This is not where I work.

This is Gyeongbokgung Palace, the largest of the royal palaces in Seoul. It's actually closer to Ewha than my previous adventures have taken me, but you have to change subway lines to get there and that's my excuse for taking a month to make this most obvious journey. It's pretty clear once you get off the subway that you aren't going anywhere 'normal.'


This is a replica of an ancient, Guardian of Forever-style gate. According the placard, anyone who walks through it "will never be old forever" (those people standing around it first walked through in 1972). I've seen too many episodes of the Twilight Zone to believe anything good can come of that.


These stone lamps as you walk up to street level also are not ordinary fixtures of Seoul subway stations (at least not the five or so that I've seen in my time here). Interesting side bar, as I made my way down this hall, I passed a group of Korean Cub Scouts leaving the palace. They looked remarkably like our Cub Scouts, right down to the ridiculous Webelos symbol (while I techincally know what a 'Webelos' is, I will deny it upon questioning). I then passed a handful of teenage girls wearing what looked like US Boy Scout uniforms. I don't know if that means Scouting is a co-ed venture in Korea, or if they were 'adult' (they looked a little young for that) women leaders like we have in the States. Or maybe Korean Girl Scout uniforms look like US Boy Scout uniforms. I don't know.

The first thing you see leaving the subway is the entrance to the Seoul National Museum. I didn't go in today, but I should soon. Assuming I'm interpreting the English signage correctly, "in honor of the 100th anniversary of the opening of the first museum in Korea" admission is free for all of 2009. The second thing you see (or, at least, I saw) leaving the subway is this.



These are South Korean beefeaters. Each of them carries an Eastern halberd, a sword, and a bow (I didn't see if they had any arrows) at their hip. There were about six of them stationed before the gates of the palace. They stand like statues, both in that they are at rigid attention and (just like the beefeaters) in that tourists have no compunction agains treating them as props for photographs.


The throne room is immediately opposite the gate.




Like pretty much everything else here, it is constructed of wood (my electronic guide device tells me that it's all pine, other woods being unworthy of royal construction). One unfortunate effect of all this is that none of it is particularly ancient. The oldest structures here date back to the 1870s, and many are even younger than that. Guide-a-tron characterizes Korean history as periods of construction punctuated by the Japanese showing up to burn everything down again. I don't know enough about the history of the area to say how fair that characterization is (when the recording got around to telling me about the invention of Hangul, it said "this has been considered the most important academic achievement in the history of Korea; now we can write our own language in our own characters, instead of Chinese characters; if we could not do this, we would continue to be a colony of other nations without our own identity;" guess we're all still subjects of Rome...except for you, Marilia).

Speaking of which, just to the west of the throne room stands what used to be the offices of the royal cabinet, where Hangul was supposedly unveiled for the people.


When I stumbled upon it, it was in special decor.


The historical society (or whoever) in charge of the palace was reenacting a feast for the king and his advisors. It was a very colorful display of historical regalia, and I got to see a guy pretending to be king carried in on an open-air sedan chair, but the ceremony itself was actually kind of boring. Despite having a full compliment of musicians present (about 15 woodwinds and 15 strings), the bulk of the ceremony was conducted to recorded music with narration. Here are highlights from what I stayed long enough to see.


More swords and halberds (always more swords and halberds).





The aforementioned wall flowers, er, musicians.



It's good to (pretend to) be king.



Hail to the king, baby!

Spiritual beliefs seem to have factored into a lot of the ornamentation and some of the construction of the various buildings in the palace. The Chinese zodiac featured heavily into the stonework surrounding the buildings.




Guide-a-tron routinely mentioned "the traditional Asian practice of geomancy." Every direction has a guardian spirit (Black Turtle guards the west) whom the corresponding palace gates were somehow supposed to invoke. The gates also had dedicated purposes according to what direction they faced (one for the king, one for the queen, one for the bodies of those who died in the palace...). According to one placard, Seoul was chosen as the site for the capital because it was "geomantically favorable."

The ornamentation of individual buildings was also spiritually guided. Every ridge of every roof (and there were often eight of them on a building) featured this procession of creatures marching off the edge.



I'd first noticed these statues on the rooves of the temples in the shadow of the burial mounds (excuse me, Brian, the barrows) at Samneung last weekend. I didn't know what they meant at the time. Thanks to Guide-a-tron, I can now say that the dragon at the back represents the king, the leading figure is supposed to be an ancient Chinese Buddhist monk, and somewhere in there is the Monkey King. Like the geomantic guardians, these are supposed to ward off evil spirits. I'm going to assume that it's the Monkey King who does most of the actual warding. Everyone else is just his entourage.

