No, You're a Dipthong!

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Sunday, March 1st

David and I continued our culture dip with a trip to the National Museum of Korea.  My Lord this place was huge...

We only made it through one floor (The Archeology Gallery) before we needed to take a sweets break.  My feet were then aching after the second floor (The Historical Gallery), but I had to sit and wait for David because he is facinated with Hangul, the Korean written language, and there was a special display about it.

Hangul was invented in the 1400's because the Korean people never had their own written language;  they were using Chinese characters to try and express Korean words.  I think David likes it because it's so scientific and logical.  The alphabet emerged from a study of the speach organs (toungue, mouth, throat) and the shape they take while speaking.  Characters are stacked and combined in groups of two to five to create syllables, and then the syllables are grouped from left to right to form words.  I say blah blah blah what?  I think the most interesting part of Hangul was how this broke major social boundaries.  It was so easy to learn and use, that the upper class were no longer the ones who had the time and money to learn how to read and write.  That and some of the characters are called "dipthongs", and this allowed me to say "You're a dipthong" to David after I was tired of waiting for him.

Later in the day we hit another shopping district, which was supposed to be a great place to buy Celedon, a certain type of Asian pottery.  We didn't buy much that day, but it had some good people watching as usual.  Ooooh, a crowd was gathering, this must be interesting...

Sort of.  It was just some guy with his pets.  But they were pretty cute.

Since it was a weekend, this place was packed.  Enough culture for one day, back to work tomorrow!