IMID Notes

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 means there are many museums and educational places to visit with children, and sometimes the places that sound quite serious turn out to interest them more than I expect. The Bank of Korea Money Museum (한국은행 화폐박물관) was one of those places for us. At first, a museum about money may sound like somewhere mainly for adults. But when we visited with our children, I found that there was quite a lot for them to see and do. My children, especially the boys, were interested in the old banknotes, huge displays of Korean won, damaged money, currencies from different countries, and exhibits they could interact with themselves. What I liked was that the visit was educational without feeling like another lesson. We could simply walk around together, stop wherever something caught their attention, and talk about what we were seeing. Bank of Korea Money Museum in central Seoul. Inside the Bank of Korea Money Museum The museum introduces the his...

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 ...