Beyond the functional buildings (throne rooms and cabinet offices), the palace is a hodge podge of ceremonial buildings associated with different monarchs who constructed them, lived in them (often while the Japanese were busy burning down the rest of the palace), and tried to impress foreign dignitaries with them.



This pavilion-on-a-pond served primarily the third purpose.



This was a sub-palace devoted to consecrating the burial portraits of dead Emperors (according to Wikipedia, Korea declared itself an empire in the late 19th centure to assert independence from China).



Here is a complex where the king lived while the main palace was being reconstructed post-Japanese mayhem.



Here's a building the king once used to house "many thousands of books" (this one's for your coffee table book, Mom).


I get the distinct impression that the stairs want to eat me (or rescue me from the Swamps of Sadness...)



This is just pretty.


The National Folk Museum of Korea also shares grounds with the palace. Like the Seoul National Museum, it is free for the remainder of 2009. I was too tired to museum walk by the time I got there, but they did have an outdoor complex with statues (!) that I wandered through before calling it an afternoon. Most of them were ancient totems from various regions of Korea. Their placards all say that they were placed just outside of villages to ensure propserity and guard against evil. Their different styles and constructions are meant to reflect the diversity of a disunified ancient Korea.



Does anyone else remember Harry Belafonte's appearance on the Muppet Show?


I'm glad to see that some concepts (namely, the fear of clowns) are universal across all human cultures.


Apparently, so are vampires. (Recall that the placard I mentioned above said that these totems were supposed to represent the good and friendly spirits of the community they guarded. Maybe there is room for fans of "Angel" on this blog, after all...)


The placard beside these statues talked about how statues (and natural rock formations) resembling male and female genitalia were prayed to for fertility (and to bring male children...) I like to think that, somewhere out there, John Ashcroft's head just exploded.


I'm not sure how ancient or traditional these were, but I thought this depiction of the Chinese zodiac as warriors was pretty cute.


It's good to see he can still get work after "Return of the Jedi."


I didn't realize that any of the Long Patrol were stationed out here.

Someone once suggested that I would have to learn how to say "I'm not from here" in Korean. My Mom's response: "No he won't." Twice today (once at the palace; once on the street looking for dinner) I was approached by college-age girls who had been assigned by their English teachers to "interview native English speakers." The questions were what you'd expect from a foreign language class: "Where are you from? What do you think of Korea? How do you like the food?" Then, as I was leaving the folk museum, I was suddenly surrounded by a gaggle of five year olds chanting "where are you from?! where are you from ?! where are you from?!" (they were almost shouting it). After I told them, they ran off and did the same thing to a group of blonde Canadians just entering the museum grounds. Aside from the various shop and restaurant owners who don't even try to interact with me in Korean, this was my first direct experience with "you're not from around here, are you?"

Final story:
Like I implied above, I tried to be a bit more adventurous with dinner today and actually jotted down the name of a Happy Cow-recommended restaurant on a subway stop between Ewha and Gyeongbokgung. Unfortunately, I only jotted down the subway stop (because why would you make a city so dense you can't see all the cross streets from any given corner?) and I wrote down the name in Western characters, rather than Hangul (making both the signage and the college girls somewhat useless as guides). I did find a place to eat, though. It was a "traditional Korean porridge restaurant." I had sweet pumpkin porridge (think butternut squash soup only thicker and sweeter and they give you hot sauce to put in it). They served it to me in a big bowl with a wooden spoon that was too large for any human mouth, a set of chopsticks, a 'normal' Korean spoon (Korean spoons have handles twice as large as US spoons), and a bunch of little side dishes. Failing to notice that one of the side dishes was, in fact, an empty bowl, I tried to eat the porridge directly from the big bowl with the wooden spoon (which, as I said, was larger than any human mouth). My waittress stopped me in the middle of my second bite to demonstrate how civilized people use the wooden spoon to ladle the soup into the empty bowl and then eat it with the normal spoon.

That's right.

They gave me a PhD.

PS This must be one of those "mountains" everyone keeps mentioning. I'll refrain from making the obvious comment about the trees that go all the way to the top.



PPS It happened again: as I left the subway heading towards the palace, someone started trying to sell sunglasses.