Weekend in Seoul

The last weekend of July Susan and I took 3 days and went up to Seoul. We visited the Korean Anabaptist Centre where Susan cooked a peach pie for our friends there. We had butterscotch pudding from scratch as a topping! On the advice of one of our friends there we stayed the weekend in a guest house just north of the main downtown area of Seoul. The guest house is owned by the city, but is independently operated. Here's a photo of us with the young man who was looking after the place.

As you can see, the guest house was a traditional Korean home. After living for six months in our apartment we had the best sleep we have had since coming to Korea. Upon reflection the reason was apparent. Our home is all concrete with the floors covered with linoleum and all wooden surfaces covered with vinyl; the apartment doesn't breath. In contrast, the guest house is entirely made from wood, clay and paper. The windows, doors and floors are paper. Yes, the wooden floors are covered with layers of paper, which is remarkably comfortable and very clean. What a difference building materials make in our overall health. I mean, in spite of being in the middle of a modern city of over 10 million people, we slept better than in the small city of Yeosu.

Also on our trip we visited the Korean National Museum - the largest building I have ever seen in my life! What a monster. We spend half a day there and only saw about a third of the place. There really wasn't a lot to see (we've seen much better museums down south), but there sure was a lot of space to cover in order to walk around the place.

This was one of the more interesting objects... try to guess what it is. I'll post the answer in the comments... so you'll have to click there if you want to find out.
Don't forget... if you want to look at a larger version of the photos, just click on them.