Seoul Day 4

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--- Apologies for the long blog silence, apparently there are still places without wifi as standard :-o ---

My first day in Seoul without my new Taiwanese friends (they went back to Taiwan today) I decided to explore a bit on my terms. So far, we had travelled everywhere by tube, which was fine as far as it went - Seoul's underground system is clean, fast and air-conditioned, are you paying attention TfL??? But the disadvantage of travelling underground is that you never get a sense of how the city pieces together.

My first discovery was that the city centre (which includes the financial district near City Hall, the palace/tourist district in Insadong and the shopping district in Myeongdong) is actually quite small - 20 mins, perhaps 30, walking from end to end. Somehow it all seems further apart when you travel by train.

So, having made a quick stop at Tourist Information to avail myself of a Korean-English map (which was unhelpfully not to scale), I headed for the financial district and the smallest of the "Big Five" palaces there, Deoksugung.

This palace attracted me as it is apparently one of the less frequented (being smaller and less showy) and I wanted to have a couple of days of downtime after my first three rather jam-packed days. Deoksugung was the residence of the last king of Korea, after he was chased out of the main palace, Gyeongbokgung (where I was yesterday), following the Japanese annexation in 1910.

Deoksugung is also rather strange as it is a mixture between traditional Korean wood buildings - one of the residences on site (where a former dowager queen was confined during the early years of her nephew's reign until he was deposed and tried for her imprisonment) is even unpainted (most palace buildings are brightly coloured in reds, greens and blues) - and stone, neo-classical European structures.

There is a hybrid Korean-Western pavilion at the back of the complex, designed by a Russian architect. At first sight, the facade looks mostly Korean. There are subtle Western twists, though, and the inside is decked out like a Russian or European ballroom/dining room. Apparently, the king had his coffee here every day. (Including the day where his disgruntled former translator attempted to poison him through said coffee).

At the West of the palace complex, there are two full-on neo-classical buildings. One is now an art museum and the other (the residence of the king in exile from Gyeongbokgung) is currently being restored. These were less impressive to me - being quite immune to the horrors wreaked by European architects in the 19th and early 20th Centuries - but there was a pretty European-style garden outside, which I quite liked.

The garden's design looked French to my untrained eye, and my information pamphlet informed me that you could tell it was a European garden because, unlike traditional Korean gardens which are built to the rear of a building, this garden was building at the front and, moreover, contained a fountain, whereas Korean gardens traditionally feature falling water, mimicking water's natural movement.

I loitered in the palace grounds for a while - which really were quite empty and seemed to be used more as a park than a historical landmark. This was helped by the fact that there was a lot of greenery and nice shady places to sit, quite unlike the exposed and forboding grounds at Gyeongbokgung.

After a leisurely lunch, I went to the theatre to see a traditional Korean play called Miso. It was, unsurprisingly enough, a love story, in this case about a young couple who were separated by a jealous town Magistrate, who coveted the girl for himself. She remains true to her love, however, and is on the point of being executed for defying the Magistrate when her lover returns as the King's representative to punish the Magistrate and marry the girl.

The performance is aimed at foreigners and so is mostly performed in mime. I was unsure whether this is traditional, or just incorporated so non-Korean speakers can follow the plot. There was a lot of slapstick and dancing and at times it really reminded me of a pantomime (audience participation included, though thankfully not me!). There was live music, performed on what I am going to claim as traditional Korean instruments, and the instruments were used to create sound effects quite as much as to set the scene or the tone (particularly when one of the characters fell down) and was often funny. At one stage, where the Magistrate's minion comes up with the idea that the Magistrate can get rid of the girl's lover by issuing a decree to exile him, the musicians played the Mission Impossible theme tune to show how devious he was. (I was slightly embarrassed to see that I was the only one laughing, but there weren't many Europeans or Americans present).

I was a little bemused at the end, duing the marriage ceremony, when the side-kicks of each of the main characters (who, it goes without saying, have their own little romance going) held up twp wooden ducks (yes, ducks). Something to look into later, I feel.

In the evening, I wandered around the famous Namdeung market, which was filled with knock-off goods of every kind. The market is open 24 hours a day and is supposed to have quite the buzzing atmosphere. I was not that impressed but I think I timed my visit poorly, as many of the shops seemed to be temporarily closed (during dinner perhaps) waiting to open again closer to midnight. Having no fairy godmother with me at the time, I didn't linger.

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Photos

Deoksugung
with the Financial Centre's skyscrapers in the background

Korean guardian
Mythical creature - note the scales on its back and the horn

Beautiful chimneys
as per

Deoksugung Pavilion
Russian fusion-style - from outside...

Deoksugung Pavilion
... and from inside

Deoksugung Korean residence
home of the imprisoned dowager queen

Deoksugung Europen buildings
the new residence