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

Day 42

My first Korean holiday, Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving), has come and gone!  I've just returned from a five-day trip to the beautiful Gyeongju, a city in the southeastern area of the Korean peninsula.  I had an excellent time--I made new friends, learned the history of the Silla dynasty, gained some new Korean vocabulary, and came home with an overabundance of new teaware.

An excellent view of the Gyeongju area.

Gyeongju was the capital of the Silla kingdom.  Silla was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, ruling for nearly 1000 years and played a major role in shaping Korean culture and history.  After 992 years of power, the Silla dynasty bowed down to the Goryeo kingdom, from which modern Korea draws its name.

The history of the Silla dynasty, particularly its inception, is actually very interesting.  Or at least, the Teddy Bear Museum made it pretty interesting.  But we won't get there for another few days.  Rather than try to fit all five days into one blog post, I'm going to split everything up by day.  Today let's focus on Saturday and Sunday.

This is a bird I thought was pretty.  It didn't really fit anywhere else in this post, so here it is.
There you have it, a traditional Korean bird eating a traditional Korean squished fruit.

On Saturday I took a bus from Chuncheon (where I live) to Gyeongju, which took about 6 hours and mostly involved an overweight Korean man with halitosis falling asleep on me.  Not pleasant.  Fortunately the trip got better after that.  I dropped my bag off at the Gyeongju Guesthouse, a nice hostel with clean bathrooms, half-comfy beds and free make-it-yourself breakfast.  After that I made my way to the park, where the tumuli are.

Tumuli are tombs beneath artificial hills.  The important person (usually a king) was put into a casket, the casket was put into a wooden room with all the burial goods, then that was covered in clay, and then that was covered in an enormous layer of rocks, and then the whole shebang was covered with earth.  So to summarize: casket, wooden room, clay, rocks, dirt.  Some of the smaller (less important people's) tumuli were looted and destroyed, but the larger ones have mostly been untouched for hundreds of years.   A few have been excavated and a veritable trove of treasures has been unearthed from each.

Tombs!

There's dead people in there.  And lots of rocks.

More tumuli.

There are at least two dozen tumuli within the downtown area.  The area is pretty flat, so they stick out. They're quite impressive, actually.  One of the excavated tumuli is open to the public to view, but they don't allow photos inside.  It's neat but nothing to write home about.

The area with all the tumuli has a few other interesting sights, but the tumuli are cool because they're the originals.  Korea only got into the tourism industry about twenty years ago, and much of Gyeongju's tourism (especially for foreigners) has been established within the past ten years.  But the Korean peninsula has been through a lot of wars, invasions, and rival dynasties, and many structures of historic importance have been demolished.  So what did they do?  Rebuild them, of course!

To be fair, most of their recreations are pretty cool and as true to the originals as possible.  But it's also strange to look at many of the 'historic' buildings and realize that they were built within my lifetime.

Traditional Korean door in a park full of tumuli.

Anyway, rebuilt or not, the stuff is cool.  This vase-shaped thing below is a primitive observatory called Cheomseongdae, and is apparently admired by modern archaeologists as very advanced for the time period.  Under the window (which is actually a door that was reached by ladder) the building is filled with rocks.  Above it were wooden planks to reach the top.

Not a bad-looking stone observatory.

It's a National Treasure, number 31 to be exact.  It was built during the reign of Queen Seondeok (632-647 A.D.) and apparently has miraculously made it through the last 1300 or so years without looking much worse for wear.  I don't buy it for a second.  The Korean government has absolutely no problem recreating anything of moderate historic importance and immediately labeling it as a National Treasure. As you'll soon see, they do this a lot.  So call me a skeptic, but I think this is mostly 'restored,' if not completely rebuilt.

Near the Cheomseongdae observatory we've got the site of a destroyed crescent-shaped palace called Banwolseong, Historic Site #16.  (Everything here is a Historic Something-or-Other.)  Banwolseong was built during the early first century, but nobody seems to know when it was destroyed.  Inside the confines of old Banwolseong is an ice storage called Seokbinggo (National Treasure #66), which was originally built in 1738 by King Yeongjo of the Joseon dynasty and three years later moved about 100m by the same king.  Nobody knows why.

Outside of the ice storage.

Inside the ice storage.

Cute camouflage frog!

Around the corner is the Gyeongju Hyanggo Confucian School.  There's a few Confucian schools in the area, though I'm unsure what they actually do.  They seem to be tourist attractions these days and little else.

Totally empty!  How did I get so lucky?

Now let's move out of the downtown area and south to Bulguksa.  The Bulguksa temple is a UNESCO-designated World Cultural Asset and the home of numerous National Treasures.  Despite all this pomp and fuss, it's actually quite lovely.

