first, a brief synopsis of the urban stream. originally a stream through the middle of seoul where women would wash clothes. the stream was covered up by streets during the boom of seoul. in early 2000s in an effort to rebeautify the city, they added a lot of public art and removed the street (big deal for a city with lots of traffic) to allow for this below ground body of water to return to seoul.
next, we walked from the stream up to the palace and on the way, in the middle of the road there were statues (picture of some ruler below- couldnt read the sign) and pagodas (actually, pagodas all over the city). this street had a lot of the government buildings and the us embassy (sign hanging in front of it below).
we arrived at the gyeongbokgung palace to be greeted by guards who did not talk or move. there were probably 8 of them in all different bright colored outfits. not really sure why there are active guards since no one lives in the palace anymore. the palace was originally completed in 1395 as the main royal palace. the name gyeongbokgung means "the palace greatly blessed by heaven." mount bugaksan is behind the palace and mount namsan is in the foreground making the palace placed in the heart of seoul. the palace was destroyed by the japanese during the japanese invasion (1592-1598) and a secondary palace was build named changdeokgung and served as the main palace. the palace we visited was left derelict for 270 years. it was finally reconstructed in 1867 only to be destroyed again by the japanese during the occupation. the current building is an effort to restore the palace and has been ongoing since 1990. once we were inside the palace grounds we realized it was HUGE. it must go on for acres with tons of buildings (each had their own purpose) as well as gardens. everytime we thought we were at the end we would discover quite a few additional buildings. there was also a section for a cemetary and statues. 
after the palace we wandered by the museums and outside one of them were statues of all different animals. i guessed correctly that they were zodiac signs. below is mine - the year of the rat!
thought this sign was hillarious.
next we went to bukchon, the older part of the city, with historic looking buildings. we may not have found them, but we did find a cute shopping/restaurant street with tons of locals. taryn and lindsay decided to go for some fried veggie thing (see chef smiling in background) since the line was long. since we couldnt really read many signs we guessed that long lines = good food. since my stomach was still not happy with me, i was unwilling to be adventurous.
we continued to meander around the streets and came across the main tourist shopping street, insa-dong. one thing i learned in korea is that people LOVE shopping and coffee (will explain that in a later post). anyhow, we window shopped and came across the only starbucks in korea with the sign written in korean. we also stumbled upon this candy making shop. the candy they made looked like a white version of post shredded wheat cereal. the interesting part was how they made the candy which was taking a hard piece of honey- looked like glass and really hard and continued to stretch it out and make 16,000 strings. i wish i had videoed them - they were hysterical! i did find a youtube video of another group so i have included that.
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