Gyeongju

In an effort to catch up once again, this post will at least finish out our travels in March. I probably won't get to April until another week or two, since Brenden's parents arrived last Friday and will be here for another 5 days or so (more on that in the next posts!). At any rate, in March, we went to Gyeongju, which is Korea's ancient capital. A brief history overview: since about the birth of Christ, Korea (both modern-day North and South) was divided into three kingdoms. The Baekje kingdom, the smallest, was concentrated in our region and south of us, and to the east of us, the Silla (pronounced "shil-luh") kingdom reigned, and north of Seoul (modern-day North Korea and parts of southern China), the Goguryeo kingdom was in charge. Anyway, in 668, the Silla dynasty conquered the other two and united Korea, until the kingdom fragmented and returned to a brief period of three kingdom rule again some 300 years later. For almost a 1000 years then, Gyeongju was the capital, first of the Silla Kingdom, then of the United (Korean) Kingdom. As the ancient capital, it has some pretty cool sights, and we were pretty excited about exploring it, along with our friend Heather.

We arrived in Gyeongju early Saturday morning and set out exploring the city first. We grabbed some gimbap (basically sushi rolls) and sashimi and ate a quick lunch in the park around the National Museum (note: Korea has many branches of the National Museum--this is the branch in Gyeongju, so it has all the stuff concerning Gyeongju and the Silla dynasty). They happened to be offering a guided tour in English just after we arrived, so the three of us joined the tour guide and two other American expats and took a 2 hour tour. The intent was really good, but they spent a lot of time in the early stuff, like Bronze Age artifacts. To be honest, unless you're a Bronze Age historian, it all kind of looks the same, whether it was made in Korea, Georgia, or Lithuania, so we would have rather spent more time exploring the later periods, where things really do look appreciably different and unique from culture to culture. With that said, the museum was really cool, and I wish we'd had the time to really slow down and explore the later period stuff in more detail, as they have some great pottery, jewelery, textiles, and so on.

When we got outside, the weather had taken a turn for the worse, and it had started to sprinkle, so we determinedly set out on our next sight, the Anapji royal pond garden. It was beautiful, even though the weather was overcast. Korean gardens are very peaceful, always with ponds, and the idea is to look very natural--very different than Japanese gardens, I think. The first photo is from the largest pond there. After the Anapji, we took a dirt road down the way to find the Cheomseongdae observatory, which is the oldest observatory in East Asia (it dates to the 7th century).

We had limited time, and since we'd finished seeing the major sites in town, it was now time for a tour of the two major tombs just outside of town. The second photo is one of those tomb sites, which shows you what typical tombs in the Silla kingdom looked like (not exactly what Westerners expect tombs to look like!).

Sunday morning, we started early as we had two major sights on our "to-see" list, plus we needed to travel back home, about a 5-6 hour adventure. The two sights for Sunday were Bulguk-sa Temple and Seokguram Grotto. Picture #4 is from the entrance to Bulguk-sa, which ended up being the highlight of our trip to Bulguk-sa. We took many lovely photos (you can see more both in my January-March 2009 Facebook album, as well as Brenden's album on Facebook), but the best part was just wandering through the temple complex by ourselves in the quiet. It was very peaceful and beautiful, and we just enjoyed exploring at our pace. The last picture is of me and Heather beside a pond on our way out of Bulguk-sa--I think it captures the essence, the feeling, of our time there. Last, we made our way up to Seokguram Grotto, which has some really amazing sculptures inside. Unfortunately, since they are also very old and very important, no photos were allowed, and the entire grotto was sealed off, so we could only see one side, from a decent way away. Although we could tell it was impressive, it was also very busy, and we couldn't really linger to enjoy it, so it wasn't as impressive as we expected.

Overall, though, Gyeongju was quite impressive, and would have been even more beautiful in later spring (April to May) or in fall. Even though some things were just starting to bud when we were there, it was a great trip, and one that is a very important part of visiting Korea.

In 0our next posts, we will probably skip past April, and focus on the recent stuff--Brenden's parents coming to visit us!

Carissa