Old Korea

Saturday I went with Grace and her family to Seoul.  Her mom knows some of the history, so she acted kinda like my personal tour guide.

We stopped on the side of the road for this shot.  I like this shot b/c on the right you can see the old-style roofs, and in the distance you see huge buildings.  If there were a theme for Korea it'd be: Old meets New.


We went to some antique stores, and I saw the original crown that the king of the Chosun dynasty wore.  There was no photography allowed, but of course we snuck one in.  The thing was magnificient!  The flash of my camera kinda reflected badly on the glass, sorry, but trust me it's pretty cool looking.  

We parked right across from this huge stone, which is basically the Korean Declaration of Independence from the Japanese, who invaded in

 1910.  They were there until 1945, after WW2.  That's when Russia was supposed to "help" N. Korea and USA was supposed to "help" S. Korea, but instead we just split them and made them sympathetic to our respective politics.  Obviously that's Grace in the picture; she's cold. 

This building is where the King worked during the Chosun dynasty (July 1392- August 1910).  The Korean alphabet (hangul) was created during this time by King Sejong.  Before this there were a couple of "alphabets," all using the Chinese characters with special Korean

 characters that would help with the grammatical differences.  Very confusing.  Hangul is made

 up of 14 base consonants and 10 base vowels, and when added to them you basically get a total of 38 letters.  The letters are made from a vertical line (representing man), a horizontal line (representing earth), and/or a circe (representing heaven).  The shapes of the consonants g/k, n, s, m and ng are graphical representations of the speech organs used to pronounce them.  After you learn how to pronounce the letters, they really do make sense because your mouth is literally forming the shape of the letter, while pronouncing it.  Words are made up of 1 or more syllables, which consist of 2-3 letters, occassionally 4.  The syllables are written clockwise in a block format.  Take the word "hangul:" the 'h' would be on top, the 'a' to the right, and the 'n' underneath, making the first syllable, the to the right (or occasionally underneath) with no space, the the 'g' would be on top, the 'u' to the right, and the 'l' underneath, making the second syllable.  There would be a space between "hangul" and the next word, and so on.  It's one of the most accessible languages in the world, preciselly because it was created instead of evolving, like ours (and most Western languages), over thousands of years.  

We went to a fancy tea place, fancy enough to have celebrities visit and sign their wall.  It was

 really good tea.  I ordered jujube tea, which came, not in a cup, but in a bowl and was so thick as to almost be soup.  By far the most filling tea I've ever "eaten."  The view out the one small window was pretty impressive.  This part of town seemed a little older, and you would commonly see the traditional roofs (as see out this window) on buildings.  It was near the King's palace and, I suspect, a rich neighborhood.  The antique places we went to were in this area.

This post is kinda out of order, but that's due mainly to the pictures.  Moving them around on the blog is really clunky so I had to cut-and-paste my paragraphs to fit where the pictures were, haha.  Oh well.