Palace/Seoul Tower

Thursday 2/27

Visiting a palace is another thing Ian had really been looking forward to.  The day that we thought we might go was the day the palace was closed so we decided to give it a try this morning.  Here are the kids posing for a couple of pictures before we left.

  The main palace (Gyeongbok Palace) was just about four blocks from our hotel so we just walked there.  On our way, we decided to stop in the market and have our family picture taken in traditional Korean clothing.  We spent too much on this (we misunderstood the pricing) but it is something that we will be glad we have.

  They do guard changes every hour so we wanted to try to make it there for that.  Our timing didn't quite work out like we wanted so we missed the change, but we saw a lot of the palace and got some pretty good pictures here. I wish I knew more about the history here to share, but I don't.  I eventually will learn some more about to share with Parker, I just haven't yet. 

We just THOUGHT it was difficult to get 4 to look at the camera!

Ian LOVES photo bombing......

This is one of my favorites from the trip

Such a good big brother!

After the palace we headed back to the hotel.  Mom and dad stopped for some traditional Korean food and the rest of us had some leftovers and relaxed for a while.  We had plans for Seoul Tower at night but there hadn't been a clear enough day yet.  Today wasn't very clear either, but it was pretty much our last chance.  Nights have been the hardest. When the sun starts going down, its like a switch turns and Parker starts getting fussy and whiney so we didn't feel like it would be smart for us to try to go to the tower at night.  We decided we would go the middle of the afternoon so we were back in the hotel before it started getting dark.  This ended up being a very good decision as the tower wasn't as busy as it would have been at night either.  We learned from the last trip that the subway/walk trip to the tower is very long and hard so we decided to take a 'jumbo taxi' from our hotel this time.  It was SO worth it!  It was pretty foggy and we couldn't see very far from the tower, but it was a good trip and we saw enough.

 

Korean UPS;-)

We stopped by McDonalds on the way back to the hotel and then were in for the night.  We had another very good day and saw lots.  We are so glad Parker has been able to see a few things.  We really wanted to have some pictures of him with some big markers of his country.