Per aspera ad astra

The last part of my bus tour was a visit to Changdeokgung (spelled in five million different ways in English) Palace; one of the five major palaces in Seoul. Because of issues with people disrespecting the site in the past, now you have to go on a guided tour to be able to see the palace/grounds. I arrived around 4, too late for the last English tour (and no Russian offered, sadly). However, I arrived just in time to join up with the next Korean tour. I figured I could Google exactly what things were later, read the posted signs for the general idea, and still have a pretty good time.

Donhwamun Gate- the entrance/main gate to the palace, and where I joined up with the tour (If you’re looking for a better explanation/direct tour of the palace, it’s already been done).

In Russia I loved taking photos of the beautifully ubiquitous onion domes- here’s my Korean version

This next photo is from the Secret Garden, the part of the grounds that the palace is most famous for. For those who, like me, assume a palace is a giant building with dozens of rooms and gilded furniture, Korean palaces might come as a little bit of a surprise. Obviously there are buildings with quarters and little gazebos and kitchens/libraries/etc, but it’s all spread out over a massive area and walking the grounds is really the majority of the tour.

The Secret Garden is the midpoint of the tour, halfway through the palace area. It’s really surreal to be sitting in this serene place with the knowledge that the bustling metropolis of Seoul is all around, out of sight if not out of mind.

This was about the time on the tour when I met a guy from India studying at grad school in Seoul and got a free Coke!

This part of the palace is designed differently from the rest (according to what my new Indian friend could translate) and was a place for meditation and philosophizing.

Finally we have the living quarters for the emperor’s wife (his first couldn’t bear him a son, so he picked up another. beats the Henry VII way of doing things)

Apologies for the late conclusion to the Seoul City Bus Tour; I’ve been swept up in orientation and week one of classes. Hopefully now that we’re more in the swing of things, I’ll be able to take some time out and explore some more- my roommate and I are already plotting a trip to the sauna (Russian баня) on Sunday!

After the National Museum, I hopped back on the bus and got off again at Namsangol Hanok Village where the city has restored five traditional Korean houses. I have a big penchant for seeing ancient/historical sites blending in with modern-day locales (see: the Roman Forum) and this fit the bill.

The kid below was super cute and totally hamming it up for the camera. Tyra would be proud.

I took more photos of the village, but they’re pretty basic. The village itself was cool to see, and you can’t beat the free admission :).

The next stop was Seoul Tower, which involved a prolonged journey up Mt Namsan (which, thanks to Wikipedia, I now know means South Mountain and is a common name). Of course I felt increasingly lazy as I saw men and women of all ages and wardrobes hoofing it up the mountain themselves, but that’s besides the point.

The (very partial) view from the top. You can kind of tell, but Seoul is huge. I tried to get a panorama shot, but it just doesn’t come close to conveying the sheer size of the city.

Apparently it’s a tradition to put a padlock up at the top of the mountain. There was also a performance area where a Western jazz band played, followed by some sort of Asiatic warrior procession and a dancing swordsman.

I was getting hungry and fell for the tourist trap of eating at Seoul Tower. (On that note, I’ve been having more and more different kinds of Korean food lately- yum!)

I would begruge my meal more if it hadn’t been so tasty and comparatively ($8) cheap for so much food and actual sushi. More on Korean delicacies once I feel like I’ve tried all of the basics. The good news? I love kimchi!

Just before I took off again,  I snapped a photo from the (almost) top- I didn’t feel like paying for the observation deck since it was still fairly cloudy out. Regardless, it was a beautiful view.

Only one more destination to go (it’s a fairly photo-heavy one)!

Sunday was my last day of (relative) freedom for a while, so I decided to go out and play tourist to get better acquainted with my new transient home. I had read about the Seoul City Bus Tour online and decided it was probably the best bet. I grabbed my Family Mart Starbucks-to-go and headed out.

After successfully navigating the Seoul Metro (much easier than I expected- all of the stops were announced in Korean and English), I found the bus tour, paid my 10,000 won (~$10) and was off! The first stop was the National Museum of Korea.

