Day 1: Gyeongbokgung

So after my aunt saw me to Dongnimmun Station, I headed for Gyeongbokgung which is one of the Royal Palaces in Seoul. I found that much of Seoul’s subway system was almost identical to how I remembered Tokyo’s. All you have to do is swipe your T-Money card over the reader when entering the station and always remember to swipe out when you are leaving the station or you’ll end up paying a lot. When swiping out, it will display how much you have remaining on your card. I found Seoul’s subway service to be very excellent and extremely affordable relative to Toronto. My informal gauge of how clean subway services are is by using the washrooms and I found them to be very clean at all stations I went to. One of the funny things I noticed about public washrooms in Korea is that sometimes instead of soap dispensers you will find communal bars of soap attached to a rod. All subways signs are in English and when riding the trains, the next station is announced in multiple languages including English.

I found it very fortunate that my aunt lived relatively close to many sights in Seoul. Gyeongbokgung (or Gyeongbok Palace) was only one stop east from Dongnimmun. When I got off at Gyeongbokgung Station, it was still only around 9:30AM of the day of my arrival. The sky was a little cloudy and it was spitting ever so slightly but not so much that you needed to use an umbrella. Entrance to Gyeongbokgung was only 3000Won (less than $3CAN).

Just before my arrival in Seoul, the Gwanghwamun Gate, which is the southern main entrance to Gyeongbokgung, was finally revealed and opened to the public after undergoing construction. Leading up to my trip, I looked up pictures of the Gwanghwamun on the internet and it was this great big construction encasement box with all these colourful dots and I thought how pretty. Throughout my trip to Seoul, I came across several places undergoing construction and quickly discovered that Koreans don’t like to leave anything looking ugly. If they can make something look prettier with colourful designs or lights, they will, including construction sites.

Gwanghwamun Gate really is a nice majestic sight and when you look closely, you can see that a lot of detail was put into its design and construction (the same could be said for all of the buildings located on palace grounds). There were ceremonial guards standing out front of the gate who pretty much stood still until it was time to rotate their positions. You could go up to them and take pictures and they generally wouldn’t move.

Going through the Gwanghwamun Gate revealed a large gravel court yard with another guarded gated entrance in the distance. I happened to be in the court yard while a changing of the guard ceremony was occurring. It wasn’t the full blown changing of the guard ceremony that I had seen in some of the pictures and Youtube videos but perhaps it was because of the weather, I wasn’t sure. Here are some clips of the guards that I put together.

There were more palace guards at the 2nd gate leading to the main palace building doing what they do best, standing tough.

When you go beyond the main palace building, there are 2 beautiful and quant ponds, one large and the other smaller, each with its own building/pavilion resting on its waters. One of the most beautiful things about Gyeongbokgung and I would say Seoul in general is that whenever you look beyond what is directly in front of you, your eyes meet the surrounding mountains in the distance.

While I was in front of the top pictured pavilion on the pond, a tourist came up to me and asked me to take his picture which I obliged. I asked him to do the same for me and he said sure. As soon as he took my pic and gave me back my camera, he started to walk away very fast and darted away. I thought it was odd until I looked at my camera and saw that he took a picture of the ground. I wish I had kept that picture now so that I could share what a bad photographer he was!

As you go further north, there are smaller structures and living quarters that look straight out of a 사극 drama (traditional historical drama) and to the right is the majestic pagoda and Palace Museum which I choose not to go to for now. I had been up for at least 24 hours straight at this point so I didn’t really want to push myself too much on the 1st day and I had a few other neighbouring things I also wanted to check out. One of the things I learned from my trip to Tokyo was that I much preferred seeing physical landmarks or sites or watching the pulse of the city through it’s people than being inside a museum.

As many foreigners as there were, it was nice to see there were as many if not more Koreans taking in their own bit of culture and history also. The palace grounds are quite large so it does take a little while if you intend on going through every nook and cranny. Here is a collection of videos that I took from Gyeongbokgung.

I left Gyeongbokgung through the main gates and headed south to my next destination…