IMID Notes

For years, Jeju Island was one of the places in Korea I really wanted to visit. During my graduate school years, however, I never had the opportunity to go. Jeju remained one of those places I kept thinking I would visit someday. Our first summer trip to Jeju finally gave me the chance to experience an island I had wanted to see for years. That opportunity finally came after I started working in Seoul. I traveled to Jeju for work, and this time our families came along as well. It gave us a chance to combine the trip with some family time and finally experience the island I had wanted to visit for so long. We stayed for five days. It was my first time in Jeju, and it was also the children's first visit. After wanting to see the island for so long, finally arriving there felt special. I remember thinking, I finally made it to Jeju. Finally experiencing Jeju after wanting to visit the island for years. Jeju Felt Different One of th...

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 ...

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 ...