My travel companions hadn't made it into town yet, so I visited Bulguksa alone early Sunday morning.  I was delighted to find the place mostly empty.  Lucky me!

At the entrance of Bulguksa!

A map with the layout.  I'm at the gate in the very bottom right corner.

Bulguksa was built between 751 and 774 and was the center of Silla Buddhism until it was completely burnt down by the Japanese in 1593.  The temple was rebuilt between 1969-73.

On the map above, this is just across that bridge, about 1/3 from the right side and the top.

Ooooh, colorful statues with swords!

The signs are all in Korean so I don't know what these are for!  I'm pretty sure they're guardians of some sort?

The guitar-playing guardian?  Really wishing I had a Korean guide right now.

Look between their legs, there are tiny monsters!  Or maybe people?

There was a lovely pond with lilies, perfect for taking selfies.  Trust me, there is no activity more Korean than taking photos of yourself.  And since I was alone and wanted some pictures with me in them, I had no choice.

Please just be happy that I'm not instagram-ing all this, okay?

Yep, very pretty.

Now we've reached the main temple area.  In this photo are at least two national treasures.  The first is the staircase, which is original and fairly unremarkable as far as staircases go.  The second treasure is the building itself, which is 100% reconstructed.

Two national treasures, right here!

To be fair, it's all very attractive.

Full view!

My favorite thing about Bulguska was that they had signs with good English!  There's a plethora of awful Konglish (Korean+English) translations in this country.  It was great to learn about the history without needing a Korean guide!

MONK MONK MONK!

Seriously, where are all the people?

A lovely door handle.

Side view from atop the steps.

This here is a cool pagoda called "Dabotap."  It was built in 751 and is actually the original, or mostly.  There is a stone lion sitting atop the front steps, and it's believed that there were one three more, one for each staircase.

You can get smaller recreations of this padoga for your backyard!
I'd love a life-sized one myself, but imagine the shipping costs.

There was another cool pagoda here, but it was under construction/repair and hard to see.  So here's Dabotap again.

View from the back.

Here's a fish or a dragon or something.  Probably a dragon.

A deer-dragon-fish?

Temple hallway.  It was nice of them to build these all covered so the monks never have to get wet.

The temple buildings also had some cool spiky bits beneath the roof.

I love this deer-dragon guy!

Check out those spikes!  Very cool!

What temple is complete without a bell?

Found these gems painted on a door to a staff-only area.  Check out the muscles on these handsome gentlemen.

My god, those muscles are disgusting.

I don't even know if this is a man or a monster.  Look at those teeth!

It looks like I have major ear hair in this picture, but it's actually that monster-dude's nipple hair.

I CAN'T HELP MYSELF.  IT'S TOO SEXY TO RESIST.

Back to the front for more pictures!

Why does it look like I've been photoshopped into all these pictures?

Finally, a tourist-free shot!

Here's the temple fountain, where you drink spring water from a communal plastic cup.  Here's hoping nobody has communicable diseases.

Delicious fresh spring water!

And a few more pictures from Bulguksa.  The individual temples were lovely, but they don't allow photos inside.  I try to be a respectful tourist so I abide by the no-photo rules.  Inside each temple was a monk performing a Buddhist chant, which was very relaxing to listen to.  I spent a few minutes in each temple listening to them.

This was my favorite temple here.  You can't see the inside but there's lots of cool art and delicious-smelling fruit offerings!

Another temple!

Oh hey, another one!

After I finished touring Bulguksa, I teamed up with a few people from my hostel and took a bus to the Seokguram grotto.  There is really only one thing to see at Seokguram, and that is a stone Buddha statue that is behind glass and difficult to see.  It's impressive, I'll admit, but I'd have been more impressed if the glass had been less reflective.  You're also not allowed to take photos, so here's one from Wikipedia.

Credit for this photo goes to this German dude.

Construction began in 742 and the statue has undergone various renovations since, including some extremely shoddy repairs by the Japanese in the early 1900s that would make modern art renovators shudder.  Apparently using steam to clean statues and encasing them in concrete are both poor ideas, but live and learn, right?

Anyway, Buddha aside, this place is popular for viewing sunrises over the ocean.  I didn't make it there quite that early.

Yes, that's the ocean way back there.  I promise.

There was also a very large old bell, which you were allow to bang if you donated 1000₩ (about $1) to a charity.  It's for charity, and I'm a good person and all, so of course I did it.  The bangy-bit (the banger?) was very heavy so I enlisted some help.

So heavy!

Me and my new Korean friend Jiha!

And that's all I've got for Saturday and Sunday.  Monday was by far the best day, so look forward to that in the next few days!

Cheers,
애쉬톤/Ashton