Changdeokgung Palace, Seoul

It is worth your while to walk along with one of the english spoken palace tours. And the palace’s garden (The Secret Garden) is even only accessible by group tour. There are a couple ones per day that are in english.
The group tours come free with the entry ticket.

Some background on this palace:

Exploring the palace and the grounds is in fact an all outdoor event. There is no entering of buildings or rooms, just looking inside some of the buildings through open doors or windows.

The site is enormous. What is called ‘a palace’ and ‘a garden’ is in fact a huge area with dozens of buildings and a forest-like park, filled with ponds and structures for leisure and resting.

While most of the buildings and rooms are empty (due to the japanese and the fires), this one has curtains, furniture, lights and so on.

In all the structures we see back these beautifully colored beams and roof constructions.

While waiting for an english tour to start -and freezing my butt of- I suddenly saw a tour guide next to me, with two tourists. I wondered if this was The Tour, since it was about time for the official tour to start.
I asked the guide (the guy with the cowboy hat) wether this was the tour or wether this was a private tour. He smiled and said: “It is a private tour, but I welcome you. These are my friends.”
I was puzzled. Was he joking or what? I asked the tourists who did not reply. Weird… But what the heck; it was cold and it was a guide, so of I went.

After a while I discovered that this was an airport transfer tour and the young man and woman were from China. He was Egyptian, living in a part of China where it could be -23C, so he had no problems with the weather that day in Seoul. She lived in a part of China where it never got that cold, so she was suffering and could not utter a word.

The palace buildings you saw so far all have similar colors and ornamentation. At the end of the tour and on the far end of the grounds we came across this palace complex:

Much more modest, right?
Well, the king built this for his mistress or concubine. That’s why;-).

Remember my post ’10 things you did not know about Seoul’? In that post I told you about floor heating. In the following picture you see one of many floor heating ‘stoves’ in the palaces.

Fire was made in these stoves or fireplaces under floor level. The heat then went up to the floor.
And yes, that is my shadow, winter hat and all;-)…

I am saving The Secret Garden tour for my next post.

What do you think of this traditional Korean architecture?