Gyeongbokgung Palace

Things You Would Only Find in Korea-Part 3:

 Entire shopping malls that are open from 10:30 am until 4:30 am.  The area that this shopping mall is located mainly caters to night shoppers, so many of the stores do not open until late in the afternoon and stay open till the very early hours of the morning.  It is popular with the military wives over here to go to this area for "Midnight Shopping". (The actual active duty member has a 1 am curfew but that does not apply to the spouses.)  I went midnight shopping not long after I got here with some ladies.  It was crazy.  We left the base around 10:30 pm and got home around 2 am.  The craziest part-there were literally thousands of Koreans shopping while we were there.  Some people say you can get better deals if you go to late night shopping.  If you know me you know 2 things for sure:
1.  I LOVE to shop.
2.  I LOVE a good deal
But even I don't love shopping or deals enough to get them at 2 am.  It was a fun experience...once and maybe I will do it again when my mom comes to visit (she loves deals and shopping as much as I do), but there is pretty much nothing that I need that I have to buy after midnight.  It can wait until the next day and I will pay the $1.00 more.
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 That's a mouthful isn't it?  The name means "Palace Greatly Blessed by Heaven"

As I said in my last post, Uncle Joe came to visit us for about a week over Thanksgiving and we were able to do quite a bit of sightseeing.  We choose to visit this palace one day while the girls were in school.  There are numerous palaces all around Seoul, but this is one of the biggest.

It was originally constructed in 1395, but it was destroyed by the Japanese in the 1590's.  It was constructed for a second time in the 1860's on a much larger scale but once again destroyed and sat in ruins until 1990 when an effort to rebuild it to it's former glory has been ongoing to the present day.

One of the things we immediately noticed was how the mountains were just beyond the palace walls.  It made for a beautiful background.

 We decided to take the free English guided tour around the palace so that we would more about the history.

Trying to figure out how to build one of these palaces while we waited for our tour to start.

Our tour guide.  This palace is right in the middle of the city.

 This is the main palace building, where kings were crowned, met with foreign officials and conducted daily business.

The animals on the posts were there to protect the king.

His throne.

The ceiling in the throne room.

Notice the 3 aisles of stones...the center was for the king or royalty one side was for scholars and the other was for military.

This was a banquet hall.

One of the inner palace walls.

This was how they heated the buildings.  They would burn coals under the  buildings and heat the floors.  Many Korean homes still have heated floors as their primary source of heat.

We went and grabbed a quick sandwich for lunch then hurried back to see the changing of the guard.  That was my favorite part of the tour.

The guards standing right outside the main palace gate right before the new guards come to take their place.

The new guards marching in.

They hit this drum numerous times and it was so loud you could hear it all over the palace. 

The new guards standing in place.

It was cold and windy, but they didn't move.   It was so tempting to poke him to see if he would move, but I thought that was probably a bit immature of me.  So I kept my hands to myself.

It was a cold day to be walking around outside but I learned a lot of very awesome history.  I could fill this post with a ton of facts about this palace.  But you will just have to come over and visit us in order to hear them all for yourself. :)

Our on the way home picture on a very crowded subway.

As a side note, I'm having some trouble with the blog right now.  I don't know why it is sending out emails from old posts.  I had to delete all the old pictures, but I'm in the process of getting them all reloaded and put back in the posts.  I'm sorry for any extra emails you are getting.   I don't send out the emails, the blog website does and so I have no control over it.  Hopefully it will all be resolved soon.