The Jones' Korean Adventure

This is the front gate entrance to the palace. When we arrived, there was a "changing of the guard" ceremony reenactment going on. Pretty cool - lots of colorful flags and uniforms...the red men behind me are the new guards who had just taken over.

This is the main building of the palace. Inside was beautiful...a throne and tons of decorative pieces around the throne. The ceiling was all painted in bright colours...and in the middle were two gold dragons. Sam and I both wished that we had been the royalty who had lived here!

This is Sam making friends with one of the dragon gargoyle statues. They had tons of statues all over the palace grounds...really beautiful stone work!

Ok, so I was trying to be artistic in this shot. "Sam, go walk through the pillars...it'll look awesome!".

This was my favouroite part of the palace. I guess one of the kings had built this little pavilion on an island so he could go there and relax. It was named "Hyangwonjeong", which means "far reaching fragrance pavilion". We weren't allowed to cross the bridge and get closer...but we wanted to!

After the palace, we went into the Korean Folk Museum that was on the same grounds. When we came out we ran into our friends, Brandon and Rachel, who we had knows at Trinity (how do you accidentally "run into" people in a city this big?). Anyways, they told us about this great street a few blocks over that had tons of street vendors and food carts, etc. It was really cool...a great place for souvenirs and Christmas present ideas to send back home :0) We also got to try a new food selection - bi bim bap. It's basically rice, lettuce, some kind of grass, bean sprouts, something we refer to as "little brown sticks" (no idea what they are), hot sauce, and an egg on top. Sounds weird, but when you mix it all together, it actually tastes pretty good!

Oh, and we didn't get lost on the way home!

# posted by Becky @ 1:19 PM