The Secret Garden

If you think I'm going to tell you all about the latest book I read you would be wrong. There are 5 palaces in Seoul and each has something about them that makes them unique. Changdeokgung has a beautiful Secret Garden you can visit and tour if you want to pay extra to see it. Last February my friend Martha came to visit Korea and we went to this palace and wanted to see the garden. When we got to the meeting place we realize we only had one ticket. I told Martha to go and see it and I would come back another day to see it.

I still think I got the better end of the deal, she froze while going through it and there where no flowers to see. I sat in a coffee shop drinking yummy citron tea and people watched as she toured.

Well now that spring is here it was time to see the garden. To go to the garden you have to buy a ticket and go through on a tour. Tours are nice, you learn lots of facts, but I get so tired listening. I was lucky because the first stop we made the tour guide said it was a special day. On this day you could tour the gardens alone if you wanted. So my friends and I where off, we wanted to tour alone and see what we could see. I mostly took pictures of things and not people so hopefully you don't get too sleepy like I do.

I loved this pond. It was so beautiful to me.


From another angle







I love the detail in the paint.

















I just loved seeing everything alive and awake.  The colors where all so beautiful every where we looked.

I loved these stairs, they looked so inviting to climb. 





Look I do have a friend, I got one picture of someone. Everyone say hi to Nick!



Apparently this tree is sick, why else would it have so many IV bags? We joked it was on life support.










I love this picture with the girls dressed in Hanboks the Korean traditional clothes.



A cool old tree.



I am glad I got to see the garden it was so beautiful. Some of you might notice that is different than Japanese gardens. The Japanese prune and take extra good care of their gardens and spend hours on them. In the end they look amazing. Koreans like to let nature be the gardener. They let things go and don't do too much to take care of them.  I think I side with the Koreans on this.  This is mostly because I am lazy and I don't like to garden, but I do love to see what nature makes for me.


If you want to see what it looks like in the winter check out my friend Martha's blog post about it here.