Gyeongju

It's now Friday here in Korea, and it seems that much time has passed since my last post again... I'm really bad at updating this regularly >_<. At any rate, this past weekend I went to Gyeongju (경주) with about 40 other exchange students and a couple Korean students as well. Gyeongju is in the south near Busan (부산) I believe, and it is famous for its history and magnificient temples. I hear it used to also be the capital city of one of the old Korean dynasties (don't ask me which one). We took a tour bus (all 45~ of us or so) which departed from the Seoul National University main gate at 7:00am. Here is a photo of the ones of us who got there a little too early...

Every person in this picture is either French or German. Can you tell who is French and who is German? I'll give you a hint, only two of them are German.

The trip to Gyeongju took a good 5 hours or so, and after a quick lunch with a million side dishes, we started sightseeing. This is one of the oldest astronomy towers in Korea. How it was more useful standing in this thing than just on plain ground I am not too sure. Apparently it has some sort of intricate design from which one can tell months of the lunar calendar or something, though. In the foreground of the picture are 3 Koreans and one guy from Finland. The guy on the right did a lot of the organizing and managing of everyone throughout the day. His name is Park Nam-Gi (박남기), but I prefer to call him Chairman Nam Gi-Nam (남기남 회장님) because that name is from a movie called Mokpo Gangster. The Chairman title just suits his organizing everyone during the trip :).

For the rest of the day we explored other relics of ancient times in Korea, most of which were not particularly extravagant looking, as the Japanese and Mongolians seem to have made sure that anything extravagant was destroyed :). Here is a photo of a tomb of sorts (I believe it's Queen Seon-Deok's):

After a lot of exhausting sightseeing, we went to dinner together which was unbelievably better than lunch. We had some sort of beef and seaweed hotpot thing which was quite delicious. After a couple bottles of Soju at the restaurant, we quickly went and checked into the hotel before resuming drinking. After getting settled in our rooms, about 30 of us went to a Hof together (similar to a pub) and shared a good 40 liters of beer or so and some Soju together. After that, back to the hotel to continue having some fun before bed. My room happened to be the biggest one (8 of us were sleeping there), so about 10-15 of us went to play some games there. Here is a pic of us sitting on the floor of our traditional Korean-style hotel room.

After that, we managed to get a good 3-5 hours of sleep before waking up bright and early for our 9am departure to continue our sightseeing. We first went to a beach where we saw an ocean tomb of some King as well as a large group of Koreans having a Buddhist ceremony. From there we went to Bulguksa (불국사), a giant temple which I actually visited once before with Tom and Chungkyu (이충규) two years ago. Here is a nice shot from a balcony on the temple.

After Bulguksa we had a short lunch and prepared for the long 5-hour drive back to Seoul. I slept for a decent chunk of the way and we made a roadstop somewhere along the highway where I had some delicious Hoddeok (호떡), a kind of warm pastry with honey inside. All in all it was a pretty nice trip, but I was glad to get some sleep when we finally got back to Seoul...

Until next time,

Curtis