A Day at the Museum

One of the things Greg and I had plans to do while we were in Seoul for my birthday was to hit a couple of museums.
The first one we hit, and the one that I most desperatly wanted to see was the Korean National Museum. Not for the Korean artifacts, no I wanted to see the exhibit of paintings that had been sent over from the Lourve to celebrate one hundred and fifty years of Franco-Korean relations.
It seemed to me that the Lourve had known that I would be in Korea for this exhibit and had included, amongst a bunch of minor landscapes, my most favorite painting in the world, one that I had previously seen only in books, Thomas Gericualts work, "The Raft of the Medusa".
All in all the exhibit wasnt that good but I stood transfixed in front of the Medusa for at least fifteen minutes while the line of people behind me became angrier and angrier at the waygook holding up the line, admiring the lines and brillant use of shading that Gericault used to depict the survivors of a shipwreck off the coast of Senegal fighting through cannibilism and thirst trying to signal to a British ship on the horizon.
After the Lourve exhibit we headed over to the main museum for a taste of Korea, but I am ashamed to say, I quickly became bored and basically forced Greg to head over to a place that I had already thourghly explored, the Korean War Museum.
While not the best war mueseum I have ever been too, the Imperial War Museum in London easily takes the cake, it is cool for all the neat machines that they have sitting outside. From the Scud missles to the Russian equipment captured during the Korean war to the mamouth B-52 with two smaller planes parked under its wings are pretty cool to look at.

Picuters
1. In the subway station outside the museum is a mosiac depicting the building that houses the treasures of Korea.
2. These are punishment sticks, used until early in the twentieth century to keep slaves and peasents in line.
3. A little boy as tired of the Korea National Museum as I was at this point.
4. A North Korean infiltration boat used to run spies and commandos up to the shore of the south in the early 1980's
5. A Mig fighter flown by a defector from the North in 1983