PyeongChang 2018 - Day -3 (February 6th) Seoul

Today is April 21st - yikes, time flies when you are overworked! I apologize for the long delay, but hope that anyone who is still reading these enjoys it. Today's blog is about our 3rd day in Seoul prior to heading to Gangneung for the Olympics.

One of the ways we use to learn about a new country is to visit their museums to see what is important to them. So today, we are off to the Korean National Museum. We're glad that our walk to Seoul Station is almost completely underground because it is bitterly cold - perhaps -15 C (5 F) outside this morning.

On the subway, I noticed how completely absorbed Korean people are with their cell phones. Here is a picture.

I could probably run naked through the car and no one would notice because the 1-2 people on each car who are not on their phones are usually asleep.

The National Museum is a massive building - over 3 million square feet of space that opened in 2005 on what used to be the golf course for the US military's central command. It's a rectangular prism that is perhaps 300 m long and five stories high. In the middle is a 30 or 40 m wide arch about 3 or 4 stories high so the museum is more like two smaller rectangular prisms connected by the top floor. On the left side is a special exhibition of European painters that is part of the Cultural Olympiad. It seemed kind of strange to us to fly to Korea in order to learn more about European painters so we concentrate on the right side where all of the national treasures are exhibited.

There are three main exhibit floors. We start on the top floor where there are sculptures and crafts. There is also a section comparing the artwork from nations along the Silk Road. The second floor is for calligraphy and paintings, but these areas are closed today for some reason. However, this is also where they store donations of important individual collections to the museum. I think of how small my Olympic collection is when I see some of these massive collections. Several of the collections were typical ones like coins or pottery from a particular time period, but there are a couple strange ones. One is a collection of a particular type of furniture. Another is a collection of ceramic roof tiles. I wonder what they were thinking when they decided to collect these? The first floor houses artifacts starting with prehistory and proceeding through the present day.

Today must be "take your high school to the museum" day because the place is packed with school kids who are alternating between rushing around trying to find the particular artifact mentioned in their homework and sitting around texting their friends. 

Here are a couple of my favorite items:

But the piece that blew me away was this one:

This is the Seogamni Gold Buckle of Pyeongyang. It was discovered in a tomb near Pyeongyang (currently the capital of North Korea) and is from the period of the Nangnang Commandery (108 BC-313 AD). During this time, the Han people of China established 3 military commands on the Korean peninsula to keep the peace. Nangnang was the most northern of them. Made of 53.6 g of solid gold, the piece has one large dragon in the middle with six smaller ones around it. The piece originally had 41 blue jewels, but only 7 still exist. To think that the Koreans were producing things with this type of technical excellence nearly 2,000 years ago is amazing! My ancestors were still living in caves!

One of the other things that I saw that fascinated me had to do with the invention of hangul - the Korean phonetic form of writing. Up until 1400 AD or so, Koreans, like everyone else in mainland Asia at that time, learned Chinese pictograms. But the large number of characters to be memorized limited literacy. Then along came Sejong the Great (1397-1450):

                                   

Sejong was the 4th member of the Joseon Dynasty and ascended to the throne in 1418. He wanted universal literacy and also something that would create a Korean cultural identity apart from China. He came up with a 28 character alphabet (later expanded to 40 characters). Each consonant was a simplified diagram of the mouth, tongue and teeth while making that sound. So, for example, ㅁrepresents lips together to make the letter M (try making an m sound without putting your lips together!) and ㄹrepresents putting your tongue against the roof of your mouth to make an L sound. Vowels are made with a combination of 1) a horizontal line representing flat earth (yin), 2) a point for the sun in the heavens (yang - has evolved into a short line) and 3) a vertical line representing an upright human. So, for example, ㅗ is O, ㅜ is U and ㅏis A. These characters were originally written top to bottom, right to left like Chinese, but has been "modernized" to go left to right with spaces between words and with Western style punctuation. One thing that did not change was grouping up to three characters together into syllables. So, for example, PyeongChang Olympics is translated as: ㅍ(p)ㅕ(yeo)ㅇ(ng)ㅊ(ch)ㅏ(a)ㅇ(ng) ㅗ(o)ㄹ(r)ㄹ(r)ㅣ(i)ㅁ(m)ㅍ(p)ㅣ(i)ㄱ(k) then put into syllables like this: 평창 올림픽. Pretty ingenious, don't you think?! Anyway, this new way of writing took off like a rocket. It was so good that it was temporarily banned in 1504 because the ruling elites did not like what the lower classes were saying about them.

