Today was our last full day of exploring Seoul, so we headed out after breakfast to find the Bukchon Traditional Korean Village. When the taxi dropped us off, it turned out that the village wasn't much at all, just stores and homes that didn't seem much different than others we have seen. On top of that, what was there was closed, perhaps because it was a Monday. Monday seems to be the day that many things are closed in Korea, but the guidebooks hadn't mentioned anything about the village being closed.

We decided to take a quick wander through the village on our way down to the Gyeongbokgung Palace. The palace was first constructed in 1394 and reconstructed in 1867, it was the main and largest palace of the Five Grand Palaces built by the Joseon Dynasty. The name of the palace, Gyeongbokgung, translates in English as "Palace Greatly Blessed by Heaven. The Palace was similar to the Changdeokgung Palace that we saw yesterday, but we did get to watch the changing of the guards' ceremony, which was rather interesting. We felt very sorry for the guards as it was a VERY humid day and that seemed like a tough job to do in the big, traditional outfits they were wearing.

Once we had had our fill of the palace, we decided to head down to the Insadong shopping district. This area contains tons of little shops, everything from expensive art and antique galleries, to cheesy little souvenir shops. We browsed through tons of them, picking up a few things here and there, including some very beautiful hand-painted art pieces and a handcrafted silver necklace for Christine. After wandering around the area for a few hours, we decided to head back to the hotel to get out of the heat, as we were starting to feel quite drained.

A 15-minute taxi ride got us back to the hotel, where we decided to take a rest before dinner. Dinner was at the hotel buffet tonight, and after dinner we were both exhausted so we call it a night quite early and hit the sack early to prepare for our full day DMZ tour tomorrow.