Finsatsea: April 11 and 12 - Incheon and Seoul

We spent two days in the port of Incheon, the gateway to Seoul and the northernmost part of the Republic of Korea. I hadn’t booked a tour for the first day and I just took the shuttle to the Sinpo International Market. Despite the name the market was a covered shopping street where the shops were mainly street food shops with a few traditional market stalls where one could buy foods to bring home to prepare. There were also a couple of household goods stores there so had I wanted to buy a laundry basket or a colander I would have been in luck. I didn’t stay long after wandering through the whole place and I came back to the ship where I listened to a couple of the lectures I hadn’t heard yet.

Sweet and sour chicken maybe

Some great big shrimp to be fried

The biggest chestnuts I've ever seen

I just had to get a picture of the Spam

On the evening we spent in Incheon a Korean dance and music troupe came on to perform. The costumes were beautiful and the dancers were graceful as they danced to traditional Korean music which isn't based on a scale like ours. Two musicians played some traditional Korean instruments including a 12 stringed harp kind of thing and a wooden flute. Sadly (at least to me) they played western songs like Somewhere over the Rainbow. I would have rather heard some traditional Korean songs, but they didn't play them.

The second day in Incheon I took a tour to Seoul, the capital of the country. Our first stop was the royal palace. Before I tell about the palace a little bit of Korean history is worth recounting. If it sounds confusing, it is, at least to me. There is evidence of people living in the country as long ago as 40,000 BC. In the last couple of millennia Korea has been either subjugated or a vassal state of either various Chinese dynasties and emperors or under the Japanese for most of the time with only short periods of Korean independence and rulers. From around the beginning of the 20th century it was annexed by Japan with a puppet king. After the Japanese surrender the Korean peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel and has been that way ever since. People of my generation have parents who fought in the Korean War (which was never a declared war and which has never officially ended). When the North Koreans invaded on June 25, 1950 they drove all the way to the far southeastern tip of the peninsula. Only the area around our last stop in Korea was not under their occupation. That’s a very brief synopsis of the history of the place and if it’s not precisely accurate, I apologize.

Anyway, the palace is in central Seoul and in terms of design reminds me of the Forbidden City but not on as vast a scale. We lucked out because just as we arrived the changing of the guard began. I thought it was neat seeing the changing of the guard in Taiwan but this one had it beat by a country mile. The guards wear what I assume are old style costumes in bright colors. They wore different kinds of hats, some with magnificent pheasant feathers, and carried swords, scimitars and spears. There were musicians with a variety of different instruments including something that looked like portable gongs and brightly painted drums. It was truly a spectacle. After that was finished we began our walk through the palace grounds. There were several ornate gates between courtyards and buildings. The roofs were decorated with dragons on the eaves. (These Asian people love dragons.) In most of the buildings, which we could only look in through the doors, the center floor was wood but the side floors were tile. Beneath the building under those areas there were ovens which were kept heated and thus heated the center of the buildings. There was a garden area with a pavilion surrounded by a moat which was evidently used for entertaining dignitaries. One other thing I should mention is the number of visitors in very fancy traditional costumes. It turns out that people dressed like that get in for free or reduced ticket prices. Plus it’s evidently the thing to do – go to the palace dressed up and get your picture taken. Consequently the area around the palace has all kinds of shops renting the costumes to people.

These next few are the changing of the guard

Visitors in rented traditional garb

From the palace we drove through a traditional old part of Seoul where people who worked at the palace would live so they would be close to go to work. Next we drove to a place close to the restaurant where we had lunch. If someone offered me $10,000 to take her to the restaurant, I wouldn’t be able to do it. We walked through a rabbit warren of little alleyways too narrow for cars to get to this place. We sat at a table for four in the middle of which was a built-in stew pot heated with a gas burner. There was a stew of beef, some vegetables, and glass noodles cooking. The rest of the table was covered with a variety of small bowls with things in them that we couldn’t identify for the most part. Some like shredded cabbage and rice were easy to figure out, but the others were mysterious. We assumed that some of it was kimchi, but for the rest I would just be guessing. It was all pretty tasty though.

The courtyard of the lunch restaurant

A view down the alley

After lunch we raced back through the maze of alleys and passed a very promising shopping street. Unfortunately our guide told us that we couldn’t shop there. “We’re going to a much better one,” he told us. Not really. We drove to a place a few blocks away, disembarked and there we were in a street just like the one I went to in Incheon yesterday. It was nothing but fast street food with a household goods store thrown in here and there for good measure. Nobody bought a thing; after all we’d just had lunch. We let the guide know we would have preferred the first street but it didn’t do any good.

Then it was time to get on the bus and drive back to Incheon through the awful traffic. Along the way we passed several of the satellite cities around Seoul. The metro Seoul area has a population of 26 million, roughly half the population of the entire country. We had to leave Incheon at a precise time because to go back out to sea we had to pass through a lock. The tide in Incheon can vary as much as 10 meters. In order to allow shipping into the port a lock system was developed. As we sailed from Incheon I could see the nearby hillside covered with blooming cherry trees. It was a bright sunny day with a comfortable temperature and a beautiful vista to enjoy.