Sometime during our stay, I managed to drop one of my gloves. We backtracked through a bunch of galleries looking for it, but no luck. We were finally able to find a museum employee who spoke English that pointed us toward the Lost and Found. I was not clear that the employee who was at Lost and Found spoke English so I held up one gloved hand and one bare hand. The man smiled and I could see a black glove on his desk which looked suspiciously like mine. He motioned to a woman co-worker who asked us in halting English to fill out a form which asked who I was, what was lost, where was it lost, etc.. Hmm, if I knew where I lost it, I wouldn't have lost it. But I filled it in as well as I could. Then she asked for my passport. I gave that to her. Then she asked for my drivers license and I started thinking she was going to ask for my shoe size next. Just how many people are looking for black ski gloves at this exact moment? But finally, her form was completely filled out, she handed me my glove and we went on our way.

It was only about 2 pm so we decided to visit Changdeokgung also known as the Eastern Palace. We were about to take the subway back to Seoul Station and then out to the palace when I noticed that there was another combination which would get us to the palace in fewer stops. So off we went. We got on a train quite quickly and got off at the transfer station. Unfortunately, the line where we needed to go was above ground. Even worse, the train we needed to get on did not show up for about 30 minutes. We were thoroughly frozen by the time it finally got there. So much for my brilliant map reading. :=( Fortunately, the train was quite warm so we had started to thaw out about about the time we arrived at our destination.

We came out of the subway at a strange 4-way intersection (angles between adjacent streets something like 30 and 150 degrees). Signs to Changdeokgung were nowhere to be found. We stopped in a 7/11 and Beth pointed to a picture of the palace in her guide book. The store clerk pointed back toward the intersection and then off to the left. Beth, who normally has problems with her ankles, was starting to have difficulty walking after all of the steps we'd put in today. In addition, it was now around 4 pm and the temperature was starting to go down. Stubborn fools that we are, we decided to forge ahead. The walk to the palace took about 20 minutes mostly uphill. Along the way, we passed a number of places renting hanbok. When we got to the palace, we saw why. There were dozens of teenagers in fancy ancient clothing getting their pictures taken. I wondered whether there was something special about getting their pictures taken while freezing their butts off or whether it is like this all year round. Anyway, here are some of the pictures that I took of the palace:

Construction of Changdeokgung was begun in 1405 by King Taejong (father of Sejong the Great) and finished in 1412. It was burnt to the ground during the Japanese invasion in 1592 and was rebuilt in 1609. It was burnt down again in 1623 and rebuilt. Each time it was rebuilt, they remained faithful to the original design. It remained the seat of government until 1868 when Gyeongbukgung palace was rebuilt and was the home of the last emperor until his death in 1923.

In 1997, it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list  (another "cha ching" for our life list!) for "outstanding example of Far Eastern palace architecture and garden design". We agree. This palace has a much more homey feeling than Gyeongbukgung and was purposely build to harmonize with the surrounding area rather than imposing on it. We understood that the garden was really spectacular, but it was getting too late to see it.

It was a little easier going downhill to get to the subway station and the ride back to Seoul Station was uneventful. When we got back to the hotel, we noticed that the mystery restaurant in the basement was open. With absolutely no clues to tell us what kind of food they served, we decided to go for it. They brought us an English menu and we learned that the name of the restaurant was Taste of Japan. Jackpot! I don't remember what we ate, but I know that we enjoyed the hot sake after a long day out in the cold.

Steps: 14,085