The building was only built a few years ago and is purportedly one of the most earthquake-resilient structures out there (can withstand a 6.0). It’s also cool-looking and very well laid out. I stuck mainly to the first floor in the interest of time and not burning myself out on museum-goodness. Half of the floor has archaeological artifacts from several centuries BCE to right around the Common Era; the other half has more ‘modern’ historical exhibits.

This is the middle area of the museum- there are windows all around to let sunlight in (except in the exhibit halls) and the layout is very open in general.

The museum is on a huge plot of land that has little parks, a reflecting pool, random pagodas everywhere, and this place, called Dragon Falls. There weren’t very many people wandering around (or even at the museum) because of the weekend, so things were quiet.

My favorite part of the museum was this room dedicated to Hangeul, the Korean alphabet that was introduced in the mid 15th century. Up until then, Koreans used the Sino-Korean hanja which was heavily influenced by Chinese. Part of the room contained a lot of documents from when hangeul first was introduced (Point #1: old books = awesome). The other part focused on the linguistic origin of the alphabet- which is really simple and straightforward. The photo above has most of the Korean consonants- all of the bottom three rows are essentially derived from the top row of 5 basic consonant sounds. Those consonants are derived in turn from the shape your mouth/tongue makes when forming the sound (Point #2: linguistics = awesome). Okay, I may be a little geeky.

I left the museum and walked around a little. One side of the building faces the mountains and city; the other faces this set of apartment buildings that go back about a half mile and bring back some pretty strong Russian/Soviet-apartment nostalgia (efficient and nondescript hunks of building).

Join me next entry for the next leg of my bus tour about the city

At around 1 pm Central Standard Time (GMT-6) Thursday, I got on this big, blue, lovely plane.

At around 4:30 pm South Korean Standard Time (GMT+9) on Friday, I got off this cramped, ugly piece of junk. Okay, in all seriousness it was a good flight, minus the fact that I had a middle seat. Fortunately, I was wise enough to invest in a neck pillow at O’Hare and sleeping pills before the trip and spent most of the flight somewhere between sleep and blurry unconsciousness.

At any rate, I survived and found my way around to customs/baggage/currency exchange, figured out how to use pay phones, hopped on a bus headed downtown and met up with someone from my school who brought me here:

My lovely entryway with a step to remind you that SHOES ARE FORBIDDEN inside. It’s a small entryway and I almost stepped up onto the wood floor to get out of my pseudo-guide’s way and got snipped at. Okay! No shoes!

Here’s the apartment itself. My room-mate of undefined origin comes on Sunday, so I managed to snag the better of the twin beds (about a 1% upgrade, but the sheets are from Bedding Korea) Off the edge of the photo on the top right is an air conditioner which is primarily not featured because it’s not hooked up to work. For those unfamiliar with Korean summer weather, Friday was a nice toasty 85 degrees. My guide promised it (and the TV) would get fixed later.

Across from the beds/wardrobe is the mini-kitchen. This apartment is so Russian-feeling it makes me giggle. Even the stove needs to have the gas switched on and off. Which, after my guide showed me, made me curious about the shower situation…

Here’s the bathroom (which is just off to the side of the entryway). Don’t be fooled by that closet and machine in the back, that’s the washing machine that only the cleaning lady knows how to operate. First of all, I was excited to see a non-squatty potty PLUS toilet paper. Then, I noticed that I didn’t see a shower. That’s because the shower(head) is hanging up right to the left of the sink and that drain on the floor is indeed the shower drain. Interesting, but manageable.

