Seoul

The next morning we had breakfast in the hotel and talked with our trip leader. He told us that last night was the Lotus Lantern Festival Parade for Buddha’s Birthday celebration. The lanterns are still hanging at the Jogyesa Temple. The street in front of it would be shut down today and booths set up selling food and other items. The festival is on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List.

The weather in the morning was clear, but the forecast was for clouds to be moving in over the next few days, so we decided to go up to the peak at Namsan Park first. The cable car station is several blocks from the hotel, so it’s an easy walk up a gentle slope.

The Namsan Tower is in the park. We chose not to spend the extra time (and cost) and skipped going up the tower.

The park allows love locks on many of it’s long fences and there lots of them.

We found the path to walk down the mountain to the station, but chose to take the cable car back down to save time, as we have a busy day. We took the subway to Anguk station near the Jogyesa Temple.

We arrived at the closed-off street in front of the temple around lunchtime and saw a singer dressed in a traditional hanbok finishing up.

We looked at the many booths selling food. We had Lotus Leaf and Water dropwort pancake and Tteok which similar to Japanese Mochi. The pancake was interesting to eat with chopsticks as it was difficult to tear.

It was warm, so we finished up with some ice cream.

We looked through the temple area which is quite crowded, so there wasn’t room to get far away enough to take a photo of the temple. Each lantern has a tag with a prayer hanging from it. Photos of the inside of the temple are prohibited.

Some floats from the parade were parked at the temple.

We then walked over to the National Folk Museum which is in the northeast corner of the Gyeongbok Palace.

We saw three permanent exhibitions:

• Life Events - it looked at birth, 100 days (infant mortality was a problem), first birthday, career, marriage, Kids, death, funeral rites, ancestral worship.

• The four seasons with their many festivals and agricultural milestones.

• Korean Culture - Korea was at one time known as the land of hats.

We walked over to Insa-dong street which is one block east of the temple. It’s called the artist’s street, and it does have some unique shops like a shop that made calligraphy brushes. It also has souvenir and food shops.

We ate dinner at Kyo Ja. The restaurant only offers 4 dishes and earned a Michelin star. You pay when you order at the entrance and then you are assigned a table. The food arrived not long after finding the table. Before we left on the trip, we made up cards with our food allergies on them in Korean and Japanese that we could hand to staff. Only one dish of four was MSG-free, Kongguksu, the bean noodles. Donna had the Bibimguksu (spicy mixed noodles).

After dinner, we walked through Daiso, which advertises that it has most everything for less. It is 12 small floors each 25 ft by 40 ft. It was crowded, there are two elevators in the store and about a dozen people in line for the elevators. We took an elevator to the top floor and looked at each floor for a minute or two while taking the stairs down. The bottom floor has the cashier desk, so you stand in line again to pay.

The Namsam Tower was visible as we walked back to the hotel.