Today is our last day with a car in Korea. We enjoyed the freedom that it brought and the fact that we were able to see so many different sights. When we returned to Seoul today we immediately noticed the enormous difference in the tourists around. All the sites we visited with our cars were almost exclusively visited by Koreans, today we saw people from all over the world.
But we started our day in Suwon where it was still raining but not as heavy as yesterday. So when Tim awoke at 5.30 he went for a walk to get some aerial shots of the huge fortress the city is famous for. But the clouds, the power lines and hills made flying not so easy and the shots were not great.
We ordered breakfast at 7.30 so we had plenty of time to bath and pack. The breakfast is good, there is a wide variety of food on offer and everyone is eating well until Cleo falls teeth first into the table. We cancel the breakfast and bring her back to the room to assess the damage and console her. Everything is fine, Olga gets an ice cream and afterwards the pain has gone from 8cm to 1cm. She measures pain with her fingers.
So we get our stuff and ride to the city’s museum to learn more about the fortress. The fortress was built in 1795 and was used by the King for several celebrations and as a station for his personal guard south of the capital of Seoul. We skip the palace as it still rains and it doesn’t look that old and interesting. We do a small walk over the city walls and get in our car to truly drive to Seoul.
Our first stop is the Bongeusa temple, the origins date back to 794 but as with many buildings in Korea their history often has huge gaps, it was reconstructed in 1498. It was then used for a while until Buddhism was repressed by the neo-confuscians in the government. Then the temple burned down in 1939 and what was left was destroyed during the Korean War. So all we saw today were modern reconstructions.
Our last visit with our car is the National Museum, but when we’re almost there Tim sees a P sign and drives into the parking garage. When we enter the museum, it’s the National Hangeul museum, a museum dedicated to the Korean script. Luckily it’s free and next door to our real destination so we take a quick tour and learn more about the Korean alphabet.
We eat lunch at the convenience store outside the National Museum and walk to the museum. It’s huge, it will be a real challenge to keep Zeno asleep and Cleo engaged. The first floor is dedicated to the Korean prehistory and Early Middle Ages. We see a lot of things we have already seen the past weeks, but there are excellent pieces on display.
The second floor is dedicated to the Joseon dynasty, roughly 1300-1900. There are some nice celadon pieces but the later calligraphy we skip. The top floor is a mishmash of things, an ancient Sumerian exposition from the NY MET. And then several rooms dedicated to different Asian regions, the first one focuses on the Silk Road and shows a replica of the ancient frescos we saw in the Afrosiab museum in Samarkand.
We race through the last rooms with Buddhist sculptures and paintings. Everybody is tired and we have some last things to do. First we have to get to Gimpo airport where we arrived and rented our car. We return the car, and carry our luggage ourselves again. We have just one speeding ticket, not bad since there were literally speeding cameras every kilometer for our 2000+ km road trip.
Now we have to get to our hotel near Incheon Airport. We take the airport express metro and test our capability to travel with public transport once again. All goes smoothly and an hour later we are checked in and ready to leave Korea and continue our adventure in Taiwan. We eat a vegan poke bowl with extra avocado, and it tastes really fresh and good.
We try to go to bed early, as the shuttle bus to the airport arrived at 6 tomorrow morning. But the children don’t agree and they go to sleep at 20, like every night. We repack our bags, as they must weigh 15 KG each, and 1 can weigh 20 KG, a difficult task without a scale. And then we go to bed ourselves as well. Ready to explore the final country of our sabbatical in the coming weeks: Taiwan!
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