Garden of the Morning Calm

We spent our Sunday exploring an amazing garden just north of Seoul - built about 50 years ago, it is an amazing place with stunning colours for this time of year - autumn - and has many wonderful features to explore. Leaving Suwon at 7.30am turned out to be a wise decision as the traffic was great and we arrived at 9am when the garden opened. This is prime time for the garden so it was pretty busy but we were able to grab a group photo at the entrance way without disturbing too many others!


We took 3 cars and had a nice group of teachers from GSIS - nice to mix with others from different divisions, all with the love of the outdoors and photograhy!  The garden had several types or themes, some were very floral, but a large number of areas were about shrubs and trees with pathways etc.

The Sunken garden area was especially interesting, as from a higher vantage point it had the shape of the Korean peninsula and it's purpose was to represent re-unification.

We stopped for a break at about 11am for coffees and so on, so I went back to the car to grab the banana cake I'd made - and discovered crowds of people coming in. It was incredible! We left to return to Suwon at about 2pm, and were amazed at the same thing - the stream of traffic coming down the 2 lane road into the garden would have gone on for about 4-5 km, at a snail's pace. We were really happy with our choice of timing - the drive home was without traffic hold-ups too, so we able to catch up with some other bits and pieces at home as well.

All in all it was an amazing place, I would highly recommend it to anyone coming to Korea.

Here's the slideshow from photobucket: