Day 6 con’t – Palace & Seoul Tower

 After court we were pretty hungry, so we stuffed ourselves at a lunch buffet with a variety of traditional and modern Korean foods.

King Sejong

Next, we visited the statue of King Sejong, who created hangul, the written Korean phonetic alphabet, among many other achievements. Koreans are very proud of him and his gift to their people because it gave them separation from using the written Chinese language and literacy to many commoners.

Palace grounds

Then, we toured the beautiful palace grounds which were rebuilt in the 90’s after destruction during Japanese occupation.

A bunch of monkeys

In the Korean zodiac, there are 12 animals representing each of 12 years on a repeating cycle. Since Ji Hae is 12 years younger than Andy and me, we were all three born in the year of the monkey. Ji Hae also told us that people who are born in the year of the monkey are smart, skillful, and flexible ;) Little Stephen was also born in the year of the monkey.

Could be a cute little mouse, I guess :) 

Annaliese was born in the year of the rat, but she preferred to call it the year of the mouse J

Connected to the palace grounds was the Korean Folk Museum, so we visited the two parts of the interactive children’s portion of the museum. One part was about Korean mythology and how the animals of the zodiac interact with the gods to explain various aspects of life and history.

That's Annaliese with the red bear face after eating the wrong thing!

One funny exhibit was portraying the myth of the bear who wanted to become human so the gods told him he was supposed to eat garlic and mugwort for several days. So you stood in front of a screen that mirrored an image of yourself with a bear head and you would try to open your mouth to eat the garlic and mugwort only, since any other foods make your bear face turn red! The other part of the children’s museum was about Asian foods, including rice, noodles, vegetables, and spices.

Purple sweet potato ice flake - yum!!

We don't have a lot of pictures of native Koreans posted here, but a peace sign for pics is pretty common, so she's just doing what they do ;)

 We were still so full from our buffet lunch, that we just snacked on various desserts as we walked along the way that evening. Excellent parenting, right?!? Purple sweet potato ice flake not only tasted great, but was beautiful as well! It is a sweet milk base that is shaved into flakes, topped with sweetened purple sweet potato.

"Poo" emoji-shaped hateok, sorry to be gross!

Next dessert on the trail was a traditional Korean street food called hateok, but in the shape of the “poo” emoji. Strange, I know, but it was yummy! Hard to go wrong with a pancake stuffed with Nutella, no matter what form it takes!

long honey strings

chocolate peanut filling - probably not the original filling ;)

Our third and final dessert of the night *yikes* was the imperial honey dessert previously made for royalty, but now a street food that was apparently made popular recently by being on tv. We got to watch it being made as it was also explained to us (in English). It started out as a solid hunk of fermented honey that was then dipped in cornstarch. He then poked a hole in it and stretched into a large loop that he doubled repeatedly until it ended up as strings as fine hair. The strings were broken into chunks and then a peanut/chocolate mixture was placed inside before being wrapped up in the whitish honey strings. It was interesting and pretty tasty!

Annaliese got a very special souvenir, the traditional Korean formal dress called a hanbok and wore it the rest of the night

Nearing North Seoul Tower

People attach locks to certain areas of Seoul tower and throw away the key as a statement of "forever"

This city of 11 million dwarfs all other cities I've previously visited

It was dark by the time we made it to Seoul Tower. Whether because it was a Friday night, or whether it is always that busy at night, I don't know, but it took us about an hour to wait through 3 lines, ride up to the ticket area, purchase the tickets, and then ride the gondola up to Seoul Tower. There was another option to go all the way up into the donut-shaped part, but we didn’t do that part.

It was pretty late by the time we were done with the Tower, but again there was a line to get down of course, so we ended up walking down 1.6 km steps (that's 1 mile for us Americans) before riding the bus back, eating a skewer of street grilled chicken, and crashing in bed close to midnight. Again, excellent parenting ;) Annaliese handled it like a champ!