As many of you may know, my wife is Korean-American; she was born in the U.S. to two immigrants from Korea who both came here in there young-adulthood as their parents fled the Korean peninsula for reasons associated with that country’s civil war. Many of you also may know that we, as a family, try to take one “big” vacation every year, with the majority of those occurring in Europe (last summer, we spent a couple of weeks in Slovenia).
What many (most?) of you don’t know is that none of us (with the exception of my wife) had ever been to Korea. It is not that we didn’t want to go, but for various reasons over the years (my older son is now 23), “the trip” had been postponed, delayed, or otherwise scuttled. It happened so often that it became a common theme that whenever “Korea” was mentioned, one of us would openly question the nation’s existence; we had heard so much about it over the years, but none of us had ever been there.
Until now.
Last week, the four of us embarked on a two-week trip to Korea, or as Nathan said: The Mother Land.
Getting to Korea from Houston is not quick. We left the house at about 7am, had a 13-hour flight to Tokyo, a five-hour layover there, a two and a half hour flight to Seoul, and then an hour Uber to the center of town and our hotel, arriving just before midnight the following day. This picture could have been taken at any point during the odyssey; it may have been in Houston? Tokyo? Des Moines? London? This is all that they do (other than eat, of course).
We finally made it to Seoul, bleary-eyed and bewildered. This is my incredible wife after clearing customs; her first time back to The Motherland in almost thirty years (don’t tell her I mentioned that).
I honestly went to Korea with few expectations of impressions. Clearly, it is a very modern city that has man links to its past.
Those links to the past seem to be scattered, somewhat haphazardly, around the city. Or at least the parts of the city we visited. Seoul is huge.
The first full day in Seoul, we went for a bit of a walk on a gorgeous day. Here is the statue of King Sejon, who ruled Korea in the middle of the 15th Century. Easily (at least it seems to this white guy), the most important king in the country’s history.
A bit further on from King Sejon is the royal palace, we stopped briefly for the changing of the guard; our visit of the palace was planned for the following day.
That night, we ventured out into Seoul in search of the street food, which is certainly a “thing” and encompasses several blocks, with hordes of people.
And then there was this guy, who really put on a show…
The following day we hit the Namsangol Hanok Village, which I thought was still a real neighborhood, but now is a sort of historical park; no one lived in the buildings.Even though they were no longer inhabited, the village gave a glimpse of what it was like to live in a Hanock. The “windows” were essentially covered with a type of paper and the ceilings were quite low. Yeah, I could never be a Korean.It also enabled us to embarrass the kids a bit, with more of that to come the following day.That afternoon, we had a bit of a drive to a cemetery outside of Seoul to visit the grave of my wife’s aunt. My father-in-law died a few months ago and my mother-in-law wanted us to leave some of his ashes at his sister’s grave. There is a whole story there, but I will leave that for another time. The cemetery, though, was enormous. There had to be a couple hundred thousand graves at a minimum.After visiting the grave, we had an early dinner with a few of the cousins and I had this Galbitang, a spicy noodle soup with braised short ribs. Pretty tasty.The following morning, we headed back to the royal palace, this time, dressed in rented hunboks, the traditional Korean dress. Apparently, if you rent one, admission to the palace is free.The boys were good sports, although they refused to wear the hats.I, however, did not. For some reason, I was rather popular. This guy insisted on taking a selfie with me……and this group of elderly women from Kazakhstan (seriously), demanded that I get in their photos.We could not actually enter any of the buildings, but peering in, one could see that they were quite ornate.
I will be back next week with more pictures from our trip!
the drunken cyclist 