::A Geek in Korea::

There is an exhibition of paintings from the Louvre museum currently at The Nation Museum of Korea. Considering my sole interest in going to Paris during our European vacation will be to visit the Louvre, I was very interested in going to see this visit. I was never really an art museum kind of guy until I went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. If you hate are after walking through place, you have no soul. My wife and I haven’t traveled out of Daejeon in ages. Schedules, work, winter, and a dog have effectively stopped our short trips around Korea these days. For art from the Louvre, we were willing to make an exception.

Some of my wife’s students and coworkers attempted to make the trip last week. We were warned that the lines are extremely long, and that it is extremely crowded like everything else in Seoul. We were told to get there as early as possible. We set out alarms for 6:30 AM, planned out our route in advance. and went to bed at a reasonable time.

Then we completely overslept. Seems I had set my alarm for "Monday through Saturday" D’oh! I set up Yoshi’s feeder to dispense snacks and food throughout the day, then we packed our snacks and bags and went out on our trip. We caught a quick KTX high speed train, then headed for the National Museum. The crowds were growing, but honestly weren’t that bad. It was a very nice building and the exhibit was very well presented. There were a lot of families walking around, people with art books trying to appreciate what they were looking at, and a lot of bored kids. Same as every museum.

We didn’t stay to look at the other Korean traditional historical exhibits. We went to Yongsan Electronics Market. This marks the fourth or fifth trip to that place without a purchase for me. While they are now selling more Nintendo DS units and games, and I got to see my first Wii console, there is just nothing of interest for me there anymore. Either I can get it locally at a much better price, or order it online and not deal with shady people or people selling pirated materials. I think it’ll be off my travel plans from now on.

From Yongsan, we went to Seodaemun Prison History Hall. This was where Korean independence fighters (called Patriotic Ancestors in the materials) were tortured and kept during the Japanese Colonial period. They had a lot of exhibitions showing torture and abuse to Korean people done by the Japanese. They even had "try it yourself" sorts of torture methods, like a wall coffin that let you feel what it was like to be locked in a very small space for a long enough time to take a picture. Some of the torture techniques were very close to what I saw in Poland. There were some occasional English signs, but by far the most interesting part of the experience was being able to just walk through the prison and imagine the horrible conditions people had to suffer to live in such a place. 8 people in a cell the size of my bathroom, with no toilet, no light, and very little food. Absolutely terrible. I had issues with how some of the exhibits were worded, again, but it was written from the "survivor" point of view, so I can understand the feeling behind it.

From there, we navigated through the mazes of subways and trains it took to get back to Daejeon. We were totally beat after our trip, which doesn’t bode well for our travels in Europe. If we can’t last a day with light baggage in good weather when we know where we are going, we’ll be doomed in Europe when we actually try to find the Louvre.