part 1- Gyeongbok Palace

Good morning. I got up before 6am so I could begin posting about my Sunday. That is how exciting my Sunday was!! Harland and I took a bus trip down to Seoul because there was the Lotus Lantern Festival. This festival is a celebration about Buddhism because it is always celebrated the sunday night before Buddha's birthday. I had heard alot about the festival and how beautiful it was. A friend of mine, Karyn, chartered a bus to take us from Casey directly to the area of the festival which was really nice. This bus driver knew his stuff because it only took us an hour and 10 minutes to get to Seoul. Usually it Takes 2 hours and 40 minutes on the other busses. So this in itself was a delight.

(reminder, you can click on each picture to see a larger version of the picture. I have these set as pretty small pictures because the uploading time is less, so clicking on them doesn't make them huge, but it does make them bigger)

Not only was there the Lotus Lantern Festival, but there was a culture festival going on one street over. So that was really neat. We also took the Subway over to the COEX mall (which is the biggest mall I have ever seen) for a change of scenery and to sit down for a minute. But we made sure that we got back in time for the Lantern Parade which is supposed to be one of the coolest sights around. We couldn't stay for the whole thing, as we had to meet the bus way before it was over so we could get back by 11pm. It really was one of the best days I have had here.

We took 170 photos. Now I haven't gone through them and deleted the blurry ones (hey, the night shots were hard to get with our camera, I will tell you that!) But that is still a lot of pictures so this will take at least a week to give you an idea of all the things we saw.

So first off I will show you the pictures we took outside of the Gyeongbok Palace. This is where our bus dropped us off and we left from. We did not pay to go into the palace because we went there at New Year's a year ago. But they were having some special events too, which was neat. it was not a very nice day when we started out, but by the late afternoon it was sunny and clear. So these pictures are a little hazy because of the weather.

Okay, first picture is a picture of the exit gate at the palace. The azaleas were out in full bloom this weekend... it was very pretty to walk near the parks. I should have taken more azalea pictures, but I didn't.



Here is a shot of a demonstration of some kind of martial arts. I regret I don't know what this is called. There were no signs/announcements for this.


There was also a TaeKwonDo demonstration. I love the picture of the guy in mid air. They were jumping over all the kids to kick a piece of paper at the end. Everyone made the jump, but I think only one kicked out the paper.

In this shot, if you look closely, you can see an upside down person - they would flip and tyr to break the board.


This is a picture of a Palace Drummer. You can tell he is a part of the Military Band because of his jacket. They call the jacket the "heavenly wings coat".


Here is a picture of the main Palace gate. This is where they have the changing of the guards (which I have not yet seen). You can see the modern buildings next to it. The Palace is directly in Seoul.


This is the last photo for today. This is outside the Palace grounds. I took this shot from the bus, so I guess it should have been first. Anyway, above the Picasso advertisement you can see what looks like a billboard on top of the building. But it is really a television. In this area of Seoul, there are televisions on top of a lot of buildings. I think it is pretty neat.
Stay tuned for tomorrow... I'll show you some day pictures from the festival.