seoul for a second time

A couple weekends ago we went to Seoul for our second time, but I never had much time to blog about it. It was an interesting weekend and we spent lots of money on clothes, but there was nothing about it that was inspiring enough to prompt a blog entry til now. Most of what we did besides buy clothes was to go see cultural stuff and since we remembered our camera, I'll put lots of pictures.

I have to start out with a picture of our cat in one of its typical ploys for attention. Leta has taken hundreds of such pictures and I couldn't make a photo entry without including one.

This is outside a reggae bar where we ate dinner in Itaewon. Itaewon is a district of Seoul known for attracting lots of foreigners, because of its proximity to a US military base and its stores that cater to western sizes and styles, etc. We spent too much money here. This is the only picture that we took on our first day in Seoul.
This is the first of many pictures on our second day in Seoul, as we visited one of the royal palaces in the north of the city. We got up relatively early to see it before we had to checkout of our hotel, so we managed to see the changing of the guard ceremony.




There were dozens of gates and buildings for different purposes, all unconnected littered throughout many courtyards. This is the typical style in which their walls were decorated.

This was a ceiling in one of the rooms for sitting and having tea.



There were a lot of places where the roove of different buildings seemed to be purposely set at different heights and angles for artistic effect.

I was surprised that you could see beautiful mountain ranges from so many different places in Seoul.

Most of these buildings were apparently destroyed by the Japanese during their reign of tyranny, but some of the structures that did survive were brick chimneys made to vent the smoke from fires that were used to heat the floors. Koreans still heat their houses through heated floors.

This is some some of the original ceiling work that hadn't been restored.

These were some of the traditional Korean idols, stone mounds and totem poles, which were placed outside villages and prayed to as people left and returned home.

This was the culture museum near the palace.

I took a lot of pictures of the cooler exhibits as an experiment of which camera settings worked best inside with dim lighting.

These pictures are from one of the bigger rooms devoted entirely to the traditional steps taken in the preparation of kimchi.









This box, a little less than a meter tall, was used to transport the bride to her wedding ceremony.

We left the palace and museum, checked out of our motel and went to see the South Gate of Seoul before we left. There we met this guy who volunteered his time as a tourist guide and he told us about the importance of the city gates and how the terrible Japanese had all but destroyed the other ones and kept this one to run a streetcar through. Most of the time he spent talking to us he was getting us to memorize the Confucian principles that gave significance to gates like this:
East: benevolence, blue, wood, spring, dragon
South: courtesy, red, fire, summer, phoenix
West: righteousness, white, steel, fall, tiger
North: wisdom, black, water, winter, turtle
Center: trust, earth, yellow



This was the ceiling of the gate.

Near the South Gate was the most well-known open market in Seoul. Some of my most vivid and valued memories of traveling in Asia are of marketplaces like this one. There is something about the way that these places are overcrowded and assault your senses that can't be replicated by any other type of experience.



The subway stop where we left this part of town was across the street from City Hall. The building is dwarfed by surrounding commercial offices and its fountain is puny. We didn't even cross the street to get a closer look before heading home.

So that was Seoul. It was worth visiting a second time and I enjoyed the cultural tourism much more than the shopping the day before (especially since it cost almost nothing in comparison). I was astonished at how much money we spent on this weekend as I did the math on the bus ride home. It's way too easy to spend money when you hardly ever do anything, make tons of money and don't have bills to pay.