On the First Day of Chuseok, the Art Teacher Gave to Me

A trip to Suwon Palace and Hwaseong Fortress,
A dinner of Suwon Beef,
A trick to learn the days of the week in Hangul,
A Korean language workbook,
And a pair of purple crystal earings!

Not everyone exchanges gifts for Chuseok, but the Art teacher is SUPER nice and she took me out with her family to have a really nice day.

Suwon Palace and the Hwaseong Fortress were constructed in the 17th century by King Jeongjo, the 22nd King of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910).  The king was considering moving the capital from Seoul to Suwon and so he constructed this fortified city with a palace in the center.  The gates are not as big as the ones in Seoul, but the walls here are still fully intact.

Here are some pictures of the fortress.

On the left there is the main entrance to the fortress.

That is a guard tower on the right.  It's great to see how history meets the modern world with the bus traveling right underneath it.

I had to take a picture of this bell because, as historical as it is, it reminded me of home.  Check out my post about the pictures from Long Beach, CA to see an almost identical bell.

In front of the palace is a huge mural of what palace life could have been like, back in the days.  I don't know if it historical, but it is about 50 feet tall by 20 feet wide.  Here is a small part of it, with the layout of the whole fortress:

It's a little hard to see, but that brown part in the middle is supposed to have been rice fields.  When you walk along the walls of the fortress and look inside it is amazing how much modern city fits inside.  Once you realize the fortress is big enough to hold rice fields which prodcued enough rice for the whole city, then you can comprehend its size a little better.  (I think this picture is upside down.)

After walking around half of the fortress, which took about 2 hours, we went to the palace.

Here is the entrance:

There are many palaces in Korea, and I go to church next to one, so I see them all the time.  What made this one special for me was that they had a lot of scene mock-ups:

They recently filmed a Korean drama, called Dae Jang Geum, about life here at this palace, so many costumes might have been left over from that.  In this picture, a soldier and his wife are presenting gifts to the king, who is seated on the left side, out of the picture. Those tall things near the front, left hand corner of the picture are fruit and rice cracker things.  The women is bowing and she is wearing those long sleeves and big hair (not like the '90's big hair, but you know what I mean).  The soldier has layed his sword on the floor on some kind of animal skin.  Anyway, I took SO many pictures of these "scenes;" I just loved them.

As you know, I am still in the very beginning stages of learning Korean.  I have finally just memorized how to say, "Where is the bathroom" in Korean.  The Korean word for bathroom is "Hwa Jang Shil."  So you can imagine my excitement when I saw this:

I thought: I'm really going to impress the art teacher by saying, "Hwa Jang Shil?" and then pointing to that. 
However, those are rice pots. 
They are EVERYWHERE in the palace, like bathrooms... but not.

Everywhere you go, there are signs stating that the King constructed this Palace out of filial loyalty.  So the story goes that the King's Grandfather, who was also a King, didn't want the King's father to become a King (I think because he had some kind of mental defect).  So the Grandfather, made the father stay in a Rice Storage Box like the one on the left.  Eventually the father starved to death and died at the age of 14.  I guess they had kids REALLY young then, because the son, the Great King Jeongjo made this palace and fortress in his honor, after he grew up, of course and then later moved his body to be buried in that area.

Further, it is said that whenever King Jeongjo saw a rice storage box, he felt pained.  So this picture is one of the 5 rice storage boxes in the same area.   There are signs that encourage you to climb into the rice box to "feel King Jeongjo's sorrow."

I did NOT feel his sorrow (because I wouldn' crawl in the box).

I did however have a wonderful trip.  And we finished our tour of Suwon with a Suwon beef dinner at this fancy restaurant which IMPORTS its beef ...from ... Los Angeles.  So I went all the way to Suwon to have LA beef. 

After dinner we went back to the art teacher's house and had the gift I gave them for Chuseok: a blueberry yogurt cake from Paris Baguette.

Then the Art teacher gave me my other gifts: the book to learn Korean and the earrings her sister designed.

Chuseok sure feels a lot like Chirstmas to me!