경복궁 Line #5

The first place Gale and I went to on Friday was GyongBok Gung(Gyongbok Palace). It is huge and they had a bunch of these guards in front of the place. They looked very cold and I felt sorry for them because I was freezing too. After you walked through the gate.....

You would see some beautiful scenery with the mountains in the background. It really was a nice day...it was just bloody cold.

All around the palace they had these stone Chinese Zodiac figures. This is mine, the chicken.

Lots of beautiful artwork. A lot of this is not original. Most of these places were somewhat destroyed and later rebuilt after the Japanese invasion. You can see more original work down in Busan, one of the only cities to retain most of the original architecture. I think it still looks pretty nice here though.

This is the largest outdoor pavilion in Korea only used by Kings and Queens. I'm just guessing that a lot of soju has been drank here.


This is from Tapgol Park. This park is very close to Insadong and actually a lot of the famous and trendy places are around the center of Seoul. It's not a huge city but it is very condensed. You can see the Seoul Tower in between the buildings.

It looked like it was a local hangout for a lot of Korean 'Adosshi's". This is also in Tapgol Park.

In Korea and also here in Tapgol Park, lies the #2 National Treasure of Korea. The Pagoda is enclosed in glass so it was hard to get a good shot of it.

After Tapgol Park, we went on to Insadong where we briefly looked at some stuff the street vendors were selling but to be honest it was much to cold to hang outside too long there. The woman is roasting chestnuts, roasting rice cakes and trying to stay as close as possible to the steaming water.

From there we went to the Korea House and then to this Traditional village. It's called Namsangol and in this village there is an area of very traditional houses including furniture. A lot of people come here to take wedding pictures etc. There is a time capsule buried somewhere in the garden and it will be opened in 2394 by the future descendants of Korea.

This explains everything in Korean and English.

Gale here is trying not to look cold here but she is very cold!

Finally, we got to Namdaemun. It was very cold at this point but it was nice to finally get some pictures here. This is National Treasure #1 in Korea.

After that we went to Namdaemun market. It is quite a large market. Didn't buy anything though. Like I said before, it was extremely cold because we spent most of the time outside. On Saturday, Gale was pretty tired and jetlagged from flying from Sydney to Incheon on the Thursday night. So we just chilled out at this coffee shop and later on went to meet Paul, Billy, Ryan and................

This guy here who hails from Western Canada and lives now in Daegu. Nice picture of ya Chris!