Korea Travels - Day 2, Gyeongbokgung Palace

I was hopping to sleep in today, but Eric and I were awake before 7am. Ugh. Oh well. Today, we visited Gyeongbokgung Palace and the Korean Folk Museum. A lot of school kids were there today, too. They recognized us as Americans and yelled "Hi, nice to meet you". It was funny. Each one was eager to speak English. At one point, we had about 50 kids saying, "Hi", all at once! It was fun.

One kid approached Eric and said, "Hi, my name is....". Eric said, "Hi, my name is Eric.", and all the kids started laughing. Apparently, Eric is funny. Anyway, we entertained the kids quite a bit by waving and saying, "Hi", whenever they did. It was entertaining.

We learned a lot about Korean history and culture today. It is very interesting. In some ways, it is similar to American Indians.

This is Eric in front of the Palace.

Statues of scholars and military officers were usually erected in front of the tombs of important figures, in order to spiritually guard them. The scholar statue represents civilian literati, and that of the military officer wears armour and holds a sword, symolizing a soldier. These statues were introduced to royal tombs in Korea from 8th centry A.D.

Sotdae is a pole with a bird sculpted on top. The bird represents the symbol of communal worship, to protect villagers and to ward off evil spirits and diseases. The bird on top was believed to communicate with the gods in heaven. After villiage rites or festivals, straw in the shape of a fish and rice were placed in small lucky pockets that were attaced to the birds on top of Sotdae, to symbolize good harvesting and fishing.

As of 2:30 in the afternoon, we were dog tired. We took a nap until Sangmi finished working. She took us to a Japanese restaurant for some Udon. It is a soup with spaghetti like noodles in a broth similar to chicken. It was good. Afterwards, I came back to the motel and crashed. It was a long day.