Day 3 in Seoul - The Tour

Holt International, the Korean partner of our adoption agency in the U.S. (Wide Horizons for Children), organizes a tour for adoptive parents. This gives the adoptive parents a chance to learn a bit about their child's culture. The guides are all volunteers. Our guide, who recently returned from college in the U.K., was Jiyeon (very similar to our Si-Yeon). She took us to the king's palace and a museum, and then dropped us off in the Nam Dae Mun market (where my Talisman of Expeditious Return came in handy).

The palace was a little sad and disappointing. It's been rebuilt a couple times due to fire and invasion by the Japanese, so it's sort of a reproduction of a reproduction of a palace. It doesn't have the same feel of incredible age that, for instance, some of the Japanese shrines do. It's sad that so much of the Korean cultural heritage was destroyed by the Japanese.

According to our guide, the Koreans are knocking down things that were built during the Japanese occupation and rebuilding them. She grew up with some of the buildings from the Japanese era, and now many of those are gone, replaced by Korean-built buildings. Other historic buildings have been lost in the race to modernize their society. You can understand why they're doing this--on both counts--but it's led to an ancient culture with relatively little visible history.

The market at Nam Dae Mun (pronounced sort of like "nahm day moon") was our last stop. Crowded and hectic, but interesting. You can see from the picture at the left the people and vendors and signs crammed into the narrow streets of this marketplace. Not my kind of scene at all, but worth seeing once. At the top of my list of things I didn't try was a pig's head with some sort of barbeque sauce. I did encounter the aforementioned boiled silkworm larvae, but they were in a dusty-looking bowl on the ground, and none of the locals were lining up for them, so I gave myself a pass on that one.

Here's an interesting display of dried fish and small bales of seaweed. The picture was kind of rushed, because I was trying not to be disrespectful, but you don't see this sort of thing all the time in the U.S., so I wanted to get a picture.

The jars on the left are ginseng...or maybe aliens--you be the judge. I've seen a lot of these in other parts of the city. They're a little more mainstream than pigs' head (which I couldn't discreetly photograph).

The market wasn't just odd foods. The bulk of the market was...well...everything else. It was like a gigantic flea market. There were lots and lots of trinkets--keychains, the same mirrors and business card holders and pins that everyone in the city seems to have, candy from Asia and America, boots, coats, t-shirts, furs, hats, ..., really an ecletic mix. I would have had no idea whether I was getting a good deal or not, there wasn't really anything I was interested in buying, and the environment was just too crowded and chaotic for me, so we didn't spend a lot of time shopping.

All-in-all, the market at Nam Dae Mun was a good experience, but I was happy to return to shopping at Inchadon, a more low-key area near our hotel. We spent the rest of the afternoon looking for small gifts for Elaina Si-Yeon that we can give to her over the coming years to incorporate elements of the culture of her birthplace.