Just Our Luck

We had a moderately low-key weekend. We had two things on the agenda: one we completed successfully, the other started out beautifully, but will have to be repeated at a later date to get the full effect. First, on Saturday we went to Seoul and set out for Gyeongbok-gung which translates to "The Palace of Shining Happiness." With a great English name like that, we just had to see it!! This is a huge sprawling estate that was the royal residence of the Joseon Dynasty kings from approximately 1400-1600. The palace was burned to the ground near 1600 during the Japanese invasions and abandonned as burnt rubble until it was reconstructed in the late 1800s. It is quite impressive. When we walked off the subway and caught our first glimpse of the mountain in the background of the front gate, Jenn actually gasped aloud. But this front gate is all we saw for the time being. This is where our bad luck comes in. The palace was closing at 4:00 and we got there at 3:45. There are about 200 buildings inside the gates and the walls, so we will return to get more pictures and learn more history. This was mostly our own fault because we left late to get to Seoul and lingered over our lattes and muffins at Starbucks, but we've had other bad luck on this trip that hasn't been our fault. If you remember when we visited Seoul Tower, we couldn't go to the top because it was under construction. Same for the Jogyesa Temple last weekend: there was full access for tourists but we couldn't see what the outside of the temple looked like because it was covered in scaffolding. Same for the DLI63 building from last weekend: although we were able to take a nice picture of the outside of this 63-storey building, the top 60 floors were unavailable to tourists due to renovations. This meant that the observation deck on floor 63 which apparently has a nice view of Seoul had been temporarily relocated to the lobby. And the view from the lobby just wasn't the same. I suspect South Korea is just one of those countries always under construction, at least it appears so this year. On Sunday, although it was bitterly cold, we were determined to walk around the pottery section of Yeoju. Our town is actually sited in the guidebooks as being world famous for its pottery and it holds annual ceramics festivals. We went into several ceramics stores and Jenn found exactly what she was looking for: A nice ceramic tea set crafted in our own little town and sold in a store owned by the parents of one of her kindergarten students. So that was successful. But as for the inside of this lovely palace, it will have to wait.