Seoul Museum of History

It's officially feeling like spring in Seoul!!  Although somedays are still only getting to 10 or 12 degrees C, it definitely feels like spring to us now!  However, spring in Seoul also brings the yellow dust, basically sand and dust particles that blow all the way into the city from the Gobi dessert areas in China and Mongolia.  This past week the yellow dust was especially bad, you could even see it and feel it while walking on the street.  Saturday it rained hard all day so that at least washed away the dust for the day.

I started teaching an extra after school this week for first and second graders.  It is only once a week and still during my regular work hours, but I'm actually quite thankful I have a little something extra to do since I currently have a little too much down time at work.  Plus the fact I get overtime pay for it is always a bonus too.  It looks like I will start teaching a class a couple times a month for some of the teachers as well.  This sounds like a bit of a challenge for me but I'm hopeful it will go okay and maybe I will even find some teachers who already know some English and I can have someone to talk with at work finally!

Today was pretty nice and sunny so we decided to head out into the middle of the city and go to a museum we had not been to before, the Seoul Museum of History.  This museum was all about the history of the nation's capital city from when it first started in the 1300s and was known as Hanyang, all the way up to the busy and bustling city it is today.  We found some of the recent history to be the most interesting, how Seoul went from being a poverty stricken shanty town after the Korean war (and even as far into the 1980s in some places) to the enormously populated, industrialized and tech-savvy city it is today in such a short time.  All of the history was very interesting though as it took you through the Joseon Dynasty, into the Japanese occupation of Korea until the end of World War II and through the Korean War and all of the hard work it took to rebuild and turn Seoul into the city that it is today in a relatively short amount of time.

Yesterday when I was walking through a subway station I noticed a rather large group of older Koreans all gathered around, standing and staring at a television.  For just a split second I thought, though I'm not sure why, maybe there was more news about something in North Korea.  No.  It was a soccer game.

This picture couldn't be more true.  No one is the slightest bit worried about any sort of conflict breaking out.  They have always talked and always will.  In the meantime we will continue to find a slight bit of humor in the American media reporting.

We will upload our pictures from the museum soon but here are just a few...

 They even had a 1:1500 scale model of Seoul today