South Korea Day 13: The Castle, The Wall

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 On our last day in South Korea I left Roger to enjoy his morning cups of tea/coffee and walked over to the Deoksogung Palace, just past the Seoul City Hall.  Deoksugung was used as a palace after all the other palaces were burned down by the Japanese in 1592.  It was then the Imperial Palace of the Korean Empire in 1897 and expanded with buildings of both Korean and Western style.  Fire, Japanese colonisation, and demotion to a mere park happened, and then a period of restoration started in 1947-48 and there I was in 2025 wandering around appreciating all the beautiful buildings.



Outside the palace walls a huge crowd gathered for an open-air celebration of Easter Sunday, belting out rousing Korean worship songs at the top of their voices, aided by a very effective sound system.  Inside the palace grounds, the music provided a rousing and vaguely patriotic sound track to the centuries of history and beautifully decorated traditional buildings.


Traditional guards manned the Daehanmun Gate, watching as tourists and locals paid their 1000W and traipsed into the grounds. 


 At 11:00 a crowd gathered, a trumpet blew, and the Changing of the Guard Ceremony commenced.  It was all narrated in Korean with a much-appreciated English translation.  Us onlookers were even encouraged to take photos.









A tiny little girl in full traditional costume took instruction in drum-beating and solemnly participated in the ceremony, the official drum beater gently nudging her to face in the correct direction when needed.  Her parents, bursting with pride on the sidelines, took photos.  The language barrier did not prevent our animated conversation regarding pride in one's daughter.



Roger had arrived in time to watch the ceremony with me and after a quick lunch we set off to walk at least a little bit of the Seoul City Wall which had once encircled the city and included signal fires on the highest  of the granite peaks that surrounded Seoul.  We started at the corner of Deoksogung Palace and followed the route of the wall to the Sungnyemun Gate with a breif diversion into the markets for lunch. 


From Sungnyemun Gate the wall headed up to the top of Namsan Mountain and Roger, not being in a mountain-climbing frame of mind, turned around and left me to climb the mountain all by myself along with everybody else who was doing the same thing. The walk started gently, winding upwards beside segments of reconstructed wall, past banks of spring flowers and parklands full of picnickers.

The tower was at the top.  It didn't look too far away.

And then came the steps.

So many steps.

I climbed in company with locals and tourists and everyone in between, all of them out to enjoy a bracing 300 vertical metres of steps on a beautiful Spring day.  The usual active geriatrics steamed past, leaving me puffing in their wake.  Three immaculately coiffed Korean women tripped effortlessly upward in black patent-leather sandals, overtaking me every time I stopped for a 'photo break'.

I took lots of photo breaks.

An archaeological dig site offered a brief reprieve from the endless steps, particularly if you took your time and read all the information boards which I pretended to do, my lack of literacy in Korean being somewhat of a stumbling block.


And then I went up again.


Nearly there.
 
All the way to the top.
 
This is what I like about mountain tops.  The solitude.

The top of Namsan Mountain was a hurdy-gurdy of cafes, stalls, a ropeway (of course!), picnickers, squalling children, buses disgorging clots of tourists, and lycra-clad cyclists who had proved their worth by cycling all the way up (they didn't take the steps).  I bought a hopeful Hotteok from a street stall and suffered terrible disappointment when it did not live up to expectations. 


I followed the wall off the other side of the mountain and in the space of two steps left the crowd behind, following the wall all by myself down steep paths and steps through showers of cherry blossoms and delicate umbrellas of new Spring foliage.
 



I'm glad no one is raining arrows and hot oil down at me from those defensive windows.

 
Eventually all good things must come to an end, and the wall led me back to suburbia, couched in parkland.  I wandered past active geriatrics making use of exercise machines, past serious pet owners pushing puppies in strollers, and past couples posing for wedding photographs.
 


Eventually I arrived at the Dongdaemun Gate, waved the wall goodbye, and jumped on the subway to rest my weary feet.

Goodbye, wall.
 
And that was the end of my last full day in Seoul.

With a trip back to the streets of course, to get my last Hotteok (sob).



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