of beasts, in particular North, South, East and West is guarded by the tiger, dragon, turtle and bird mentioned in previous blogs (not respectively).

The goatie does nothing for ya, mate, y' still ugly!!!

While Ben and I were taking another look at the throne room, we were approached by a keen Korean English language student, who interviewed us for his homework assignment (where are you from? why are you in Korea? What do you know about this palace, Can you say a sentence in Korean? etc) and then insisted on taking us to the building below:



I could not get a decent shot of this building, which is a shame (see Ben's website). You can see animals "walking' along the edge of the roof. Most, if not all of the roofs had this effect. Close to, and wrongly- overshadowed by the entertainment room, this building is where Sejeong oversaw the production of the Korean Alphabet, around 500 years ago. This subsequently created wide-spread literacy amongst the "common folk". A very important landmark in Korean history, yet people walk past this building as the entertainment room looks more interesting, see below:



...Where guests were fed, entertained etc. Sadly I showed up to late. (Oi, mate, where's the party?)



Yet another hint at how cold it is here in Korea, the water surrounding this has frozen over to a couple of inches thick

We saw a little more of the palace, but we cut it short to visit the Folk Museum. Even then we only had 45 min to see everything. Because of that I did not really get a chance to appreciate what the museum housed. In the end we concluded that there are other folk museums and other days we can go and visit them.

After the visit to the palace Ben took me to an area in Seoul where the shops sold traditional pottery, paper, insence etc.(Insa-dong) .Watching my pennies, I bought a mother of pearl necklace for W5000 with an image of horse galloping across the ocean, while Ben bought one with a celtic symbol. While we there we had dinner at an eating house...mmmm mandu...delicious. Additionally, we saw a monk using caligraphy brushes to paint some rather supberb images of Confucious????...see Ben's Website.

On the way back to his apartment I slept on the underground trains standing up, sitting down; you name the position, I slept in it.("I don't understand how people can sleep on the Underground...ZZZzzzz"). Before I nodded off Ben managed to keep me awake for a short time with his card tricks...I still can't work out his secret. First stop after the underground was the Wa-Bar, where I had a couple of cocktails and somehow got a little tipsy.

Sleeping on the airbed was comfy, but I woke up feeling like I hadn't slept. Hence on the way back to the Express Bus Terminal on the underground, yep, you guessed it, I slept. Out for the count. Catchin' Zzz's. And on the 3 hour journey back to Gunsan too.

When I arrived back in Gunsan I felt suitably refreshed to pop in and see Yeon-A as it was her 30th on Friday. I stayed there a couple of hours, watching Jackie Chan coach some Korean celebreties in how to do some of his swanky moves. Jackie was explaining things in an amusing mixture of Korean, Chinese and English.

The sleep during the day meant that I was awake at night thus I headed to the PC bang to check my emails, do some research etc. I was there until 1.30am, only to get up at 8.30am...