Samneung Park is two stops beyond the Olympic Park on Subway Line 2 (the Seoul Train, if you will [why has it taken me so long to use that joke?]). The park is not very large, but features three burial mounds for ancient monarchs: King Seongjong (1457-1494), his third wife, Queen Jeonghyeon (1462-1530), and his second son King Jungjong (1488-1544). According to the tourist pamphlet they gave me, King Jungjong "succeeded to the throne after his elder brother, King Yeonsangun, was dethroned in a coup." I'm going assume that's why Yeonsangun didn't isn't featured in the family plot. This pamphlet is about all the English signage (beyond "bathrooms, this way" and that wasn't in English so much as in "man" and "woman" symbols) I could find, so this is the extent of anything intelligent I'm going to be able to say beyond "oooh, pretty". In fact, to my untrained eye (it's a sonic screwdriver, not a bullwhip), the temples looked pretty identical, so I'm going to proceed to conflate them based on which pictures of what turned out best.
Each of the two kings' mounds overlook one medium and one small huts that look exactly like what we as Westerners have been taught to expect from Eastern architecture.
Here's a peak under the eaves of the medium-sized one.
Inside, there was a table.
Again, absent any English signage, I can't really say why. However, the one near King Jungjong's mound did feature a picture which leads me to believe that there are still ceremonies carried out here from time to time.
The small huts contained engraved tablets. The tablets looked freshly polished, however, the characters on them do not resemble any other Hangul characters I have yet seen.
Wikipedia tells me that Hangul was developed in the 1440s. Perhaps these characters were still in use at the time our subjects ruled.
The mounds themselves tower over the huts. They are, after all, mounds.
They are fenced off at the base, but there are paths so that you can climb King Seongjong's and Qheen Jeonghyeon's. At the top, you find a smaller mound guarded by a coterie of stone soldiers, goats,
and what I choose to interpret as cows.
Between the mounds, there's a sylvan network of paths and benches where you can sit, nap (I actually saw many people sleeping on park benches; I don't think it has the same connotation here that it does in Central Park), or run around like a five year old. In my two hours enjoying the trees, I was twice fortunate enough to look up from my book as a tide of five year olds broke around my bench. It was very amusing.
Incidentally, if you're standing at the base of King Jungjong's mound and turn exactly around, this is what you see.
In addition to the shock of "OMG, I'm living on another continent!" I've also been party to the shock of "OMG, I'm living in a ridiculously huge city!" There's a story that I meant to tell on my Olympic Park post. I forgot it then, so I'll tell it now. At one point as I was riding the subway, a man stepped into the middle of my car and began addressing everyone. At first I figured he was the Korean version of the man I'd seen on the Berkeley campus talking to no one in particular about Jesus. He was wearing what looked like a sponge mitten on his hand with which he started to polish the hand rails around him. Okay, maybe he was on the janitorial staff and was just asking us to let him do his job. No, he's still talking to us, and doing a pretty piecemeal job cleaning. Oh good grief, maybe he's trying to explain how Swine Flu is going to kill us all if we don't spray everything with rubbing alcohol every five minutes. Now he's drawing on the wall with a crayon. Now he's wiping it away. It was at that point that he produced a bag full of the sponge mittens and started trying to exchange them for money. The truly funny part of this story is that he actually sold a few. The truly high-larious part is that, after he left, another guy walked into the car and tried the same routine with neck ties. Nothing like that happened today. I have yet to decide whether this belongs in the "Korea" or "big city" circle of the culture shock Venn diagram.
PS Apparently, Great Cthulhu is moonlighting as a professor of film studies and Shingu College.
PPS In response to Jeremy's comment: the going rate for souls (er, soles) can't be that much. Open air shoe shops are by far (as in orders of magnitude) the most common commercial fixture on any given sidewalk leaving Ewha. I may, in fact, be living on prehistoric Brontitall.
In paraguay ppl got on the bus and sold stuff all the time. Usually it was gum, candy, hair combs, things of that nature. Every now and then you got a good presentation. Usually they just chanted "chicle, chicle, chicle" ("gum, gum, gum") or whatever they had. I'll be interested to see if you run into more of that.
ReplyDeleteIn Cameroon they didn't actually get on the bus, but they did shake things at you (oranges, watches, banana leaves full of steamed starch, plastic bags of water) through the windows. It would be kind of nice if useful items were offered during my morning commuter bus ride here in NH now that I think about it (not that sponge mittens are useful items).
ReplyDeleteI can't believe you passed burial mounds and didn't call them barrows--a potential Tolkien reference missed.