Anyhoo...so on the weekend Mark and I packed our bags and headed to Gyeongju, the city that served as Korea's capital for about 1,000 years in the era that I like to think of as one of Korea's best. This is the time period when Korea was a reasonably powerful kingdom, fighting the Japanese at every turn and building tombs, temples, fortresses and palaces every chance they got.
Getting to Gyeongju was an easy affair, 3.5 hours on a train at a cost of around $10 (12,000 won). Really can't complain. Once there, we got a map (which, as we later found out was a true Korean map: ie...looked like it was drawn by a 4-year old and nothing was to scale...one inch on the map equalled about 5 minutes of walking in one case and two hours in another case).
The first place we headed were the royal tombs and on the way there we bumped into Asia's oldest observatory! I was pretty stoked about it, my dad has been into astronomy all my life (heck, pretty much all of HIS life), so I thought he'd like a few pictures from it. His interest in the day and night skies has rubbed off on me a little bit too, astrophotography is one of my favourite passtimes and I've made a point of visiting observatories and stuff whenever I can (a few years ago I swung by Flagstaff, Arizona where I saw the observatory where Pluto was discovered)...so this was a nice addition to that.
This observatory is about 1,400 years old, apparently the square hole near the top is where they ancient astronomers climbed in to gaze at the night sky. Way cool.
As usual, I haven't had time to process any of my pictures, so they're just raw files straight off the card...I'll edit them when the rainy season hits and repost them when they look a little better...until then, here's a pic of the observatory and one of me with it...(that one's mainly for my parents haha)
After that, we walked around this beautiful park where happy families were chasing butterflies with pink nets and tame frogs let me pet them. It was very idyllic.
Then we headed to the royal tombs. Apparently there are about 200 around Gyeongju (they're everywhere!), with about 30 of them being all in one pile. Two of them were open...here's what they look like from the outside (they're massive...8-20 metres tall) and as much as 30+ metres around:
Two Korean women doing their makeup in the shade in front of a tomb:
Tombstone in front of the same one:
The inside of a different tomb (this was pitch black inside...I love, love, LOVE my camera...crank the ISO to 6,400 open the aperture to f2.8 and I got this, no flash at all and still looks presentable)
Inside the only tomb open to the public...they had a cool cross-section of it to show you how it was constructed (sorry for the crappy pic, had to be stealthy, no photography was allowed...lest my camera steal their souls...)
Replica of the burial chamber:
They dug out tens of thousands of treasures from these tombs...some of them were on display...like a golden crown:
His and Hers tombs (queen/king tombs...)
Then we started walking around to check out all the random historic sights in Gyeongju...we found a cool pond, just randomly on the side of the road...
With a neat pagoda in the middle:
And random little walkways snaking their way through the water plants:
Then we bumped into this pond (really have to find the names, sorry, I'll properly tag all these on Flickr in the coming days/weeks) where the Kings used to entertain people...all the pagodas are rebuilt, but are believed to be exact replicas of the originals:
Hurray for waterfalls nearby!
Then we started our long walk out to this lake resort thing we thought was just outside of town (or, according to the map was just outside of town). Well, it was...about 10-12km from where we were. It was a beautiful walk, but it was hot and humid and we both had backpacks on and really just wanted to chill out instead of walking that much...damn maps here haha. But we did see some cool stuff along the way...like people working the rice fields:
The lake was beautiful and very resort-y...reminded me a lot of Lake Okanagan back home, but with a lot more hotels and stuff around it...they also had some sort of special even going on and managed to fire off ONE firework. It was pretty funny...then we took a bus back to town, found city hall (disappointment haha) and took some night shots of the observatory and packed it in for the night.
Gyeongju was kind of boring at night (heck, even during the day it is), it's a beautiful place with a great history, but definitely not somewhere I'd want to live for more than a weekend at a time ;)
The observatory at night (and now we've come full circle haha)
After that, we found a cheap (but decent) motel for 30k won a night (split two ways, we paid about $12 each a night...really can't complain...even if the pillow/mattress were like bricks). Okay...I'll have more on the second day tomorrow!
Have a great day everyone, hope you're well...oooh yeah, one more thing...today is my 3 month anniversary in Korea! w00t w00t 1/4 of a year! :)
T
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