Hello again readers! It has been a very long and eventful day, so boy is there a lot to share. Starting where we left off, the final flight to Korea was not nearly as bad as everyone expected it to be. There were the standard occurrences like a crying baby (with impressive stamina: I don’t even know if I could scream for that many hours in a row if I tried) and trying not to roll over onto the person next to me, but nothing bad enough to make the flight miserable. I passed the time by getting 6 hours of sleep in and watching the entirety of season 4 of Invincible. I could go on about how good that show is, but I’ll spare you the details and stay focused. I don’t know how, but the people around me either got no sleep at all or slept for close to the entire 16-hour flight and both ends of the spectrum amaze and perplex me. Regardless, we landed and got through customs without any problems or lost passports and were on our way to our hotel in Seoul! The sunrise on that bus was an absolutely stunning red and it was beautiful enough to ignore that it was mostly from air pollution.

First thing in the morning after we got to the hotel, we made our way to the metro to begin our day. We didn’t leave anyone behind thankfully and soon we were facing one of the jaw dropping entrances to Gyeongbokgung Palace. Everything there was ornate and packed with so much detail that you could spend hours admiring it and still find new things to impress you. Being on a schedule, we could not spend that time, but we got to stop by each part of the palace and admire each building. We learned a lot about the palace’s design and history, including how the emperor’s chambers had no crest because nothing could be “above” the emperor, and the bare gravelly ground was to make the footsteps of intruders louder. Overall, it was an incredible experience and being able to surround myself with such a culturally rich environment was amazing. We learned about the design principle of being in balance with nature that drove the integration of natural spaces into the palace and continues to influence Korean practices today. We have experienced many small ways in which policies against single use plastics have been implemented here, setting an example that should be followed by the US. These included more paper packaging, fewer trash disposal bins in public, less bottles supplied by the hotel, and others.

Thank you for reading this quick update on our travels so far, and I’ll keep writing about all of the wonderful things I get up to!