We started the day wondering when Dr Yun would show up to meet with everyone in the lobby of the hotel, but then we get a message that he was somewhere in Seoul and we would need to find him scavenger hunt style. He left us a picture of his surroundings every few minutes until we had 5 clues, and the first ones to find him would get lunch on him as a reward. He led us to the Jogyesa temple first, where there was a beautiful ceiling of colorful lanterns with wishes written on them all being illuminated by the sunlight. We took the metro there and my group arrived just a few minutes later than the others, but hopes were still high to make it to destination 2 on time. Every navigation route onwards be it the bus, metro, uber, or walk, had around a 40-minute transit time so we chose the bus because the station was close and wow did we choose wrong. 20 minutes before we arrived, the other groups who took the metro met with Dr. Yun leaving us to crawl our way to the National Museum of Korea through bus station waits. 

The museum itself was amazing, and I only wish we had more time to spend there and explore its exhibits. It was children’s day, so two massive inflatable characters from some Korean media were propped up in the front and kids were everywhere. They even had several performers and a choir singing songs in front of the massive steps! I spent most of my time in the porcelain exhibit because there was so much rich history, and the techniques developed for its production were remarkable. To fire the premium pieces, they developed a technique to protect them from the fire in which each piece was sheltered in a super heat resistant “saggar” container and still be surrounded by enough heat to fire effectively. They also incorporated a host of metals to serve as the dyes for the intricate designs we are familiar with, including iron for reds and even cobalt for the traditional Chinese inspired blues. This made the blue designs exclusive to royalty or those with great power. Learning about the innovations that went behind these cultural staples we are familiar with was incredible, and helped me contextualize the rich history of development behind traditional Korean crafting techniques.

Before I got a proper chance to explore the rest of the museum however, it was on to our next stop: K-pop dance class. Just as I expected, we were in for a taxing workout today. The class was located in the World K-pop Center and our instructor introduced himself as having worked with BTS and Blackpink in the past! He started us out with a warmup of stretches and rolls to get us ready for the dance, into a rundown of some basic moves to get us familiar with the techniques. Gosh the warmup took it out of everyone, we were all breathing heavily and soaked in sweat before the actual dance even started and those who underestimated the difficulty of K-pop were given a rude awakening. The dance itself was fun but we were given a lot of counts to memorize in such a short time so most people forgot a significant portion of the moves by the time we had learned them all, which I think made it much funnier.

Then when we got back, I went around the city to some of the busy market and shop sections to get dinner. I got two chicken skewers in bbq and chile sauce which were amazing but super impractical to carry around with us as we walked. I also found an ice cream smore stick, which was a block of ice cream surrounded by a marshmallow coating that was blowtorched out of the freezer to get melty and crispy without melting the ice cream on the inside.

Thank you for tuning into the blog again, and I can’t wait to tell you more about our trip!