I have made the most fantastic discovery. On my way to Seoul this weekend, I had a 20 minute wait at the Dong-Daegu Train Station (because the train I’d been aiming for was sold out), so I went in search of something to wake me up and found not only decent coffee but also a cupcake shop. The cupcake craze which has taken a lot of Western cities by storm over the past few years didn’t ever really make it to South Africa, but I have always found cupcakes irresistible. This is the first time I have seen a single cupcake in my almost 9 months in Korea, so there was absolutely no way I was going to walk away. I bought four cupcakes (two black forest and two dark chocolate) and was given an extra one as ‘service’ – something free that the shop-owner gives you because you bought a lot. So breakfast before I got on the high-speed train was strong, dark coffee and a decadent chocolate cupcake. Sometimes living in Korea is not very Korean.

Just over an hour and a half later, I arrived in Seoul. Arriving in Seoul is always a reminder that wherever I have come from is a tiny village compared to this huge urban sprawl. When combined with Incheon – they’re so close they share a subway system – Korea’s capital has a population of over 20 million and is the second largest metropolitan area in the world. It’s a little intimidating to stare out of the train window as you enter the dense mass of skyscrapers and traffic and roads but it’s also a little exhilarating to leave the small city I live in and visit the bright lights for a couple of days.

I met up at the station with the friend I was visiting and, after coffee and a bit of catching up, we headed off to visit Gyeongbokgung (Gyeongbok Palace), the largest of the five grand palaces in Seoul. The construction of Gyeongbokgung was ordered in 1394 and it was the royal headquarters, delightfully called the “Palace of Shining Happiness”, for over 200 years, according to my guide book. It’s subsequent fate tells the story of Korea’s history over the rest of the millennium. The palace grounds once held nearly 400 buildings but most were burnt down when the Japanese invaded in the 1590s. It was finally rebuilt after the coronation of child-king Gojong in 1863. Soon afterwards, the Japanese invaded again. In 1895, one of the wives of this king who was considered an obstacle to the Japanese, was assassinated in the palace grounds, a precursor to the full-scale Japanese invasion of 1910. During the Japanese occupation of Korea, this palace, formerly a symbol of Korean pride and national identity, was used by the Japanese for police interrogation and torture and they moved things around, like palace gates and built additional structures with, seemingly, the express purpose of destroying the symbolic form of the palace. The Japanese Governor-General’s residence was also within the palace complex. After the Japanese finally left with the end of the Second World War, parts of the palace were further destroyed during the Korean War. These days the palace complex has largely been rebuilt, with work still going on to recreate the rest, and is a monument to life in the Joseon dynasty, including various representations of traditional life and a great museum.

The last time I was in Seoul we visited Changdeokgung, which is the only palace to have been granted UNESCO World Heritage status. It was fascinating but the thing about World Heritage sites is that the efforts to preserve sometimes limit the experiences of visitors. At Changdeokgung we were only allowed to walk around with a tour-group and it was all a little sterile. From the moment we arrived, Gyeongbokgung was anything but. We stopped to take a look at a particularly beautiful ancient stone stupa (1085)  within the grounds but outside the actual palace complex. As we came around the corner and walked towards the main gate, a group of palace guards in bright red uniforms with black hats and weapons marched past us to the beat of their military drummers. There is something a little surreal about military guards in uniforms belonging to another millennium marching past you as you look up at the gate of a grand palace. The entrance was also guarded by guards in various uniforms, some with flags and others with shields and long sticks. Their colours, from bright red to purple and sky-blue, and the varied flags fluttering in the chilly wind, complemented the colours of the palace gate and the huge painted drum outside, as we got our tickets (3000 won) and wound our way between them and into the actual complex.

Once inside the palace complex, we found ourselves looking up at a large central hall – the throne room or Geungjeongjeon. You can’t walk into the throne room but looking through the open doors on the sides and in the front, you can see the elaborate, detailed (and shiny) throne with the royal screen behind it. The throne is on a raised dais under an awesome ceiling in amazing colours and designs. Around the dais, in the spacious room, are lamps and jars and wooden pillars. The room is set up as it would have been at the time. In front of the throne are two narrow tables with cushions around them, where the scribes would have sat. These scribes, according to a guide we overheard explaining to another group of foreigners, would have sat there throughout the days, recording everything the king did or said to create the record of the kings life that was sealed until after his death: a memoir captured moment by moment as the days of his reign went by.

