Food, Sightseeing, nothing new...
Again, some time has passed, but to be honest, nothing super super exciting has happened... Sorry! I used my day off to go to Deogsu-palace (덕수궁) near City Hall to see the palace and the area nearby.
This is at the entrance gate to the palace area. When I arrived the change of guard ceremony just started so I had to wait in order to enter. It's a lot of drums, strange trumpets and weird shouting every now and then, haha. But quite interesting to watch.
After the ceremony was over the old guards disappeared through a side street. bye bye~
I took a short video of the ceremony but I got tired of filming it, so yeah, that's what you get :D
The actual palace area is quite small compared to the other palaces, but those are also located nearby. Wait, which palace is this now? Can you tell the difference?
There were some preparations going on for a kind of event that took place in the evening but I think it was a more private thing, I didn't see any advertisements.
There were also older parts that have yet been renovated which was nice too see. It appears that a lot of the buildings are painted in a colour that looks much more vibrant and piercing compared to what it probably looked 100 years ago.
Here's a view from the Modern Art Museum dept. inside the palace area, with a view over the heart of Seoul, next to City Hall Station.
There is rather european looking building complex next to the more traditional Korean buildings here. And next to the building on the left is the Modern Art Museum (one of the many..)
This is the actual palace building. Not many tourists around, nice~
I heard some music and chanting from a little further away so I went to see what was going on. There were some women inside the building rehearsing for the event in the evening. Yeeeeeheeeeeeeee aaaaahooooooyeeeeeeeeeeheee ahaaaa yeeeee!~
I have no idea what the big bell was used for but everybody was taking pictures of it, so I thought I should do that as well...
Back outside you can see the City Hall building to the left that looks like a big wave engulfing the building in front of it which was built during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Maybe it's just a coincidence that it looks like it...maybe not, hrhr.
There was a kind of plants-flower-something festival going on with a lot of stands that sold flowers.
Really nearby is the Cheonggyecheon Stream (청계천). During the Joseon Dynasty it served as a drainage but after the end of the Korean war it was covered by concrete and a highway which was later removed and the stream was restored. And now it's a really cool place to hang out. It makes you feel like you're not in the city anymore but somewhere more rural.
Could be a stream somewhere outside, right?
The next stop was Dongdaemun History & Culture Park. I did not go inside the different museums I just wandered around the area a little bit, but I will probably come back to take a look inside :)
It's a very modern futuristic looking area with a green park area surrounding it.
I am not quite sure if the brown earth place thing used to a traditional building, a construction site or if it's just something they made to look like if there had been something..
Best Bingsu so far! Blueberry cheesecake, oh my, deliciousness!!! I wish I had a machine to make Bingsu at home <3
And some trashy English! Dependably Delightful ice cream. yo~