Consorts and Calendars

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(Warning the spicy wings last night fucked me up...)


First full day on Seoul, headed for the Geongbukgong Palace first thing in the morning.

Well first first thing was get coffee. There are coffee shops everywhere here. They are reading add prevalent all over Seoul as the trendiest neighborhoods of New York, Paris and Vienna.

This particular shop had bagel "sandwiches" we got blue berry cream cheese, it was delicious, it was a slightly toasted bagel smothered in house made blueberr cream cheese, so really nothing to complain about.

The train is much cheaper here than Japan was, with most rides costing about 1500 won. The bus dropped us off a little ways from the palace, but provided a great view.

The palace grounds are pretty impressive, they have era appropriately dressed gate guard, that attend stoic while people take selfies with them.

We planned to arrive in time for the English language tour. And we thought we would be bumped, because there was a huge gaggle of tourists, but that was for the Japanese tour, there were alot of them throughout the palace.

The tour guide was great, had her script and mostly stuck to it, when asked a question it took her a little while to translate and then translate an answer. She was clearly very knowledgeable, the only hindrance was language barrier.

This was also our first taste of regional rivalry. See the Japanese invaded the korean peninsula in the 1590s, and then in the 1870s gunboat drplomacy-ed Korea onto a terrible treaty, and then invaded again in the1910s, and exploited the land and quite thoroughly during the WWII. The Japanese burned this place down twice. So the Koreans are rightly peeved about it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasions_of_Korea_(1592–98)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan–Korea_Treaty_of_1876

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule


The reconstruction efforts have been ongoing since 1990, the present palace has been built up to about 15% of its former glory, and of that about 60% was surviving structures that just needed rehab.

It was built by the first of Joseon dynasty in the 1390s, who took over after defeating the previous dynasty. Like most palaces it was added to over time.

The big outer courtyard serves to impress guests, and provide security, back in the day there would have been stuff here, but now there are just some trees.

The inner courtyard has the throne room. This is where the king recieved official guests and conducted state matters and various ceremonies.

Behind that were the actual chambers for the king, and queen. Which were seperated. The king had maid-nurses to look after him and a half dozen concubines. The queen managed the palace affairs. They met once a month to attempt to create an heir, at the best time of the month according to the stars and moon. Meaning thy had astronomers and calendaronomers encouraging them to bang. If the queen didn't conceive, she would adopt one of the sons from the concubines and everyone pretended it was legitimate.

You might notice on these houses there is a sort of pit or door on the side that seemingly goes into a basement. This is actually a fire pit for the heating system. They would build fires here, and the smoke would run under the stone floor to the chimney, heating the room from the floor up. This also explains why Koreans sit on the ground, and have no furniture.

There was a great banquet area. Because you can't be a King without throwing gutwrenchingly ostentatious parties. It even is surrounded by a pond for boating, or when the Chinese envoy drinks too much rice wine and needs a quick dunk to sober up.

The palace grounds is also home to the first (according to the slightly biased your guide) use of grid-level electricity in East Asia. One of the forward looking crown princes installed electricity, in what today is the president's house.

We witnessed the changing of the guard ceremony.

I don't speak Korean, I wasn't in a XV century army. But I recognized the commands given by the captain of the guard, with a 10 minute warm up, I could have been one of these guys in costume (except for my green eyes, lack of wispy black beard and Brown hair). It's interesting how a XVIII century Prussian based drill and ceremony manual differs only in language from something born 5000 miles away and 300 years earlier.

After this we went the museum of all the relics and stuff that would have been IN the palace if it were in use. I made use of their toilets in a catastrophic way. The museum was free, it was a great museum, all the better due to the sans cover charge.

Here we learned about the day to day lives the king and queen and princes and courtesans and administrators.

The most interesting thing was the fastidious recording of everything. All the state goings-on were recorded, any official metric the king had, had court stenographers noting everything. These notes were kept up until today, the interesting part was the confidentiality of it, as long as the king was seated, these records were sealed, even to himself. And crown princes were strongly encouraged to read the chronicles of previous Kings, to learn the ropes before actually handling the fate of the nation.

Also administrators and beaureaucrats had to pass an exam before recieving the title and position they sought.

We intended to go to a dumpling place, but I was given the wrong address so we walked into a traditional neighborhood on a hill. With old timey though still occupied houses, very much like Kyoto, with very traditional Korean homes. Unfortunately, I was desperately looking for another toilet to desecrate, so after discovering this was the wrong address, we found a coffeeshop, with a toilet for me to defile. Fortunately upstairs from the cafe was a probiotics shop making smoothies with kimchi biotics, helped my tummy calm down.

We reassessed, and got ourselves to the dumpling place. Had a variety poster of steamed and fried pork dumplings of various varieties.

This shop was next to a craft mall, a multi storey open air Mall with handmade and probably-fell-off-the-truck stuff. We got some gifts for family and friends.

After this we went home to research dinner. We decided on bi bim bop, find a famous place. Went to it, and was underwhelmed. There was a stove bowl bibimbap a regular bubimbap bowl, and a soup. It was ok, wasnt bad, and it was alot of food for cheap. But given the supposed reputation of this place, we were expecting more.

After this we wandered into the Sinchon/Dongdaenun neighborhoods. This is the college area, there are at least 3 universities here, so the barscene is pretty great. We found a place with inexpensive beers, laura got some craft beer and I got the "house beer" which is akin to a black and tan. It's Beck's (who knew they had that over here) with Asahi Black floated on top.

After beers, we went home to bed.