After taking a look at a couple of museums in the city, and then getting some rest, I wanted to take a look around some of the palaces in Seoul, and I started with Deoksugung Palace, the smallest one of the bunch. There is also an art museum in the palace’s grounds that can be worth exploring.
When I got there, it turned out I was just in time for the English tour, which I didn’t even know about. The tour guide took the small group around the place, stopping around each building and important point of interest, and provided quite a bit of details about the history of the place, the architecture, the people who used it (and how they used it), as well as what Japan has done to it, and why.
While I could’ve enjoyed just walking around the place by myself, I would not be able to gather all that information without any help, and so the guide was very welcome, and it was certainly a good choice for me to join this tour. Even without going into the art museum, the tour took about forty minutes and was quite informative.
The next palace on my list was Gyeongbokgung Palace, the main royal palace of the Joseon dynasty, and the biggest of the five remaining palaces. While I thought I was more than an hour late to the guard change ceremony, it appeared to be ending just as I got there, so I did see a few of the guards walking around the gate, and then people started taking pictures with them.
This palace, too, offered free guided tours, but I didn’t want to wait for the English tour which was quite some time away, so instead I just took a leaflet with a map and some explanations about the different areas of the palace ground, and set out exploring on my own. It might have been because this was my second palace of the day, but my first reaction was that Gyeongbokgung is not as impressive as I thought it would be. Understandably, the architecture of the building was pretty much the same as those in Deoksugung Palace, and so I wasn’t sure the guided tour could offer me a lot more, as I still had a lot of the information in my head.
But then I got through the maze of buildings and found myself on the other side, where there was a nice garden with a couple of ponds in it, and a view of the National Folk Museum building, which stood out against the natural scenery. After walking around the place a bit more, and seeing a few more buildings, I turned around and left Gyeongbokgung Palace.
The last palace I wanted to visit was Changdeokgung Palace. There was a garden inside the palace grounds called “Secret Garden”, which was sold out on the day I was there, although I wasn’t sure it was worth the additional fee anyway. There wasn’t any English tour available by the time I got to the place, but there was an audio guide app that I could use free of charge, so I did just that.
The audio guide tour started at the main gate, and took me around what seemed to be the main area of the palace grounds. It was a bit over the top for my taste, with the different voice overs that pretended to be different historical characters, a tree, or even a gate. Nevertheless, it was quite informative and provided details and context, although once more, there was some information I already knew from earlier on in the day. It was still nice to hear the additional stories and look at things from a somewhat different perspective.
It was going well for most of the tour, and then the clear directions pretty much stopped, and I resorted to the map to try and find the next point in the tour. By the time I got to the government office complex, I completely lost the audio guide. I kept listening to it as sort of story time and a background noise while I looked around at the buildings and tried to guess what they were used for.
I definitely feel like the audio guide could be refined and have more clear directions to let people know where to go and what they are looking at. I enjoyed visiting those different palaces, although I feel like just one could have been enough, especially when doing a guided tour.