Today we planned to visit the rest of the last 2 palaces in Seoul. They scattered in a 10 miles radius. These are smaller and have less visitors than the other 3.
Today, we could relax a little. The schedules were very light. The last 2 palaces were pretty similar to the others, same design, and same color.
We were lucky to be able to take a couple pictures with the guards, who worn the old kungfu type of clothing.
They carried very large and odd looking weapons of the 10th century. Their uniforms were very colorful and unique in design. It's interesting.
After visiting the palaces, we headed straight to Jogyesa Buddhist Temple. It's a small temple in the middle of all kind of traffics.
It was barely a few miles away but took us almost an hour to get there. Traffic was backed up for miles. Not much to write about this temple.
After that, we took another short bus to the largest Catholic Cathedral in Seoul, the Myeongdong Cathedral.
Myeong-dong Cathedral is the Church for Archdiocese of Seoul and was also the birthplace for the Roman Catholic Church community in Korea. It's located in downtown Seoul and tourists frequently come and visit the place.
Myeongdong Cathedral was the first church building in Korea using a variety of colored bricks. It’s structure was built in the Gothic style.
I didn't know it was originally to be dedicated in honor of the Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception until I got to the back of the Cathedral. There they have a large area for visitors to pray for the Virgin Mary. The statue is a copy of the Lady of Lourdes.
The interior of the church is ornately decorated with religious artwork. Stained glass windows depict the Nativity of Jesus, Jesus with the Twelve Apostles, and the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary.
The crypt of the cathedral lies directly beneath the main altar. According to the info at the site, the crypt contains the relics of nine Korean Church martyrs. Two of the martyrs' identities are unknown.
Near the cathedral are other tourism spots such as Namsangol Hanok Village preserving Korean traditional houses. We could see the Namsan Seoul Tower clearly from here.
We ran across the street finding there were many nice and cozy restaurants.
We couldn't decide what to eat, so we picked the most crowded one. It was a great decision.
Here was our lunch and included drink cost roughly about $10.00 each. It's not bad at all.
After this heavy lunch, we decided to go to the Seoul Children's Grand Park. I wanted to see how this park compared to Disney Land.
To our dismay, the park was open for maintenance, but there were only a handful visitors due to the harsh weather. It was bitterly, and brutally cold. Anything had water, frozen solid.
Not much to see but since we were here, so it was good to take a long walk.
The museum is large in scope and covers a wide swath of Korean history. We spent 3 hours here, but definitely did not have the time to look at everything in depth.
One could easily spend the entire day browsing artifacts from ancient to modern Korean history. As someone who admittedly was not as familiar with the history of Korea, I definitely got a better sense of the different dynasties and historical figures.
The National Museum is an incredible free attraction that will guide you through the history of Korea and also show you about other countries in Asia too.
The museum is well laid out, monumental and uses light to highlight its treasures well. It contains a number of national treasures and is a must if you want to see the cultural side of the country.
There are 3 floors in the building.
There are thousands of artifacts from hundreds of years ago to the modern time on the first floor.
The second floor housed calligraphy and paintings, as well as donated works from individual collectors. There was a huge exhibit of artworks from America shown during our time there. It's a coincident but it was a nice bonus.
On the third floor we found many beautiful Buddhist sculptures, ceramics and art representing Asian culture.
We came all the way to the top, and to be surprised by a vast open area that opened up to the clear blue sky. The Namsan tower was clearly visible from a short distance.
The grounds outside are also good for walking and have a few statues and birds flying about. There is a small lake and the water was almost frozen solid. It must have been deep.
It took us a few seconds to realized why all the small plants were covered by straws. They were wearing clothing to prevent of being frozen in this cold weather.
Every one of them was carefully wrapped by straws even the containers worn one as well. They looked strangely but artfully.
We headed back to the city to garb something to for dinner and to refresh a bit before heading out to a huge night market, the Namdaemun Market. Traveling during winter has a couple advantages, you don't get tired too quick, and you don't sweat.
This is the largest traditional market in Korea with lots of stores. All products are sold at affordable prices and the stores in this area also function as a wholesale markets.
The Market opens very late from 10:00pm to 5:00am, and is crowded with retailers from all over the country.
The Namdaemun Market sells a variety of clothes, hats, shoes, glasses, kitchenware, toys, mountain gear, fishing equipment, stationery, music CDs, fine arts, accessories, carpets, flowers, ginseng, and all different imported goods.
There are an endless sprawl of street-vendor stalls. This market is seriously crowded. After a while, it didn't bother us so much to get bumped around.
We stopped and grazed at so many food stalls, that offered so many different types of snacks and serious foods. Our tour guide introduced us to try mandu gook, a simple and savory dumpling soup, and bindae duk, a skillet-fried mung-bean pancake.
The Dragon's beard candy makers were the most fascinating. The candy stalls drew a large wide eyes crowd with lots of ooh and aah, but it's too sweet to my liking. In another word, it's good to see but not good to eat.
We had packed quite a lot on the way back home already. We didn't want to add anything else so all we did was window shopping, and snacking.
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