Day 165: Traditional Korea

It was another nice day out, and I headed out with just a few things left on my list of things I wanted to see. I started off walking to Gyeonbokgung Palace, which is the most famous of the palaces in the city, but one I missed earlier because the rain forced my day shorter than I had planned. Before going to the palace I stopped at the Traditional Folk Village right next to it.

The Folk Village has two sections, an open-air museum of statues and reconstructions of traditional buildings, and an indoors museum covering history and culture in Korea. Since early Asian culture and tradition (and history) isn't something I know a lot about, I thought it would be a good place to get a bit of a foundation - especially since it's free. The outdoors section had some stone figurines and tablets, but the most interesting part was the buildings. In addition to different types of traditional buildings there was also a reconstructed street depicting buildings of about 50 years ago, including a comicbook store which I thought was a bit funny.

Indoors there was quite a bit to see, and thankfully all translated. Following all the different empires, wars and alliances of earlier history was a bit tough, but I found the sections on traditional life, describing marriages, farm planting and harvesting, adaptation to the seasons, building techniques, ceremonies and festivals all very interesting.

With that all done, it was time to move on to the palace. There were many different structures and complexes within the walls - many of which are only reconstructions of the originals, but still very pretty. My favourite was a shrine in the center of a pond with the mountains in the background.

I also caught the changing of the palace guards. I'm assuming it's just for show, but many aspects are similar to the other guard changing ceremonies I've seen - just a lot fancier.

I didn't a lot more walking around the city center and spent some more time around Hongik since I liked that area so much. I found a small park in the area with a busker on a keyboard working his way through Oasis, Radiohead and Coldplay songs. He was surprisingly good, and I sat under a tree nearby and thought about one of the many programming problems I think about in my moments of idleness (this time it was about how to program digital civilizations with the ability to develop and evolve culture, and all the complexity culture entails).

I then grabbed the subway back towards city hall to find the Chongdong Theater. A day earlier I had reserved a ticket for a performance called Miso, which is an original musical with traditional Korean music and dance. Somebody else in the hostel recommended it highly, and I thought it would be something different and interesting. It was a pretty small theater so everybody had a great view, and it was a really nice show. It was all just instrumental and dance, but followed a love story about a couple falling in love, being separated by a jealous official and eventually being reunited and getting married. As is often the case, the real highlight of the performance for me wasn't the lovers, but their two personal servants / friends who had a much more energetic role.

A busy day, but a good way to spend my last day in Seoul before heading west into the mountains.