Gyeongbokgung Palace

On Saturday we finally decided to check out Gyeongbokgung Palace which is the largest palace in Seoul. You may recall that we visited Deoksu Palace awhile back. This one was much larger and more interesting but I wish we'd gone to it first because a lot of the buildings are really similar to Deoksu so for me it wasn't as exciting. Gyeongbokgung is filled with trees and would be a really great place to have a picnic and just walk around and look at the palace. Matt and I weren't thinking very clearly and we decided to visit on Children's Day and it turned out that kids were admitted free and so the place was swarming with people.

















I love these shoes and I'm so happy that I bought them, however, I should have worn protective bandaids on my baby toes. Alas, I am now full of the blisters. Beauty is pain, right?
















I forced Matt to take pictures of me so that I could be featured on the blog for a change. However, my favorite picture of me (left) I took my damn self.

Matt bonded with his Chinese zodiac animal outside the folk museum.

Attached to the palace grounds is the National Folk Museum which is also worth checking out. It's possible that Matt and I are delinquents, but we couldn't find anywhere to buy tickets (and it does say there is an admission price on the website) and so we just walked in. Of course, it is possible that because it was Children's Day they were letting people in for free so I am going to pretend that's what happened. We were pretty tired when we walked through here so we probably didn't spend the time we could have. This museum really teaches you a lot about Korean history and customs and the information is printed in both Korean and English (decent English at that!) on all the signs. They also had a mighty tasty little coffee shop at the entrance where I purchased a very delicious Jeju mandarin orange slushie. For all the pictures, venture over here.
Oh to be royalty. I want a casket like this when I die.