nope the one i stayed is at ohmok-gyo...

its not hard to find the dongdaemun market..its just that 2 local korean guys pointed me to a totally different direction...

Emm... size of Dongdaemun is about... as big as Bukit Bintang? Maybe slightly smaller/bigger though.. not too sure.

The wikimapia link to Dongdaemun ( or the big eastern gate) is here

http://wikimapia.org/#lat=37.5711559&lon=1...49&z=18&l=0&m=b

Wondering where is the exact location of the shopping district? East west South or North of this ancient landmark?

Nandaemun market (South gate) & myeongDong market are clearly marked but not dongdaemun..funiii

Continuation of my previous post

After the visit of Blue house i then went to visit the Gyeongbok Palace or GyeongbokGong. According to the back of my entrance ticket, it seems that the original palace was almost completely burnt down during the World War 2, hence restoration has been carried out for the past 10 years. At the time of my visit, only phase one is completed, meaning only 40% has been restored. But no thanks to the tightness of my schedule, i didn't really visit the whole palace properly. Pictures are quite limited as well as our clueless guide kept rushing us here and there. Sigh.


Walking to the palace


Main entrance of the palace. or is it the back?or middle? @@


more colorful trees.


turn left and go......

Entering the folk museum........





Some phoenix again


Buddhist Heart Sutra in traditional Chinese. Another proof that Korea originated from China.


Placenta chamber..whatever it is used for.. @@


Superstitious Koreans as well.

Back to the palace...


A walk down the road.


At that time there was a royal parade where these people dressing in their traditional costumes and circling the building. No 'palace girls' though.


When there were no clubs/bars back then, these was the place that the officials & ministers partied out with the girls.









more pics at my blog

Actually they are not really originate from China-lah. they have their own Empire and even have their own 3 warring states or kingdoms Gorguyeo (north), Bakje (West-possible the origin of japanese ) and Silla (Related to Han Chinese - East)

Similar to ancient japan, korea and Vietnam, All were using Chinese characters before Japanese started inventing their own katakana (~1000yrs ago) and Korean king Sojeon in 15th century created Korean alphabet & Vietnam romanised their chinese literature during French time.

The Koreans have their distinct language wth lotsa loan words from chinese nia..but no evidence they were part of chinese empire before ..Well from my understanding-lah

well, just booking for kaya hotel
http://www.agoda.com/asia/south_korea/seoul/kaya_hotel.html

budget maa....


@stimix
somehow, wikimapia page is not working...
keep loading unnecessarily

This post has been edited by koinibler: Nov 17 2010, 10:29 PM

lol nola. you see the dates of the first korean empire. all long after china's empire.

most of their old stuff in the museum were in chinese, including wordings of the palace. can see for yourself.

my guide told me, the koreans got their inspiration to change the chinese words into the now korean words when they were observing people playing chinese chess, the wei qi. a lot of boxes ma. so they convert those words according to those boxes. all from traditional chinese. japanese words also come from chinese ma, that's why there are some similarities. even the pronunciation of some korean words are from chinese. try translating market into korean.

they were not part of the chinese empire. they were chinese(barbarians kononnya) who ran away from china. same thing like japan. this was during the time when Qin Shi Huang burned all the books in China to unify China, some how korea and japan was too far to be affected. This is from my understanding la. maybe SSJBen can give a better explanation.

Thousands years of assimilation wth Chinese lor..haha...Thus more than 50% of the words are borrowed from Chines (Similarly to Japanese)..Well probably b4 the 3 Korean Kingdom states, The korean peninsular might be directly controlled by Chinese or as those Chinese dramas.."The Babarians" More refering to the mongols & manchu..well..Korean having lotsa similarities to Monggols as well rather than Chinese from what I read

Even those Historic gates/walls also similar name to Chinese mah..such as:

- Dong Dae mun - Chinese - Tong ta men (Big Eastern Gate)
- Nam Dae Mun - Chinese Nan Ta men (Big Southern Gate)
- Nam San - Chinese - similar ronounciation- South Hill

exactly. well, manchu or not. let's call it 'Mainland' to avoid confusion. so yeah, korean & japanese are highly likely to be originated from the mainland.

not sure about japanese, but like my guide said, all the korean words were modified from chinese letters. that's why sound very similiar too. haha oh well, not a very history person here.

Not really modified-lah..The current Korean words actually more like romanise wording like ABCD...Very easy to learn wan...It was created by King Sejong after realising that Chinese characters so difficult to memorise & certain chinese characters can't 100% represent spoken korean..(Fo eg..I dun think any chinese character to represent korean sounding words such as the "Yo" & "mida" haha

So easy way out..create the abcde..things..haha Trust me..you can read Korean within 5 days..Only ~ 20++ characters and join it to words..You can even use Korean character to write in Malay or English

This post has been edited by stimix: Nov 17 2010, 11:15 PM

Stimix is right... although I would like to add that you can actually count Koreans as part of chinese, they're like our distant cousins.
Like how chinese isn't only a SINGLE clan, there are dozens and dozens of clans.

Hanja, chinese characters are what Koreans used in old days (we still use it these days, but it's alright not to know them too much really).
Hanja is basically Kanji, with different pronounciations.

The reason why Hangul was invented is because it just makes reading and writing easier.
So... emm, you can say it's modified or you can say they're romanised to make it easier, either way works.

Going tomorrow

Still torn between wanna bring the leather jacket or the down jacket

Emm... it's still not snowing yet, so leather jacket should do fine unless at night.
Well.. got space just bring both lo.

Daytime leather jacket, night time down jacket.

got space bring two lo... my colleague went with just a not so thick jacket end up suffering like crazy..then we had to borrow our scarves and the caps for him to keep him warm...

Got a lot of space but limited weight allowance.
Cilakat, USD up RM3.15 at the money changer already.

Yeah so sad.. All currencies getting better and an edge over RM liao..So sad..I'm praying hard it will dropped by nxt mth

weather today seoul 3/14

i got 80k won left wan change?

nvm hope to save it for the future. ><

Continuation my last post:


The place was located at some isolated back yard building. lol.


Traditional costumes for everybody to try & camwhore with! Quite cool. Best part is its free.

Ok now the process to make kimchi:


Materials to prepare the..er..sauce?


First add the chilli powder.


Add garlic..onions...


..soy sauce..ginger..etc.


Mix them up all together~


Spread the sauce evenly on each leaf of the cabbage.


Then you tie tie tie and wrap and it becomes like this.


My masterpiece. XD

Basically everything was over pretty fast. Zzz..the rest of the time spent there was taking pics with the costume and buying over priced souvenirs. =/