We would soon be leaving Seoul for Busan but first I want to share a few other places we visited and things we saw – some even from the windows of our bus. Pictured above the blog title is Namdaemun Market. It is a traditional market dating back to 1414 when it was a government-chartered market. The historical picture below was posted on the Namdaemun Market website. The gate in the picture is the Sungnyemun Gate, also known as the…
Our tour also took us to the War Memorial of Korea. It was an exceptional museum with lots of information about the Korean War which is where our group spent most of our time. But first I want to share a little about two other exhibits. The first is a South Korean patrol boat that became famous during the Second Battle of Yeonpyeong (2002). Two North Korean patrol boats crossed the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the disputed maritime border in…
Our Sakura Seas South Korea and Japan Tour officially started and first took us to the Gyeongbokgung Palace located in Seoul. When I researched the Palace, I learned it was the site of significant Korean achievements, followed by the Japanese’s government systematic destruction of the Palace during its occupation of Korea, and finally Korea restoring the Palace to its original glory. Gyeongbokgung Palace was built in 1395 and served as the royal residence and government center for the Joseon Dynasty….
After our night tour of Seoul, we went on another independent tour with Tours By Locals. This time we would be in Suwon area, about 20 miles south of Seoul. We would first visit the Hwaseong Fortress, a stone and brick fortress built in the late 1700s. It was badly damaged during the Korean War. A document, Hwaseong Seongyeok Uigwe (Records of Hwaseong Fortress Construction), was published in 1801 and was used to reconstruct much of the Fortress. It is…
We took Tauck’s “Sakura Seas: South Korea and Japan” tour. The first part of our tour was centered in Seoul. We came a few days early to see some sites on our own before the start of the tour. Before arriving in Korea, we booked a private night tour of Seoul (through Get Your Guide). Our first stop was the Changyeonggung Palace, a palace we had visited on our prior trip in 2009. It was the third palace built during…
From Bern, we went to Jungfraujoch in the Swiss Alps. It was this opportunity that attracted us to this particular tour. This area has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001. We first took a bus to Lauterbrunnen where we would catch one of two trains to Jungfraujoch. These are some of the beautiful views we saw near the Lauterbrunnen train station. We were appreciative of these photo opportunities because we knew we would encounter a snowstorm at higher…
We began our Rhine, Swiss Alps and Amsterdam Tauck tour in Bern, Switzerland. We arrived a day early and stayed in a very nice room in the Bellevue Palace. These are views from our hotel room. The first picture below is the Albert Einstein Museum. It was within walking distance of our hotel and dealt mostly with Einstein’s life and to a lesser extent some of his inventions. The second picture is the Aare River. It flows through Bern and…
Our last shore excursion was in Giverny, a village in the region of Normandy. Claude Monet lived and worked here from 1883 until his death in 1926. He was a French painter and the founder of Impressionism painting. The term “Impressionism” is derived from the title of his painting, “Impression, Sunrise.” Monet’s ambition to document the French countryside led him to paint the same scene many times so he could capture the changing light at different times of the day and…
After our time in Les Andelys, we had lunch on our riverboat and then sailed to Vernon where we took a short walking tour through the old part of town. The picture above the title is the Old Mill. The Old Mill is a landmark in Vernon and was originally a water mill. It was built between two piers of an old bridge over the Seine. Several mills like this one used to be operating on the river all along…
The next day our tour took us to the town of Les Andelys. Even from a distance, we could see a medieval castle named Château Gaillard. Construction began in 1196 under the direction of Richard the Lionheart, who was both King of England and feudal Duke of Normandy. The castle was expensive to build, but the majority of the work was done in just two years. The Château Gaillard has a relatively advanced design, using early principles of concentric fortification….