서울: Gwanghwamun

This place was undoubtably one of the more cultural things we did during our weekend in Seoul. Gwanghwamun, the gate pictured above, has an incredibly long history associated with the Joseon Dynasty, one of Korea's longest ruling dynasties. What I found really interesting was the Hanja at the top of the gate. Hanja refers to Chinese characters and pronunciation that were incorporated into the Korean language. If you click on the picture above, you can see that the three characters are as follows:

門化光.

Bear with me here. These traditional Chinese characters, if read from left to right, would read:

men-hua-guang

But since there's this thing that's done in Chinese signs where the characters are written from right to left, one should actually read it as such:

光化門

guang-hua-men

And, thus, you finally arrive at the Korean name for this Korean gate, which, derived from Chinese, is:

Gwang-hwa-mun

See, isn't language so cool? 

Alright, allowing for the awkward judgement to pass after that last sentence, I'm going to go ahead and take y'all on a little tour inside the gate to the actual Gyeongbokgung Palace that lies behind it. Sometimes pictures just can't do justice the scope of a place, and sometimes I just want to try out the video function of my new camera, so I ended up shooting film more often than still shots to give readers an idea of this palace. My friends and I actually had a great time filming the inside of the palace for you guys, so I hope you enjoy.

First, a few pictures:

And now, the tour: