It turned out to be another busy day again today, despite our intentions not to cram too much into it. Following breakfast we once again navigated the metro to Changdeokgung Palace, which was built in 1405. It remains largely in tact, although some elements were destroyed during the Japanese occupation of 1910-45. These are actively being restored as the palace is now world heritage listed. There is also a whole section, called the Secret Garden which has limited access, except for 4 weeks of the year during October, so our timing was good.
The Palace itself is impressive, but the gardens are spectacular, particularly at this time of year.
As we walked around the grounds it was quite warm until we notices some black clouds in the sky, which soon gave way to thunder and lightning and a temperature drop of around 10 degrees. A morning thunderstorm … what a novelty. As the storm approached the wind gave us lots of falling leaves in a real Autumn scene that we rarely get in Brisbane. We found some shelter and waited for the best part of an hour while the storm passed, and then wandered through the rest of the palace grounds. It was really a magnificent display of colour that photos do not do justice to.
Due to the storm delay, we were a bit late for our planned lunch, with many of the restaurants that are aimed at the tourist market closing at 1:30. We did find and Italian Restaurant called Smiths… a very italian name. Debbie had pizza and I, of course had the Carbonara.
Unlike the place yesterday, that needed help with their SPAM filtering these guys had already gone to the CLOUD.
Following lunch, we had intended to go to the main palace, but after circumnavigating the grounds, google was able tell us that it is apparently closed on Tuesdays. We decided we would head to the Lotte World Tower, which is the 4th highest observation deck in the world and has the fastest double-decker lift in the world. I was not aware of any other such lifts, but a quick search of wikipedia indicates that there are actually about 50 of them including the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Centrepoint Tower.
Lotte World is a Korean version of Disney World and also hosts a major hotel and shopping mall. The tower is 495 metres tall and the Observation Deck is on level 120. We had hoped that the storm would clear the air a little, but from that high up it was still really hazy, so visibility was limited. There is one overlooking the Han River and another looking towards all the Olympic and Soccer World Cup facilities.
The last remaining activity for the day was a Korean Food Tour. This was similar to the one we did in Taiwan, but probably not as good. I felt that we’d already done a some of the walking parts of this tour with the one we did on Sunday. That said we started with some assorted traditional Korean snacks (Sausage, thick noodles, dumplings etc…), before moving on to some very tasty barbecued skewers before trying a honey based fairy floss sweet treat… which had to surreptitiously pour out the peanut mix before eating.
To close off the tour we had a Korean Barbecue meal of Pork Belly cooked by our guide. The interesting thing was that he did show us how barbecue should be eaten, The best option that he showed us was actually wrapping the meat, some kimchi and cooked garlic in a pickled radish.
It was then time to catch the metro back to the hotel. By the time we walked up the hill from the metro station to the hotel, Debbie had clocked up 30,000 steps for the day … another record breaking performance.
Until tomorrow!
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