Last night, Sarah and I went to see Miss Saigon (in Korean) at the Seongnam Art Center. Wonderful show and a really nice evening. We got all dressed up and went out for Thai food beforehand. Lovely.

And today, on this beautiful day (70° finally!), I decided to do some palace hunting. I went to Changgyeonggung Palace. (창경궁... much easier to read in Korean than in English with 5 Gs... hmmm.) Parts of hit had been destroyed during the Japanese invasion ("Trashi, teacher. The Japanese are trash!") and then again by a fire in the 1800s. The fire only hit some buildings. This one remained in its original 1600s condition, with much more subdued colors. I thought it was nice.



Most Korean palaces look exactly the same, so I wanted to make my way down to the small pond off the to the side. Beautiful sunshine, beautiful trees in bloom...


Apparently everyone had the same idea. There were so many Koreans! It's so easy to forget that this city has nearly 25 million people in it. And everyone insists on having the nicest cameras. I'm sure they don't really even know how to use them. But what's funny is that there were two men with cameras taking nearly the same short about 10 feet apart from each other. And I couldn't get a picture of both of them without being really conspicuous about it. This kinda ruins the beautiful experience...



But then you can also see the cherry blossoms, and it's worth it.



I left the palace pretty quickly... Korean overload, what can I say. I made my way over to Hyehwa, a college area that I really like. And there was a totally sweet breakdancing group. They were fun to watch.





For lunch, I went over to this market and decided to have a Korean picnic. I grabbed bindaetteok, kind of a Korean pizza? It's like a pancake filled with veggies and mung beans. Delicious. There were tons of vendors selling the exact same things in this part of the market. How do they make enough money?



And I carried it over to the park where I knew there would be an "ajoshi" (old man) convention. There were TONS of old me. Playing chess and traditional Korean games. I didn't want to be too rude and take a really great photo... people were already staring at me... but there were SO MANY of them there!!! It was pretty cute.



I sat down for my bindaetteok picnic (delicious!)...



... and an old business man started chatting with me. He had been to America many times working for LG. Even to Chicago! It was nice to enjoy the weather and have a bit of a picnic. :D

Wonderful day.