It turns out that Gyeongbokgung, the first palace we visited, was actually the main one, so this site, while impressive was nowhere near impressive as Gyeongbokgung. One interesting thing about this palace was this stage/pavilion, designed by a Russian architect in the late 1800s with blended elements of Korean and western style architecture.
From there we went to another, even smaller palace, Geonghuigung, which was kind of nice in that nobody else was visiting it at the time; very serene. We also visited the Seoul History museum, the national palace museum, and the Seoul museum of art. This involved aw lot of walking, so it was time for lunch! We dined on Budae jigae, "army base stew"; this dish first came about during the korean war when food was scarce -- people would take hot dogs, spam, whatever was left from us army bases and make a Korean-style stew out of it. The resulting dish is still popular today; and pretty tasty
This meal was in a traditional shoes-off-sitting-on-the-floor-style eatery, and I found that it is very difficult to stay in a cross-legged position for long periods of time without your feet falling asleep if you are not used to it! After lunch we went to a large central plaza near gyeongbukgong and saw two large statues commemorating important Korean heroes. The first is King Sejong, who promulgated the official use of Hangul, the Korean alphabet. Before this point everyone was using Chinese characters, but these were rather difficult to express meaning in Korean and only high officials were literate. So the king tasked a team of scholars to develop a writing system that was more efficient.
The second statue is of Admiral Yi Sun-sin, A naval commander famous for his victories against Japanese naval incursions in the 14th century. He is also credited with the design of the "turtle ship", a massive ship in the shape of a turtle with a dragon's head, equipped with cannon that greatly helped in the defeat of the Japanese.
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Amusing photo of the day!
We found another haechi statue!
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