IMID Notes

Living in Korea means seeing Hangeul everywhere: on subway signs, school books, restaurant menus and messages on our phones. After many years here, reading Korean has become part of my everyday routine. I rarely stop to think about the letters themselves. Our family visit to the National Hangeul Museum (국립한글박물관) in Seoul gave us a reason to look again. Through historical texts, handwritten letters, writing tools and typewriters, we explored the story behind Korea’s alphabet. For my children, Hangeul is familiar from school and everyday life. For me, it is a writing system I learned later. At the museum, we had something new to discover together: the history behind those familiar letters. The National Hangeul Museum, where we explored the story behind Korea’s alphabet. A Writing System Created for the Korean Language One of the most interesting things about Hangeul is that its creation is documented. King Sejong created the alphabet in 1443, and the Hunminjeongeum , pu...

Yesterday, while watching the news about the Central Asian presidents visiting Korea, I saw a very familiar place on the screen: Cheong Wa Dae (청와대) , Korea's famous Blue House. Seeing official meetings taking place there immediately reminded me of our own visit a few years ago. I went back to the photographs we had taken that day and realized that our visit now feels a little different from how it felt at the time. For decades, Cheong Wa Dae was closely associated with the Korean presidency. Most people knew its distinctive blue-tiled roofs from television news, official photographs and important national events. In 2022, after President Yoon Suk Yeol moved the presidential office away from the compound, Cheong Wa Dae was opened to the public. During that period, our family had the opportunity to visit. The Main Building of Cheong Wa Dae, with Bugaksan rising behind its distinctive blue-tiled roofs. At the time, I saw it mainly as a rare opportunity to enter ...

Several years ago, during a work trip to Samarkand with a group of professors, I visited the Afrasiab Museum. Samarkand is usually associated with places such as Registan, Shah-i-Zinda, and the blue-tiled monuments that have made the city famous around the world. Afrasiab, however, takes visitors much further back into the history of Samarkand. Inside the museum, I saw the famous Afrasiab murals . Among the many people represented in the paintings, two figures were especially interesting to me because the museum identified them as Korean envoys . At that time, I was standing in Uzbekistan looking at figures connected with the Korean Peninsula. Years later, after returning to my everyday life in Korea, I unexpectedly encountered the Afrasiab murals again—this time at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul. Seeing the same historical story presented in two different countries made me want to look more closely at the murals, the ancient city they came from, and the connection bet...

Living in Seoul gives us access to many museums and cultural places, and the National Museum of Korea (국립중앙박물관) is one of those places that feels worth returning to. On this visit, I went with my children, and rather than trying to see everything, we moved through the museum at our own pace, stopping whenever something caught our attention. That is probably the best way to visit such a large museum with children. There is simply too much to take in during one day. Instead of treating it like a checklist, we could look closely at a few objects, talk about what we were seeing, and then continue to another gallery. Ancient treasures, everyday household objects, Buddhist sculptures and even the architecture of the museum itself gave us very different things to notice along the way. The Ten-story Stone Pagoda from Gyeongcheonsa Temple was one of the first objects to catch our attention inside the museum. The same pagoda seen within the scale of the ...