Day 43

Monday was the best day in Gyeongju!  My fellow foreign teachers finally joined me and we took an early bus north to the folk village of Yangdong.  The village was cute and quite old, full of historic houses where mildly important people once lived.  The houses are still inhabited by people, so it's a bit odd to be able to walk right into their yards and look into their homes.  Once we accidentally wandered into someone's house, but they were very cool about it and even invited us in to look around.

Here's a shot of the first bit of Yangdong we saw when we arrived.

Yangdong from the bus station.

The whole village is build on the hills, and there's a lot of houses behind this main hill.  Some of the houses have information signs that speak in Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese, which is something I really appreciate.  Without a little history and background, an old house is just that.  Some of these speaking signs were inordinately loud, and we felt bad for the people living in the houses.

Boss tourists.  The only waegukin (non-Koreans) in Yangdong.

These are impressive homes!

Nobody lived in these two, but it's interesting to see the construction of these buildings.

There's lawn equipment inside the doors on the left!  I'm nosy.

This would make an excellent party house.

This was an especially nice house that was once the residence of someone moderately important to Korean history.  The signs kind of looked the same after a while, because every house was the home of some scholar from ages ago.  Maybe Koreans know the history, but all the names sound the same to us waegukin (that's Korean for "non-Korean people.")

A gorgeous house with an ancient tree and its own temple!

Here's the entrance to that temple.  We couldn't go in.

 And a little more from Yangdong:

It took us about an hour and a half to explore Yangdong, so we hopped on the next bus to Oksan, a village to the east of Yangdong.  The northern area of Gyeongju seems pretty unpopular with tourists, so we mostly had the place to ourselves.  The buses to Oksan and back to downtown Gyeongju only come every 1.5 hours, so we were careful not to miss it!

I wanted to see a thirteen-story pagoda in Oksan, and despite a dearth of signs leading the way, we eventually made it.  Despite the map saying it was 'thirteen stories,' the boys were expecting the pagoda to be about 5 feet tall.  I was the optimist and wagered it would at least be taller than me.  I think we were all pleasantly surprised!

The 'stories' apparently refer to those layers on the top.

See?  Totally taller than me.

It was a nice pagoda!

There was an unmarked path leading into the forest behind the pagoda, so of course we followed that.  It led to a graveyard of sorts, the cool kind with old tombs and mounds.

Pretty cool tomb!

Seriously, that is a sweet headstone.

Juan between two lovely mounds.

Behind the graveyard was a small Buddhist temple with the cutest Chow puppy I've ever seen!

That swastika is the Buddhist symbol.  The Nazi one faces the other way.

A tiny lion!!!

Monks!  They're almost as cute as the dog, actually.

Sweetest puppy.  So sweet.

Probably would have stolen this sweetheart, if it weren't for those pesky monks who owned him.

They actually had another dog, a tiny yappy mangy white thing that played fetch.  This one is much cuter.

Two monks invited us into their home (a building connected to the temple) for lunch, which was an incredible and unexpected experience.  They served us fresh fruits like bananas, grapes, and kam, which is a messy Korean fruit that looks like a tomato but grows on big trees.  They also served songpyeon, a crescent-shaped rice cake with sweet red azuki bean paste filling, and some kind of rice-based bread with whole red azuki beans.

You can't take photos in the temple, but apparently you can take photos inside the house part.  Here's Eric enjoying some banana.  I'm right next to him.  On the table you can see the orange kam fruits on the far right, grapes in the middle, bananas and cut-up kam in front of the grapes.  The back-left plate has green songpyeon and the white bean-bread.

Apparently you're allowed to take photos inside the house part?  The food was delicious!  

They didn't speak much English and we speak barely any Korean, but we managed to talk and eat for over an hour.  Actually, Juan carried most of the conversation, because Eric and I are abysmal at Korean.  I managed to communicate that I wanted their dog by saying "Ke agi shippoyo," which literally means "dog baby [I] want."  Probably missing a few important parts of the sentence, but whatever.  They understood.

