Just inside the front gate is this statue of the scholar Yulgok. Note that because he is a Confucian scholar, his book is written in Chinese, not in the Hangul characters, which latter were designed by King Sejeong for use by the common people.

Tags:   Yulgok Ohjukeon house museums South Korea tourism South Korea Korean heritage Confucianism 오죽헌 율곡

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A rather lengthy walk from the front gate to get to the Ohjukeon house exhibit, but a nice pattern of tiles on the plaza, which I think are in the three national Korean colours.

Tags:   Ohjukeon Museum tourists South Korea 오죽헌 tourism South Korea Korean heritage museums flagstones tiling

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I was surprised to see that various public facilities, museums and palaces and such, had clean-up crews like these older ladies and men, working to keep the place spick and span. What attracted me to the shot were the traditional brooms, appropriate in a museum. I learned later that these are, in a sense, make-work jobs funded by municipal governments, for the most part, to make up for the lack of any public retirement plan in Korea. Traditionally, elders would be looked after by their children in their own houses, but that way of life has now effectively vanished, and no retirement plan has yet been set up to take care of the shortfall. Of course, eventually, these ladies will not be able to work, and who knows what will happen to them then?

Tags:   South Korea 2012 Korean people Korean faces everyday occupations ordinary life Ojukheon Museum elders retirees 오죽헌 tourism South Korea museums Korean heritage

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In the courtyard before you go into the museum precincts is this metal inset, showing you where to stand to get a good shot; just place your feet on the feet symbols and shoot away.

Update, July 2014: I've replaced the shot with one that is a little less biased towards red. For some reason, when I processed this originally, I went hog-wild with pushing it towards red, probably because I wanted the bricks to stand out. But the result was over-saturation and a garish look. To fix it, I simply filtered the image with cyan (which is roughly the colour of the sky, or daylight). The fleshtones are now more accurate, as are the greys of the stone, and the white of the flags.

Tags:   오죽헌 Ohjukeon house museums South Korea tourists parents and kids photo opportunity snapshots Korean heritage flagstones tiling advice tourism South Korea

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A tour group at the Museum. Koreans seem to visit places in large groups travelling by air-conditioned bus with tour guides who explain all the details of the various historic locations. I really only got a taste of this when we visited the De-Militarized Zone along the 38th parallel, and our tour guide spoke in English. On this day, we were visiting with friends, and using the Museum's English language brochure, which was fairly comprehensive.

Tags:   South Korea 2012 Korean people Korean faces ordinary life Ojukheon Museum elders tourists photo opportunities 오죽헌 tour groups flowers steps

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