The harder part came when I wanted to shower after unpacking last night. My guide (who also sort-of told me how to get to the subway station and to work at 9am on Monday before jetting off) told me that in order to get hot water I needed to press the hot water button. This button is on the thermostat right above the shelf in the entryway photo. Easy- I press the button and hop in the bathroom to shower. However, my guide neglected to elucidate that when you press this magic button, the water goes to exactly one temperature: slightly below boiling. Now I like hot showers, but this was extreme. I had already managed to lather myself up with the increasingly warmer water and needed at least to rinse off without losing part of my skin, so I hopped my soapy self out of the bathroom-shower across the little hall and hit the button again. I rinsed off quickly as the water turned back to its other temperature- slightly above freezing. At this point, I was desperate to wash my hair, so I repeated the process of lathering up my hair using the rapidly heating/cooling water, hopping out into the hall to press the button and rushing back in again. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. Either there’s some trick that I haven’t figured out yet to keep it at a reasonable temperature or Koreans take the shortest showers in the history of mankind. Hopefully when my roommate comes on Sunday with the guide we’ll be able to figure it out together, so we don’t have a peepshow every time one of us gets stinky.

Anyway! After my shower and a quick run to the grocery store for juice, I managed to fall asleep from about 10pm-4am. I figured out how to hook myself up to some free stolen internet (however precariously- see my laptop next to the stove?) and looked up my neighborhood and how to get around until I got sleepy enough to nap. Now it’s about 10 am and I need to shower (eep), change and explore the neighborhood a bit. Ahn nyeong haseyo!

My aunt had asked me to put up some photos of the flooding that’s been going on in the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City area. Fortunately, my apartment is far enough north that I didn’t have to deal with the water, but most of downtown wasn’t so lucky.

This is the entrance for Waypoint, the women’s shelter that the KDChis volunteered at.

And here we have the roadriver, just to the left of the entrance to Waypoint.

Mercy Hospital had to be evacuated last week, so we ventured down there, passing this street on the way.

The sandbag wall on the side of Mercy.

This is Mercy’s parking lot-turned-pond.

There are plenty more photos and stories on the Gazette’s website, but suffice it to say that this was devastating to the area (my photos are only from the very edge of the destruction). Early estimates of the damage in Cedar Rapids alone are hovering around $800 million, my former boss’ house is half underwater still and there are thousands of people without homes or workplaces. It’s going to take a while to clean this up.

Piell and I got adventurous today and brought out one of the many new cookbooks my mom got for me on the clearance rack at Borders recently. I’m too tired to elaborate more, but check out the lovely results!

Salmon quiche in a potato pastry crust, with some asparagus on the side.

For dessert, we were a little less original and had some Americanized pain au chocolat (Ghirardelli chocolate wrapped up in Pillsbury crescent rolls)

Nom!

Hello! 언 녕 하 세 요! This is only a test.

As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to experiment more with my lovely collection of cookbooks. On Sunday, I opened up the Greek cookbook and here are the results!

Salad: Mediterranean-style lettuce with red peppers, parsley, feta cheese and Italian dressing.

Dinner: Lamb cooked with tomatoes, garlic/herbs, and orzo pasta, topped with a four-cheese blend. The little egg roll-type things are feta + herbs wrapped in phyllo (a little tricky to handle, but oh-so-tasty).

And of course, Araby patiently waiting for a piece of lamb to accidentally fall off the table. Isn’t he dashing in his bandanna?

Finally, totally unrelated to cuisine, here are some of my recent experiments with the color effect feature on my sweet little camera:

Jordan and Coley, respectively, at Hamburg Inn for Jordor’s birthday.

Pretty tulips in Mt Vernon.

Meet the new love of my life.

Love at first sight test drive? I think so

My car (Q) and I have a love-hate relationship as of the past month.

Love = top down on a beautiful spring day, wind in my hair, blasting the best of the crap on the radio…

Hate = What is that on the passenger seat, you say? Could it be… my muffler? You betcha!

Anyway, this is just part three for Car Tribulations: Take April (see part one: axle breaking; part two: windows feisty and totally uncontrollable). Rather than spend the $500 to put a new muffler on (and replace a second muffler which is leaking!), I just told the Meineke guy (officially the FIRST helpful mechanic I’ve had) to put a stupid pipe on, under the assumption that I’ll get a new car soon. I certainly hope I will; despite the financial strain it’ll impose on me, it can’t be much worse than what I’ve had to go through already with poor Q here.

Grr.