A pretty lazy Sunday

There wasn't too much to do today... I was gonna go to church this morning, visiting a classmate's church, but I forgot to check the time it takes to get to his church last night, and I figured it's probably the same time it took for me to get to the Full Gospel church last week.... so I couldn't make it. I thought it was only gonna take 15 minutes, but it turned out to be 45 minutes. :( So I told him that I'll try to make it next Sunday instead.

Since that plan was scratched, I decided to try finishing visiting all the palaces today. Oh man was it hot and humid today. It was 30C outside and super humid since it was about to rain (it's pretty much gonna be raining the next few days). I didn't think it was gonna be that bad so I took the subway to the palaces anyways..... oh man. I couldn't stop sweating! It was SUPER HOT!!!!! My goodness......... EVERYONE was fanning themselves.

And some people picked the worst day to wear hanbok. -_-.

Anyways, so I got to Changdeokgung and started walking around. I realized that the palace looked pretty much like Gyeonbokgung, so there is really no point getting another tour guide to go through the same information. So I walked around it and took some pictures...

Then I went into the Secret Garden, which is for the royal family, in the back of Changdeokgung, with a tour guide explaining it to 100 people. It was just really too hot to enjoy anything today. So we went through it really quickly.

Then I went to the nearby palace called Changgyeonggung, which is also pretty much the same thing. I walked around a bit and saw these flying around:

I know it's hard to see it, but there were sooooo many dragonflies around. I've heard before that if you see dragonflies flying low, you know the rain is about to start. So I went to a nearby building and sure enough, rain started within 5 minutes. Good ol' biology is still working!

It rained really hard for a while.... and a lot of people just sat in nearby palace sitting area and waited for the rain to wane. And then after that, I just went home. It was really too hot to do anything at all. I even took a bus to go straight to the nearest bus stop near our dorm. It was impossible to walk without sweating profusely, not to mention breathing heavily too.

Anyways, so here is a compilation of the palace pictures......... because I really don't remember which one is which :( They all looked the same because they were built for different emperors, but has the same overall function. Alright, here they are!

Just a quick explanation about these tombstone looking things. They're not tombstones! They are position markers for the officials to stand before the emperor when he holds assembly. It represents their ranking, the closest to the palace represents the most important official.

That's it! Sorry this entry is not quite interesting........ because it was just too hot to do anything today. Bleh. But my Korean listening is definitely getting a lot better! When I watch variety shows, I can pick up a lot more words and phrases than before! *pat on the back* I just have to speak more with confidence......!