Palace prisms

Because the world looks beautiful if you're willing to tilt your head.

In the corner of the palace I found all the other kids playing traditional Korean games...

But the stick-n-circle was harder than the seven-year-olds made it seem.

Luckily, after a laugh at my expensive, the Koreans decided to show me how it is done.

"Like this, young white man," I'm sure he said in his native tongue.

He was patient, but I was not a fast learner.

After several attempts and fruitful coaching, SUCCESS!

Return to the palace

They said they’d pay both ways. We all accepted the bribe and headed towards the city on the weekend. They told us it was all about team-building, which we translated to not hating our jobs.

We’d take one more break a day, or one less pet-project instead, most of us said under our collective breath. But we shrugged our shoulders and took off to the palace with the promise of margaritas after the evening show.

The arrival came at during the changing of the guards. The color wheel of Korean silks marched from one door to the next, swords sticking to their backs. They beat the drum a thunder vigor and stood stoic for all the tourists photos.

We stared into the temple reflections in the early winter ponds till the grumbling for cigarettes and lunch led us to the gates. On to the next adventure, all on daddy's bill.

Changdeok Palace

We set out to find a strip of art galleries and stumbled upon a palace. To us it seemed out of place, across from a gas station, under the shade of urban office buildings. But as we would later learn, the city sprawled around the palaces, pushing new development out in all directions from the centre of the old.

The open air met palace walls, stretched out into grass and greens. With sky for ceiling the mountains poked up above the walls, towering over mulberry, juniper and Chinese scholar trees.

We pushed our chins into closed rooms covered in royal dress. The smell of wood from some childhood summer cottage filled the nose with its vintage spice. Above our heads the ceilings stood, all ornate details and brilliant colours.

We wanted through the site’s north walls into the Secret Garden. But not quite bad enough, we decided, to walk through the two-hour tour in Japanese. So we snapped one last photo and followed the footsteps out, sweaty with summer heat.

Out the exit we walked six hundred years in a single step. Suddenly modern cars soared by, their reflections chasing each other on the windows of boxy buildings. Just like that, we were back in downtown Seoul.