Gyeongbokgung Palace

Jet lag woke us up at 7:00am after a pretty good night’s sleep so we took the opportunity for a twosome and went across the street from our hotel to A Twosome Place, a cafe chain with quality cappuccino, sweets, and some pre-made sandwiches for breakfast. It was open early, where many cafes open from noon to 8 or so - guess this is an afternoon coffee culture. Leia had a cheese bacon bagel, and Guy had an English muffin with egg and bacon. The food was basic but up to standard.

We then made our way to the subway station. We took the 2 and 3 lines to the big Gyeongbokgung palace, and arrived just in time to see the changing of the guards. This was a pretty impressive performance of many people in traditional costumes.

We paid for tickets and walked around the palace grounds in the cold, and took photos of some of the many structures in the vast grounds. This was the first built and biggest palace in Seoul.

From the palace we took the 11 bus towards city hall. Leia had a beauty treatment appointment in that area. Guy went across the street and ate all the conveyor belt sushi he could eat, an unwise decision anywhere.

Guy waddled around city hall, the plaza in front of it, and a closed palace to the Seoul Art Museum. This free museum currently featured two galleries of feminist art. One exhibit had paintings of women with themes of roots and mother earth, from a collaborative of feminist painters, alongside paintings of the impacts of war and globalization prominently featuring women in roles of caretakers or defenders. The other had paintings of places the painter had traveled like New Orleans and Monument Valley, in a flat and brightly colored style. There was also an art library where Guy had time to catch up on texts and emails.

Leia texted when she was done for Guy to return, and both ate bibimbap across from the clinic. We both walked after lunch to a fancy coffee place around the corner with samples of coffee grounds to smell, like a dispensary.

We tried to go the same way Guy had gone to the modern art museum behind the closed palace, which also closed a few minutes before we got there. Guy tasted some beondegi, boiled silkworm pupa, on his way, but Leia wouldn’t even taste one! The pupa was chewy and sort of nutty or earthy flavored.

We stood in the rain deliberating our next move for a while, then walked back and bought a delicious maple waffle. Giving up on anything else in that area we boarded a very crowded subway where everyone was smashed into the train car like sardines.

Our stop is the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, which we visited on our way to the hotel. They had a design showroom with some activities for children that Guy wanted to test out. One of them included competitive jumping up on trampolines, which seemed pretty dangerous, another walking on a treadmill to do a fashion model strut, and another used terrible AI to edit photos and give Guy bangs and an awful hairstyle to look like Korean Keanu Reeves.

We walked through the design museum's free exhibits, all the way to the street level. There was a paid gallery we decided to skip, given the high standard of free museums in Seoul.

In an elevator coming up from our subway stop, some children introduced themselves in their best English and complimented Guy’s lime-green shirt with pictures of trippy fat cats.