Monk walking his puppy.

After lunch they loaded us up with bananas and kam for the road.  As they walked us out, they picked some fruits the size of large grapes off a bush and gave us those too.  They tasted like bad apples and we ended up tossing them away once we were out of sight.  Very generous, those monks.  It was an incredible experience!

I often travel alone, which has its benefits.  I get to meet new people, follow my own schedule, and do whatever I want.  But today reminded me of the benefits of traveling with others, because I never would have had this experience if I had been alone.

On the way back to the bus stop we stopped into a small pottery shop called "Tosandoyo."  The owner made everything he sold and had a classroom in the back for pottery classes.  I bought two lovely teacups for 5000₩ (USD$4.50), which is an excellent souvenir for me because I love tea.

Aren't they lovely?

 I also strongly considered buying this set:

For fertility!

I got a pamphlet with my purchase and this set actually makes an appearance there too.  The caption reads "Beauty and the Beast (One-shot cup)."  Of course.

I'm unclear on what the penis structure one is.  It's not a cup...

I ended up not buying it, but only because I didn't want to carry it around.  Certainly not for lack of need or desire.

Next up was the Oksan Confucian School, which was somewhat unimpressive.  We did watch these Korean people for a while, trying to figure out what they were doing.  They look like they're fishing, but the strings have no hooks at the end, just metal rings.  We're pretty sure they were just attracting fish with the shiny bit to have a look at them, nothing more.  That said, we did see a water bottle stuffed full of minnows, so maybe this rig actually does catch fish somehow?  Us waegukin will never know.

The fish were just little minnows.  This was weirder than the fertility teapot.

Fairly standard entrance to the Oksan Confucian School.

There was a book in the water, so we wanted to see what it was.  It ended up being an empty address book.
What a let-down!

With all the sights of Oksan exhausted, we hopped on the bus back to downtown Gyeongju and went off in search of dinner.  Mr. and Mrs. Boss had recommended a restaurant called 욕석궁, or Yokseokkung, in an old house belonging to the Choe family.  The Choe clan was apparently pretty rich and well-loved because they took care of their peasants, but they donated all their money to national endowment after the Korean war.  Today the head of the family is a lawyer in Seoul.  The Choe clan's precepts included not letting anyone starve within a 30-mile radius, not buying land from peasants during famines, and not getting involved in high-level politics.  Their house was absolutely lovely, and the food was even lovelier.

The beautiful house/restaurant, staffed by women in traditional hanboks.

The 욕석궁 menu had three options: a 33K meal, a 66K meal, and a 99K meal, and we chose the least expensive.  At 33,000₩ (USD$30), this was my most expensive meal in Korea so far.  And it was totally worth it.

There were at least 30 different small dishes, and each more delicious than the last.  In the photo below we've got a delicious salad in the white bowl on the far left.  Next to that is a dish of pork slices, and to the right of that is a pork stew.  The white rectangles on the oval plate are fish, and the pizza-looking thing on the far right is a fried spicy seafood pancake.  It was perfectly crispy and spicy and my absolutely favorite.  The side dishes are in the small bowls.  On the bottom left is a bowl of veggies, with a bowl of kimchi to the right.  I have no idea what the rest were.

Just the first round.

Everything was stellar.  I would absolutely recommend this place to anyone going to Gyeongju.  So delicious!  It's behind the old Confucian school next to the river, behind the observatory and surrounding park.  So if you're ever in Gyeongju, check it out!  :)

Look at all this food, it barely fits on the table!

All Korean restaurants have really nice dishes, then give you cheap plastic jugs for water.  Weird!

After dinner we went to Anapji pond, where royalty used to vacation.  It's entirely rebuilt, but pretty.  None of my photos turned out except for these two, and I am in both.  Oh well.

Lovely pavilion behind me, nicely lit up at night.

These night pictures are hard to get!

And that wraps up the best day ever in Gyeongju!  Cheers!

-애쉬톤 / Ashton