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π
2016-05-13 01:01
in Ntrips, Southkorea2016, Trips
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As soon as we arrived in Seoul after our 4 day Eastern South Korea tour, we arrived at the drop off hotel at 17:00, so I figured we had enough time to go visit Namsangol traditional village by Namsan park and tower and spend the evening by the tower so that we could catch sunset there:
view from namsan tower
happy bird was scooping off flying ants as they popped from the hole
After visiting the village, we took a shuttle bus to Namsan Tower (from reading beforehand, it's faster than taking the overcrowded cable car):
one of the 3 busses that drives to the top
Seoul Tower
the new lotte tower that is being built
viewing platform on top floor was basic, but worked, outside of dirty windows
Namsangol traditional village
nicely lit
After coming back down from Namsan tower, we went through Namdaemun Market, which was shutting down:
The next morning, we went to the South Korea National Museum, which was both big and excellent. It went from prehistoric times to all dynasties in Korea (hopefully they had fewer than the Chinese or it would have taken even longer :) ). It was nice to learn about the Silla dynasty again (it lasted almost 1000 years), and see some of the sights we had just seen, along with others we hand't seen yet:
We probably spent a bit too long in the first museum and only arrived in the War Museum by 14:00 or so. It's also a very big museum and sadly we had to leave by 17:15 for our flight to Jeju that evening. In 3h15, we just had enough time to see the floors on the Korean War and Vietnam War (which South Korea helped with in return for all the help they got from other countries during their war):
As far as the Korean War goes South Korea definitely has the moral high ground here. They got attacked by North Korea, North Korea abducted 100,000 of their citizens to help their side, more recently they attacked South Korea in a few ways like sinking a patrol ship, or killing soldiers that were cutting a tree that was blocking the view at the DMZ, and things of that nature. I did see a little bit of propaganda for South Korea here and there, but honestly nothing that shocked me or that I disagreed with
While Jennifer argued with me that China would likely not have gotten involved in the Korean war, escalating it much further, if the UN had not tried to retake all of Korea past the 38th parallel once North Korea had invaded virtually all of South Korea, I have to side with South Korea and the UN: North Korea had shown to be dangerous and more generally this was the best time to try and reunite both sides of the country. It's very sad that it failed because North Korea is that much more of a danger with a list wackos running the country.
Sadly, instead of re-unifying both countries, the Korean war lasted 3 years, caused 1.5 million injuries or deaths, and 200,000 million people missing. Financial losses at the time were 1.8 to 3 billion dollars (of then money).
South Korea was invaded as far as this corner until the UN and US got involved
Thankfully Seoul was taken back quickly
France was one of the many countries that helped out
some army recruits were visiting
They had a nice collection of planes, tanks, and more, some from North Korea:
and a replica of the boat that was recently shot and sunk by North Koreans
it got shot pretty bad
The war museum had plenty to see, we missed an entire floor due to lack of time, but did quite enjoy the 3.15H we spent there. Too bad we had to run out to the Gimpo airport to fly to Jeju
Ok, we ended up going to the museum the last day to finish it up, and spent another 3H there (a bit over 6H total) to finish it up:
I then spent time at the bottom floor showing the evolution of war in Korean history, including what Japan did:
in the naval battle of Jinpo, Korea had managed to build cannons that could fit and work inside their superior boats, and use them to defeat an army of Japanese raiders that greatly outnumbered them (1380). Sadly the Japanese only came back more numerous and stronger later
the French
the Japanese
We were glad to have time to go back to this museum, it's definitely worth 5 to 6 hours, or even more. It was quite well done, much to learn there. |
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