May happened super fast and June is already halfway over. Good grief. Here's a partial update.
Three weeks ago was the weekend of Buddha's Birthday, which gave us a Friday off. So we got on a bus on Thursday night and went to the south end of the peninsula to Gyeongju, which was the center of culture and power in Korea for the better part of the seventh through fourteenth centuries. In the 1980s South Korea's dictator/president declared that Gyeongju would be preserved from development. The result is that many of Gyeongju's historic sites (some of them UNESCO World Heritage sites), and it's traditional Korean architecture, has been preserved. Given that most of the historic areas/things/buildings in Korea have either been destroyed by war, colonization or development, the existence of Gyeongju is pretty exceptional. There's a small city outside of the historic district, but it's a really easy place to get around.
The main attraction of Gyeongju are the tumuli--grassy mounds that entomb old kings and nobles. Many are in a park in the city, but others are on the outskirts and some are even in the city itself. They pretty much look like hills in Super Mario Brothers:
Since we visited on Buddha's Birthday, the city was packed with tourists on Friday. It was beautiful and sunny outside but it was a little hard to focus on the delights of the Silla kingdom with thousands of people pressing all around you. We rented bikes, which helped us dash in, around (and sometimes away) from the mobs of people. Our agenda for Friday included the big Tumuli Park in town, a walk around the grounds of an old fortress/palace (not really there anymore, but there is a beautiful green space), a visit to an old lotus pond (Anjapi), a couple of beers in the shadows of smaller tumuli in town at sunset and a mad dash around the outskirts of town after the sun went down. We climbed up one of the more remote tumuli after dark.
On Saturday the rain started. It came on and off, but was never quite a downpour. Our main agenda item for the day was to hike Namhan, a small mountain to the south of Gyeongju. Namhan was basically the Buddhist playground of the Silla Dynasty. There are thousands of small relics, shrines and Buddhist statues scattered around the mountain. We rode our bikes to one of the main hiking trails and hoofed up. The rain picked up when we were on the mountain and by the time we made it back down in the afternoon the drizzle was pretty constant (and not stopping). So we found dinner and a coffee shop (which was a minor miracle) and wrote postcards for the evening.
Sunday was all rain, all day. We returned our bikes on Saturday, we walked to the Gyeongju National Museum, which mostly displays items (shiny ones) recovered from archaeological digs and tombs in Gyeongju. We were there with probably half of the tourists still left in Gyeongju. Korean museums are designed kind of like conveyor belts, and museum goers act in kind: Most galleries are set up explicitly to be circumnavigated counter-clockwise. Koreans respond by putting themselves in a single-file line and following the person before them. If it sounds nice, orderly and reasonable, imagine being poked and prodded by children and grandmas who think that you're not moving fast enough past the display cases. This was a prime opportunity for Kate and I to play our "we are ignorant foreigners" card and just do what we please.
We were back on a bus by about 4pm and reached home by 10pm or so. Not a bad bus ride, but we were super wet. A good three-day weekend.
Photos of the trip are on the Shutterfly page:
Photos from the museum are in a separate album, but they're there too:
