Everything in Gyeongju the city itself is old and they try to keep it the most untouched possible, but for this reason, the KTX station shin-Gyeongju is in the "sinh-new" part of the city built aside the old capital. The KTX station is amazing. Huge. And very pretty. Shame we didn't have the time ti look at it better, we were in a hurry to catch our tour-bus as we got out.
Rosemary had booked a bus-tour. She was not fond of tour-buses, just like me, but there were a couple good reasons why we ended up doing this:
1. We were both short in money.
2. We were both short in time.
3. We had only one day and wanted to get a glimpse of what was around Gyeongju.
While I am happy we did it (only CAD$40 bucks for a full day-tour), I still think tour buses have their limits. First of all, in Korea, they don't have people who speak English (even if they say so) so I had to translate everything to Rosemary (some stuff I didn't even understand properly I am sure). That's not that bad, because technically, the visual will help out whatever understanding of the place you may have. There is also the written stuff at each places that explains roughly what is going on there, and they always have the English version.
Another reason I am not fond of tours, is that you only really get a glimpse of everything and never really get a feel of anything. You follow the crew, do your stuff in the allowed time (which actually was quite decent in length if I may say) and take many pictures. For pictures, I must admit that you get your load of nice pictures taken in a very short laps of time, so on that point tours are good. The only thing is that you think about the trip looking through your pictures weeks later, and realize you haven't really lived anything you went through over there. Oh well.
Anyways, I can't find my pamphlet thingy with the whole itinerary and thus, will have to look for the places and names... probably through Rosemary's album (she is more diligent than I am in remembering the names of the places we've seen).
The first place we visited was up in the mountains (like a lot of cultural sites in Korea actually) and was at the Seokguram Grottoes. A buddhist temple. The main attraction of the place was the dome-shaped tiny little worship place with a carved statue of the Buddha. Place that somehow had a very well thought ventilation system that let the humidity condensate at the top of the dome and drop in a little waterway out of the grotto. According to the guide, not only the way the stones were placed, but the orientation of the shrine itself was made is such a way that prevents the decay or cumulation of humidity that was never completely understood - in any case, could never be reproduced.
Sadly, they blocked direct access to the shrine, and only once a year do they allow people to get in one by one, as many people in that small place disturbs the fragile ecosystem of the palace. Some monks are allowed to go in and pray, but I doubt it's for all your day-to-day Tom and Joe monks...
We went in but were separated by a big glass (or maybe plastic?) window, and could not even take pictures. Oh well. We still got our load of pictures taken all around the place. I love those lanterns. I wish I can see a Buddhist temple that has those when they are lit up at night.
Rosemary paid to hit the bell: I didn't but I got the pictures alright.
Rosemary all happy to pose for the picture.
Rosemary in action.
Rosemary all "WTF!? that was soooo loud! Scared the **** out of me!"
Did I mention it was hot? Cuz it was really hot U_U
Now I rely on Rosemary's infos for the name of the place. Yangnam Columnar Joint. King Munmu, when he died, had his body put in a water-tomb, a cross-shaped rock in the sea, under the belief that we would reincarnate in a water dragon and save Gyeongju from the invasions (I think at the time, Japanese invasion was around the corner... wtv..). To thank his father for his promise to protect Gyeongju, his son built this "thank-you-shrine" linked to the sea by an underground tunnel. At the time, the shring was right by the sea, but now it is quite far from the water (water level lowered down and now the sea is not even in sigh from the shrine). According to the guide, there was a bigger monument there but time destroyed it (I can't remember what was the exact cause of destruction, but I know for sure that there is next to nothing around there...).
We went to Gogulsa, a Buddhist temple up the mountains (yayyy again) that had carved Buddhas up the really intense climbing to it. Actually there were many little caves of worship all over the place, so it was not only "one", but anyways. It is the only cave temple in korea.
It was really pretty, but it was REALLY hot, and if you look, I was wearing heels. I find myself pretty amazing to have survived both the climbing up the steep pathways and getting back down from them. Rosemary is mad afraid of heights though, so I had other things to worry about than my feet.
We went briefly by King Munmu's tomb. If you look at picture from up there, it looks pretty intense, a tomb in a cross-shaped set of stones at sea, but what we see from the shore is not really impressive. That's probably the reason why we really only stayed there a few minutes. It was, however, a good completion of the story we had heard before...
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