Gyeoungbokgung, Insadong, Jogyesa and more Markets

On Sunday we once again woke up early (still aren't used to the 14 hour time change!) and went to Gyeongbokgung, translated as "Palace of Shining Happiness." The palace was gorgeous, and covered a great amount of land.

I took a lot of pictures (which can be seen on Picasa) but here are some of the best ones!

The main gate of the palace

A throne inside of one of the main buildings

A side walkway leading back to the main gate of the palace

A Palace Guard

Right next to the palace sits the National Folk Museum of Korea. This was a great escape from the cold -1 degree Celcius temperature! There were some pretty interesting things to see here as well, and the building itself was impressive in its own right - there is a good picture on the site linked above!

After walking through the entire Palace complex, we went to the National Palace Museum of Korea. This housed many more artifacts from Korean history, but the thing I thought was most interesting was the large water clock inside. My pictures did not turn out well, but here is a link that explains it. We were there for the 10:59-11:00 time changing, and it was pretty cool to see that this huge (and very advanced for the time it was created in 1436AD) clock worked on schedule!

After our morning at the palace we went to Insadong, a market area filled with great deals and also a lot of street vendor food. We came here in search of a good authentic Korean restaurant, and found one! We ate bulgogi and a seafood/noodle dish, along with the provided norm of kimchi and other small appetizers. We also tried some new Korean beers, OB and Kass, and decided Kass was definitely the better of the two. Below is a picture of the main street in Insadong.

After lunch we went to the Jogyesa, Korea's largest Buddhist temple. The temple compound was flooded with people on Sunday afternoon, and there were lines waiting to make donations, buy calendars, and enter varied buildings at the temple. We looked in at the three large Buddha statues inside, and the smell of incense was potent all around the temple complex.

The above picture is a view from the outside of the Jogyesa. Directly to the right was a makeshift temple, also facing the Buddhas, which was also filled with people praying (shoes left outside the temple, of course!) This is also where the lines of people I spoke of earlier were. The side doors each had signs posted like the one below:

Finally, we took a walk down to the market close to our Hotel. I noticed that these are usually full of older Koreans rather than younger. We ended up buying dinner, splitting what I can best describe as a potato/veggie/onion fried pancake with a soy sauce-like sauce; it was delicious! Old Korean men walked by and smiled at us as we ate our dinner on the steps of a closed shop. One of them gave James the thumbs up sign... they loved seeing us enjoying traditional Korean food.