Hwaseong Fortress

May 10th – Today was Maggie’s third birthday. So, we celebrated by taking our first train trip to Suwon City. Mark was so wound up about riding a train and Andrew thought it was “cool” he got his own T-card to ride the Ko-Rail. Once, we got to Suwon city we found the information center and got ourselves a map of the city and then we were set to go on our adventure for the day to Hwaseong Fortress. The walk to the fortress did not take long. Once we got there we started the 3 mile walk around the wall of the fortress and saw the different defenses along the wall. The wall seems like it is similar to the Great Wall of China on a small scale. As we walked around we heard the striking of the Bell of Filial Piety which was a sound like none other I have heard – very low and deep. We stopped and had Beef Bulgogi at a little Korean restaurant for lunch. This was our first Korean style meal together as a family sitting on the floor and cooking the food right in front of us. As always, Mark and Andrew attracted a ton of attention all day and lunch was no exception. One person gave Andrew some Korean snack type food and another came in off the street and gave Mark a little toy train. After lunch we walked to the Hwaseong Haenggung which is the best of this kind of Palace Architecture of the Joseon Dynasty. We watched many traditional performances. I put short clips of the performances on YouTube for you watch. Once inside the Palace, Andrew was able to put on and wear the Jang Yong Yeong’s armor. He did not last too long because it was heavy. The walk around the Palace was beautiful. Andrew had some nice man give him ice cream. Andrew is doing a marvelous job of saying kamsahamnida (thank you in Korean). We then moved on to continue our walk around the fortress wall to Janganmun Gate, one of the four main gates. We got off the wall walk at Hwahongmun on the Suwoncheon River and walked along the river back to the Suwon Station to get our train back home to Songtan. It was another marvelous day together here in South Korea. You can check out the pictures on Shutterfly under “Hwaseong Fortress.”