Eli Came To Stay

Thought I'd show you what a Korean copy of Harry Potter looks like. It's CUTE!

As we were feeling pretty exhausted from Tokyo and the subsequent onslaught of visitors, we decided to not go anywhere for Seollal, the Korean Lunar New Year holiday in February, and just spend the week relaxing.

I tend to get a bit antsy when we don't do much because half of me feels like we're wasting time, but it was also pretty good for my health, because I did feel a big difference when I eventually went back to school.

Anyway, our friend Eli came all the way up from Jinju (on the south coast) to hang out and spend a couple of days with us!

On the main day of Seollal, we went to Gyeongbokgung, as there was apparently something going on there, but by the time we got there we were really hungry. And, like Christmas Day at home, almost everything is closed. Gah.

After a lot of searching, we found a donkatsu place and I burnt my mouth on cheese. As usual.

Obligatory "why" photo. Eli hasn't faced the horrors yet.

By the time we'd finished searching and eating, it was kind of...actually quite late. Oops. So the museum had started closing up and everyone was leaving, boo. I felt a bit bad, considering Eli told us he hadn't ever looked around Seoul aside from the glimpses he'd seen at orientation, but there's always time for more!

While we were waiting to cross the road, I snapped this photo of two young girls in their traditional hanbok, taking selfies together which I thought was a really cute contrast of old and modern. I posted it to instagram and they actually found it, haha. They were really lovely and it was a nice coincidence!

경복궁 | Gyeongbokgung

Ever on the hunt for interesting, cultural places to go, we felt that Gyeongbokgung was a good way to go. Easy enough to get to, and pretty impressive visually, we headed over to take a look.

Again, it was freezing cold, so much so that large parts of the bodies of water dotted around the palace grounds had thin sheets of ice dotted around, and the ground was frosty. But the sky was crystal clear and the sun was shining, so once again it was a really good trip out.

I'd already taken a lot of photos of the palace itself, so I'll just post a few.
The cold prevented us from lingering very long, and the kimchi house was locked up (presumably because of the weather or season) so we kept moving and left to get a look at the Statue of King Sejong and a brief visit to the museum underneath, with the pretense of warming up my numb feet.

경복궁 와 대림 | Gyeongbokgung & Daelim

So, in the timeline of events, (rather than my horribly non-chronological blog posts) a few weeks after Chuseok Nick and I went on another day out with Rachel and Jamie, this time to Gyeongbokgung and the Daelim museum.

But first: food. Of course! ;D

In honour of Nick, we had bossam (boiled belly pork, what's not to like?) but this time rather than ssam (large salad leaves that you use to make a fajita-style wrap) we had crepe-like pancakes, effectively a thin, plain version of the jeon that we love to eat. It was super good, I'd definitely eat it like that again, but then I'm not even TRYING to convince myself it's healthy via all the salad I eat when we use ssam. ;p

So. Stuffed full of pork, ssamjang and pancakes (and soju) we went to the Daelim Museum where there was an art exhibit called "Persistent Illusions" by TROIKA, a UK-based art collective that'd I'd heard of before but never experienced.

This ominous sculpture greeted us in the main lobby/gift shop.

The rippling mirrors reminded me of The Imprisoned from Skyward Sword and generally made me feel kind of uncomfortable and scared for some reason. But I like it when art causes physical and emotional reactions, good or bad.

For the uninformed: This is The Imprisoned. It's creepy.

Anyway, we headed upstairs to the main exhibits and it quickly became clear that this place was all about the kind of big hipster non-statements that I absolutely adore, so this was very exciting for me.

Deep, man.