Saturday we got a bit of a late start, but the weather was great., We met David and Elizabeth at 11am and walked to Namsangol Hanok village, which is a park with a restored traditional Korean village from about two hundred years ago. I guess it would be an upscale village because they had the emperor's father in law's house there.
Anyway as we approached the entrance someone came up to us, I assume because we were foreigners, and said they had a free English guide service to allow students to practice their English. We agreed to use the guides and we were assigned two middle school girls, Crystal and Ji Won. I put a little pressure on them by telling them that both David and Elizabeth were English teachers.
They turned out to be pretty great guides. They had quite a bit of knowledge about the village and their English was remarkably good. They didn't have long canned speeches like most professional guides, and they were genuine. I asked a couple of tangential questions and they were able to answer those too.
Yanmei likes the design of traditional Korean houses, or at least those of royalty.
After that we had lunch at a French cafe. Most big cities had a sample of cuisines from around the world, but Seoul seems to have more, especially the chains. In certain areas it could be like any US city, with Taco Bell, Starbucks, Baskin Robbins, McDonalds lining the street. I assume this is because the US 8th Army is stationed there and they are catering to all the soldiers and families.
After lunch we went to Insadong which is a shopping district that also houses many traditional Korean tea houses. David and Elizabeth took us down a few narrow alleys to find their favorite tea house.
I ordered a citronella tea because I was suffering from a cold. Yanmei ordered ginseng tea. She felt the ginseng tea really worked and gave her a lot of energy. It also gave her a severe case of flatulence. Luckily for her Insadong was crowded and noisy, so no one could hear her. 🙂
We did a little shopping or browsing in Insadong. They told us that just a few years ago it was mostly locals at Insadong, but now it is becoming more touristy and they have have a lot of shops selling the tourist knickknacks.
By good luck, May 16th is Buddha's birthday, so they have the Buddhist Lantern Parade that day, which is one of the biggest parades of the year in Seoul. David and Elizabeth haven't seen the parade even though they've been in Korea for nine years. So our plan was to have a traditional Buddhist temple dinner then go watch the lantern parade.
Unfortunately either our information was wrong or the parade was early, because when we came out to watch the parade it had almost completely passed. We didn't get to see any Buddhist monks with lanterns, but we did see a fire breathing dragon float making Godzilla roaring noises.
The temple had lots of lanterns though.
It was so great to see some old friends in Korea. I'm really glad we decided to add this side trip to our journey.
-David
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