Gyeongbokgung Palace and National Folk Museum

Last night I went to bed at about 1am, but I couldn't get to sleep until about 4am.

This morning I woke up at 7am, then actually got up about 7.30am. I wrote the blog post for the 2nd of October, then me and Moccle went out to get the underground train to the Gyeongbokgung palace. First we got the train going in the opposite direction to what we wanted, but luckily Moccle realised, so we got off at the next station and got a train going in the right direction.

We spent quite a while looking round the palace. Outside they had skill guard people in traditional dress, who just stand still and occasionally march around. Lots of people would get their photo taken when standing next to one of the guards, so I took a photo of Moccle doing that. When we got inside the palace, a random woman came and stood next to Moccle, then her husband took a photo of them, SKILL!

After walking round the palace a bit we went to the Korean National Folk Museum. We saw some people doing a dance outside, which went on for ages, and with the heat and the costumes, the dancers must have been very hot.

Inside the museum, you couldn't use flash or tripods (though I did see a few people using flash), so I had to make do with high ISO images, which don't look that great.

After we'd been in the museum, we carried on looking around outside it, and they seemed to have lots of events on for children, like mask making, lantern making, a game with a giant dice, and various other activities. We bought some food from an old woman for 2000 Won, not knowing what it was. I still don't know what it was, but it was quite chewy and tasted a bit like bonfire toffee (though it didn't look chewy at all).

We went back into the palace grounds for a bit, then we tried to find Insadong, which is meant to have lots of tea shops in it.

We walked around for ages trying to find Insadong, but never did. We did find the president's house or something, which had lots of guards around it. And we also found a long stretch of flowerbeds, where lots of people were taking photos and having their photos taken. At the end of it was a big statue and water fountains that come up out of the ground, which children were playing in, and lots of people were watching.

Eventually we gave up trying to find Insadong, and went to a Metro station instead to try and get a train back towards the hotel. Unfortunately, we couldn't work out what train we needed. A Korean couple that spoke English tried to help us, but then we couldn't remember what route they said we needed to take, so we just walked all the way back to the palace, and then got the train back from there, since we knew that that would go to where we wanted.

When we got back to the hotel I copied one of the memory cards I'd filled today to the laptop, which took about 2 hours, and also finished writing yesterday's blog post, and started writing today's blog post. After that we went out to get some food.

We went to a different place to yesterday, but in the same district. It was a similar setup, but instead of having the main dish all mixed up in a big pan, you just fried little bits of bacon up on the pan thing in the middle of the table, then you had the side dishes which you would eat with the bacon bits.

It was quite expensive though, we thought it was going to be 9000 Won, but actually it was 18000 Won (9000 x2 people), so a lot more expensive. Then it was also 2000 Won for a bottle of 'Cider', which did say 'Cider' in Hangul on the bottle, but was actually just fizzy apple drink. Also, some of the bits of bacon had bone in them, which was annoying. The Kimchi pancake was nice, but I still don't like actual Kimchi. The soup was also alright, though quite spicy.

After finishing our meal we went for a walk down by the river, and there was quite a few people down there (it was about 10.30pm), mostly couples. We came back to the hotel, and watched The Mask of Zorro while writing the rest of today's blog post and copying the rest of today's photos to the laptop.

I sorted out the photos, then moved them across from the laptop to the two hard drives.

Food
Breakfast: Slice of toast with strawberry jam x2; cup of fizzy grape drink.
Dinner: Bits of bacon; Kimchi; Kimchi pancake; bowl of (maybe ginseng?) soup; Lettuce leaves; Weird tasting leaves; spicy bits of some vegetable; some spicy small sliced vegetable (shallots maybe?); some sauce stuff; fizzy apple drink.