South Korea 1: The great wall of Seoul, and our first palace

Our flight left at 7:00 AM, so we had to be up before 4.  When we arrived in Seoul, we struggled to find an ATM that accepted visa ATM cards, but after we found one, we hopped onto the first bus available to bring us into town.  The drive was a little over an hour, and then we had to walk a little bit to our first hotel.  I changed my reservation from a traditional hotel to a bed and breakfast that was highly recommended, in a traditional Korean house, with a host that reportedly spoke a lot about Korean history and had detailed knowledge of the surrounding area.

We arrived roughly around 6:00.  Miles went straight to bed.  I spoke a little bit with the host, who did indeed speak about Korean history.  I went to be around 7:30.  This was a mistake, as I woke up around 2 AM and laid there until around 5:30, when I finally drifted back to sleep.  The host promised to speak to me at 8 AM, giving more in depth information.  He ended up speaking to me for about two hours, explaining about the Korean alphabet and how to place up to four parts of consonants and vowels(Up to two of each) to form a word.  He also went into detail about the history going back nearly one thousand years.  I asked questions about the local area, as well as practiced the Korean phrases I had memorized.  He corrected two of these that I had slightly wrong, so I am glad that I asked.

I was highly interested in walking part of the 18.7km wall that surrounds Seoul.  He recommended one part in particular.  We left a little before noon to walk about forty minutes to this section.  It was mostly uphill, along a wooden railing on the sidewalk of a road.  We saw quite a few insects and a few birds as well.  I did not have my closeup lens, but I did the best that I could to capture some of them.




The path finally converged with the wall, and we followed the signs until we approached the information center.  They gave us two ID cards to carry.  We put them around our necks and began walking on the wall.  The views in both directions were incredible, and aside from one tour group, we pretty much had the walk to ourselves.



At one point we reached a tree that had bullseye marks on it, with a plaque that explained that this tree had caught 15 bullets when the North Koreans once tried to come in that direction, in a plot to attack the Blue House, the South Korean White House equivalent.



The wall wound up and down, but mostly up, eventually having us hit the highest point, which I imagine was 293 meters because of the sign.  We were able to look below and see the palace that we planned on visiting.



We reached the end by about 3:00.  We walked down the hill toward the Blue House and the Gyeongbokgung Palace complex.  We had wanted to visit the Blue House, as it was one of the locations that appeared in one of our recent favorite shows, Stranger, but you had to make  reservation two weeks in advance, and I don't generally look up activities for our trips until a few days before we leave.

Guards appeared in boxes along the street approaching the Blue House

This is the Blue House, originally created by the Japanese occupying force, but later adapted by the Korean President.

The Gyeongbokgung palace grounds were large, with many birds near the dried up streams that intersected the buildings.  When we entered, we started noticing that many people had dressed up in rented traditional Korean garb, similar to what we saw happening in Kyoto last March.  We eventually came upon the two largest buildings, which were magnificent.


We exited east into a Korean Folk Museum area, but by this time we were wiped out, so walked back to our hotel.  I picked up a Pocari Sweat spots drink that I fell in love with on my trips to Japan.



I have not eaten Korean yet, and was a bit overwhelmed with the Korean food choices in the area, so chose something simple in the form of a Japanese Ramen restaurant that ended up tasting nothing like the ramen from Japan.

At night, I ended up having long conversations with the host of the hotel and another visitor, from the US, on a whole range of Korean related topics.