Seoul - Day 2

Our second day we were excited to get up early to head out to the National Museum of Korea. It was just a quick subway ride to the other side of the Han river, so we grabbed breakfast and headed out.

Here is Joseph checking out the map of the Museum, we still had not entered the museum yet, so we were excited to figure that we were on the right track.

The HUGE entrance to the National Museum of Korea.


The Museum was HUGE… no other word for it. It was also really beautiful with the big reflection pond frozen over out front. It literally looked like you could ice skate on the pond. It was fantastic.

We arrived to another wonderful surprise, the Museum was free due to the holiday and they were also providing special programs for kids… since Joseph and I are both kids at heart (and a novelty being white and all) we too got to try our hand at a few traditional Korean crafts. Check out our cool wood carving print we made with ink, paper and a chunk of wood.

This is a giant version of a kids game where you throw different shaped blocks. They also had jump rope, kites, a huge drum and some kind of see saw contraption. They also had a palm reading station which would have been fun, but it was all in Korean.

A Close up of the big dome, it is fantastic. You can see how bit is was because Joseph actually is in this picture!

The pictures don't do it justice, it is a fantastic piece of architecture.

It also had some stairs you can climb to see a great view of Seoul from the top, so of course we had to climb to the top to check it out!

So worth all those stairs! The view was amazing.

Me and the view of Seoul. I think it was the lower observation deck.

Our view of the traditional fair below, there were more tents I just could not get them all in the picture.

We were about to go in the museum when the Korean guy got on the loud speaker and people started gathering towards the big white paper taped to the ground, we decided to check it out only to witness a man try to make the biggest Korean calligraphy. He had a huge brush and got ink everywhere, but it was exciting.

The first floor really captivated us and was all about Korean history, and had lots of English for us to read about. We probably spent a good two hours just looking on the first of three floors
About halfway through the museum I figured out I could take pictures as long as the flash was off, so here are some of my blurry pictures. Sorry they are not the best.

Ancient Armour.

Royal crown and belt.

Pottery

Ancient coins

Recreation of a throne room.

We decided to take a break and head over to the Museum Café to have lunch. We recognized many of the western dishes, but sometimes the Korean word is more helpful than the translation. We saw something that said “boiled rice with various materials”…. And what would those materials be? Like car parts or something? Here have some boiled rice with three mushrooms, a muffler, an eraser, three double A batteries and a bag of Doritos!...needless to say, Joseph translated the hangul to show it was actually Bibimbap one of our favorite dishes. It is just rice with lots of cooked vegetables neatly arranged on the top… much better than mysterious “various materials”. We ended up getting it, and it was delicious!

We took much less time to cover the last two floors, since they consisted mostly of pottery, some art and calligraphy.

Room showcasing the different art forms of the Buddhists.

Me next to giant tapestries.

They even had a cool place you could make your own postcard. So hands on!

Fun with stamps!

The Buddha hall was awesome.

Big Buddha

Recreation of the Pagoda that I took a picture of in the park the first day.

After we took a 20 minute break off our feet, we decided to go back to downtown Seoul and see what the night life would be like.

Much to our surprise we saw they had set up a Huge event in the middle of town. There was a live concert, Ice skating, kite flying and booths to look at. We spent a good hour just walking around and watching poor skaters fall on their butts.

Emperor Sejong

Crazy Concert that was going on next to the rink.

Monument and Mountains.

They had awesome decorations too, it was so alive. We had a great time just walking around and listening to the music.

They even had some modern art TVdisplay that you could walk though. It was really neat, not sure I got it, but that is modern art for you.

We were starting to get hungry and were tired of walking so dinner and a movie to celebrate Valentines day seemed just the ticket. We stopped at a place called Sunshine Kebab and had really delicious Greekish food. (I use greekish to define Greek food that has previously been popularized in Australia.) We thought it was funny that our two main meals of this trip was Koreanized, American version of Australian food at Outback, and Koreanized, Australian version of Greek food….. nothing normal for us!

We then headed to one of five different theatres on the same block and bought our tickets for no other movie but “Valentines Day”.

It was cute, and we didn’t totally hate it, but it was no Love Actually…. I guess you need the British people for those extra laughs.

We decided to call it a day, and headed back to the hotel to plan our next day and get a good nights rest.