Once again, we are back with another blog! Today was the second day of our trip to Seoul, and once again it was a busy day full of things to do.
To start off the day, when I was eating breakfast, I asked Dr. Yun what we would be doing today because the itinerary just said “sightseeing,” but he just responded that it would be a surprise. It turns out that our activity for the morning was to find out where Dr. Yun was based on some photo hints that he gave us, kind of like the game Geo Guesser! Our first hint that we were given was of some paper tiger statues with lanterns around them, which eventually led us to the Jogyesa Temple. This temple is one of the largest Buddhist temples in Korea, and it has lanterns everywhere with wishes written on them. There were pink, yellow, blue, red, and white lanterns, with the white lanterns representing deceased people. All of these lanterns created a really beautiful scene throughout the whole temple and gave it a pretty red light, as they formed a canopy over the grounds. Once we got to the temple, we received our second clue for Dr. Yun’s location. This time, he ended up at Seoul’s History Museum, so we rushed there to try and beat the other groups. We ended up teaming up with another group, so that we would be both be the first two groups to the museum. We had to navigate the bus and subway systems so it was a little test to see if we actually knew what we were doing or not. Somehow, we managed to not get on any wrong stops along the way, so I guess you could say we are experts now.
Once the scavenger hunt was over, we had a little time to go and explore the museum, which was an absolutely ginormous building. One of the exhibitions that I visited featured a bunch of pots and vases from ancient Korea. There were a couple of displays I looked at that had smaller pots with a bunch of different uses, which I thought was interesting. Usually, with vases and pottery, they are all for the same purpose, so it was intriguing that there were some included that were a little different than others. There was a water dropper, a brush cleaner, and a brush holder, along with a few more. Outside of the museum, there was a performance happening to celebrate the holiday “Children’s Day” in Korea, which celebrates children. One of the singers had an amazing performance where he sang some English songs, like “Don’t Stop Me Now” and “We Will Rock You.”
After our activities for the afternoon, we headed over to a kpop dance class that we took with the whole group, which was really fun. We learned a part of a 30-second dance from the song “Swim” by BTS. It was exciting to get to learn the dance and perform it with everybody else. The instructor for the dance class was somebody who has worked with kpop groups in the past, so it was cool to learn from somebody who has worked with famous people. When the class was over, since we were done with our group activities for today, some of us decided to go to the 12-story Daiso in Myeongdong, which is a department store in Korea that has all kinds of things to buy there for a low price. We spent a while exploring the store and seeing all that was there.
I had so much fun today and I am looking forward to tomorrow even more!
