2017-04-22 (Seoul)

Didn’t know Paris Baguette is actually from South Korea. I guess Paris Baguette is very popular in Seoul.

Bukchon Hanok Village (북촌한옥마을)
As I am staying in the heart of Seoul’s city center – Insadong, it wasn’t too far for us to walk to the Bukchon Hanok Village. It is a roughly 20 minutes pleasant walk over there. We are all suffering from jetlag and wake up early in the morning around 6 am local time.

8 am in the morning in the village. Pretty empty 🙂 We get to take a picture of the village without the crowd.

Gyeongbokgung Palace (경복궁)

We actually didn’t plan on coming for the guard changing in the royal palace. Tourist Center from Bukchon Hanok Village is really helpful in recommending places to go. The person timed it so well that as soon as we quickly walk through the village, we get to the palace just in time for the guard change.

 Nothing too fancy here. The whole ceremony is translated real-time in three different languages: Korean, Japanese, and English. Honestly, without the descriptions, it is pretty difficult to understand what the guards are doing or saying because they hardly make any movement during the whole ceremony.

In short, they are just verifying credentials of the switching guards before making the official switch. The whole guard change takes around 15 minutes, but you can almost instantly get into the royal palace because the admission office is just right behind where the ceremony is.   It’s interesting to see Chinese character being used in Korea as nowadays most Koreans only use Hangul.  Beautiful pool with traditional Korean pagoda in the center. This looks exceptionally pretty complimenting the spring scenery in the garden.      This looks like the Cloud Gate in Chicago. I wonder if this work is also from the same designer.