Walk about Seoul

We woke, ate breakfast of some kind of thick toasted bread with a two foot pile of whipped cream, then went to Chang Deok Gung Palace. The whipped cream must have wrecked my brain because I forgot my bag when we boarded the bus to take us to the palace. Problem was I couldn't remember if I left it in the hotel room or at the cafe. So because of that creeping worry in the back of my throat I found it a bit hard to enjoy the palace.

Thankfully when we got back to the hotel my bag was waiting there where I must have left it. Whew. After lunch, mindy, her mom and her aunt went shopping and I set out on foot to explore with my sketch book.

I walked to the city center, then turned around and walked back toward the palace. Along the way I stopped at a cool little canal that was quite populated with people dipping their toes in the water and strung with lanterns from side to side. Then after arriving near the folk museum and palace near insadong I visited a few art galleries mindy and I had either skipped or missed. I saw an interesting show I still can't quite think through. The artist was obviously studying clouds. He had created a video of layered images that allowed the clouds to appear and dissipate. Then he had created installations out of large canvases painted in single colors, but the colors were opalescent cloud colors and with the lighting they created the same sort of dissipating shapes that the clouds made in the video. It was way way minimal, and interesting, and really different than the majority of the other work I've seen in Seoul.

As I walked the 1500m or so back to the hotel I found many other buildings to draw. I ended up doing 8 different sketches in the few hours I was out wandering about. It was fun to walk around and I find that the different sections of Seoul are very walkable in the same way that the neighborhoods of NYC are walkable. Seoul is an interesting place.

Tomorrow we leave bright and early for Bangkok and whatever awaits us there. There won't be the art museums and the galleries, and I don't quite know what to anticipate there, but I'm looking forward to seeing a new city, culture and people.