A Temple, Some Guns and a Museum

On Saturday afternoon we went to Insadong, a traditional area and popular sightseeing place in Seoul. We'd visited the area briefly a few years ago but we were new to Korea at the time and had trouble navigating our way around the sights, despite all the sights being mainly located on a single street.
The bus ride was only about 25 minutes from our apartment and it let us off in front of Jogyesa Temple, one of Korea's most famous Buddhist temples. The temple has three giant golden Buddha statues inside that are definitely worth checking out. There were dozens of people inside praying and saying hi to Buddha.

There were colorful lanterns hung all over the grounds.

We crossed the street onto the main sightseeing street, Insadong-gil, which is full of galleries, souvenirs shops, and antique stores. If you're looking for traditional-looking souvenirs in Korea, this is the place to go. It seemed like every shop has the same supplier, though, because all the shops we checked out had the same selection of carved masks, traditional paper and beaded jewelery. More interesting is the Ssamzie Market, an open-concept 5 story building full of artisan shops selling clothes, jewelery, food and art.

I always find something random to pose with and this s-line robot did the trick for the day.

There was a demonstration about North Korea taking place with this guy dressed like a soldier doing mean business to a hooded prisoner.

We turned off Insadong-gil and walked 15 minutes to the Bukcheon Hanok Villaqe. We'd really enjoyed our trip to the Jeonju Hanok Village, but this place was just a traditional-looking residential area, which isn't quite as interesting as the cafes and souvenir shops we found in Jeonju. It was a nice area to stroll around but I wouldn't make a special trip to go there again.

We relaxed at a nice cafe near Insadong for a while and then carried on to Tapgol Park since it was right next to Jonggak Station, which we were headed to anyway. There's a pretty cool pagoda in the park, which was labeled as being Korean national treasure #2. It was built in 1467 and looks to be holding up about as well as you would expect something from that era to be.

Next we went to Myeongdong to shoot guns. We got this really good tourist guide from Big Rock last week and it suggested a bunch of things to do that sounded interesting, including this shooting range. Neither of us had ever shot a proper gun, and I don't know what this says about us, but we both instantly wanted to do it. When we found the place we were each given a catalog with pages and pages of guns to choose from. Mel chose a Walther PPK, which was described as being ideal for 007 and women, and I chose a 9mm Beretta INOX because I thought I recalled hearing of the name "Beretta" before.

For 40,000 won we were permitted to shoot 10 bullets at a piece of paper. This was, of course, stupidly expensive but we decided to do it anyway since we we already had our hearts set of shooting stuff. We geared up with bulletproof vests, goggles and ear muffs (neither of us can think of a better word for this equipment) and met our guides, who stood with us the whole time. Mine spoke a little English but Mel's didn't, so she was basically given a loaded gun with no instruction as to how to use it. I could hear her start to shoot immediately.

My guide was quite chatty, and he was very curious about my job. It made for a strange conversation as I shot my gun:

"What do you do?"
BANG
"I'm a teacher."
BANG BANG *the smell of gunfire*
"How old are your students?"
BOOM
"They're 7." BAAAAANG "They're really cute."
BOOM *bullet casing flies in face*

We were pretty good shots. Watch yo' self.

After a disappointing night of soccer watching, we got up on Sunday and went to Itaewon to visit the Leeum- the Samsung Museum of Art. It's a very, very nice building and one of the best museums I've visited in Korea.

There are 3 museums to visit: one is full of old vases and boring artifacts, one is full of contemporary art, and one is a mix of sexy video art and an interactive children's play area. Which makes a lot of sense. When we visited the first 2 floors of the BORING VASE museum we started to second guess our $10 admission but then we moved on and decided the art museum was pretty cool.

If my kids did this to my white board I'd be pissed. In a museum it's art. I kind of like it.

I'd put this up over my bed, no problem.

Mel hates this style of painting, but I thought it looked pretty cool.

This exhibit was called "I Must Learn English" and each tile has an English word painted on it. I might copy this idea for my next Panda Class art project.

Next we went to the Children's Museum. On the first floor no cameras were allowed but the exhibits were quite interesting, including a wall of a dozen TV screens showing an image of a naked woman in various stages of hatching from an egg. It's always the most interesting stuff that you're NOT allowed to photograph. Also, this is for children? There were a few running around.

In the basement level of the Children's museum there were some cool exhibits to play around with including this screen that projected your image onto a the wall for everyone to see. You could play with the colors and display and it was fun to tinker with.

Then we visited a corn field.

And just when we thought we would leave, the security gate began to close on us as if we were trying to smuggle out a Warhol in Mel's purse or something. After freeing ourselves, we met some friends for a misleading all-you-can-drink meal at a shitty Indian place, Chakkra before going home for the night. And then it was Monday again- funny how that happens every week.

Booze cruise next weekend!