Beyond the main hall, we wandered through the many buildings of the complex, each restored and carefully maintained, some, including the residence of the queen, with furnishings set up to show how things would have looked. Unlike the previous palace, here we were able to wander everywhere we wanted on our own. One of the joys of Korean palaces is just being able to spend time wandering around and taking in the incredible detail in the roofs and roof tiles, as well as the symmetry and elegance of the way buildings are spaced out. These palaces are not like Western buildings where everything is clustered under rooves. Here, the courtyards form an important part of the design with passages around the edges and buildings set apart in the centre of courtyards. The courtyards are like white space on a printed page, adding to the drama of each hall or building because they create an open space around them. Sometimes water is used to do the same thing. We looked across a lake at the pavilion where festivities and events would presumably have been held (Gyeonghoeru or Royal Banquet Pavilion). The people who lived banqueted here are long since gone but the water still laps at the small island where the pavilion stands and fish still swim through the water. Behind us, I noticed some of the chimneys that would have carried away the smoke from the fires used to heat the rooms. According to my guidebook, the water in the lake was used not only to add beauty to the banquet hall, but also to put out the fires that inevitably accompanied the use of underfloor wood or charcoal fires (particularly in buildings constructed using rather a lot of wood).

Further on, we looked up the steps to multi-story temple-style building, longing to be able to climb the steps – something that is not allowed in order to preserve the old construction. It is particularly beautiful and strikingly Asian. Alongside this, a few buildings have been set up as models of life in the early 20th century, with the house of a scribe and shop of a traditional healer, a comic book shop, a restaurant and (of course) a beauty salon, among others. There is little explanation but the setting is obvious from things like radios and movie posters (James Dean, among others) scattered around the place. We were intrigued by the information outside a model of a little shop selling shoes and the tradition wide-brimmed, black hats, to read that the hats are called ‘gat’ (which only those who speak Afrikaans will understand).

From there we went into the museum underneath the multi-story temple-y type building. I have mentioned before, I love museums, but am often frustrated by the sterile approach to history some museums employ, presenting artefacts as individual finds rather than part of the narratives of the history of the time. This museum, the National Folk Museum of Korea, took a different approach and instead of simply presenting historical things, tried to recreate and explain the context. The exhibitions range from the ‘Life Cycles of Koreans’ gallery, which attempts to present traditional life experiences from the bridal bed and birth, first birthdays and childhood to weddings, sports, war, the way different classes lived and old age – complete with traditional games – and death. Another area presents different aspects of traditional life. At one point, there is a truly magnificent funeral bier, ornately decorated with figures of birds and animals and people and painted in bright greens and reds, blues and yellows and oranges. The information board said that it was carried by between 12 and 24 pallbearers. It certainly looked large enough and heavy enough to require that many men. There was also a bridal palanquin – a little like a covered sedan chair meant to be carried by four men and used to transport the bride to the home of her husband after the wedding ceremony. There were also displays of traditional farming, fishing and other ordinary living activities, including what looked for all the world like a scarecrow and turned out to be a raincoat made of bundles of straw. It is impossible to detail all the things we saw but it was a great museum, far more modern, of course, than the Gyeongju museum (because this one focuses mainly on the much later Joseon period, rather than the Silla dynasty) but also focussing on social history, rather than royalty or archaeological finds.

This is the second time I have visited a palace on a misty, wintry day but it adds to, rather than detracts from the experience. Before we left, we went to another small lake where a much smaller, but even more beautiful, pavilion stands on a tiny island, connected to the outside world by a narrow wooden bridge. In the background, the mountain peaks were shrouded in mist and the grey day gave an eerie timelessness to the bare trees set around the gardens within the complex walls. At one point, as we walked back towards the main gate, we came through a doorway into a courtyard and we were the only people there. I had a sudden moment, in the dusky light of the misty, overcast day, picturing what it must have been like waking through these same grounds on the same kind of late-winter day hundreds of years ago at the height of the Joseon dynasty.

After leaving the Gyeongbok complex, we found – after a little trial and error – a great little Japanese restaurant. I’ve been craving sushi for ages so it was a great find. Our fairly inexpensive meal included, as is so often the case here, several different courses. We started with sweet pumpkin soup and then a cabbage salad with a yummy sauce, a variety of sushi and sashimi, including prawn (wow) and salmon (yay), miso soup and prawn and sweet potato tempura with a sweetish sauce with a hint of ginger, all accompanied by tea and the usual side dishes (including kimchi because it’s not a meal in Korea unless there is kimchi). We were seated at a table in a private room, with sliding doors pulled shut around us by the woman serving us, opening only as she brought us yet more food. We sat and chatted as we savoured the gorgeous meal and sipped warm tea. It was almost difficult to leave the warm, cosy restaurant and go back out into the chilly afternoon.