Gyeongju Weekend

The weekend that Scott was here we decided to head down to Gyeongju, which is a smaller city in the Southeastern area of Korea. It was where the kindom of the Silla Dynasty was located. You couldn't walk 100 meters without running into some sort of burial mound, temple, palace, shrine, or other artifact of some sorts.
We got up super early on Saturday and caught the first bullet train heading South out of Seoul. We changed trains and took another train into Gyeongju. We stashed our bags at the train station and wandered over to Tumi park...a park full of gigantic burial mounds for the royal families of the Silla kingdom. After wandering throught park we went outside and rented bikes so we could see the rest of the sights in the town. We rode all over and even headed to Bulguska (a bit further on our bikes than we expected) to see the temples there. We also went up to see an amazingly large Budda carved out of granite. It was amazing! It was a beautiful day and we saw all sorts of amazing pieces of Korean history.










After a wonderful nights sleep we got up and decided to go on a hike through namsan mountain to see the numerous Buddhist temples, shrines, and carvings. The guide book gave us directions according to the busses that we would need to take to get to the less-known trail head but after much gesturing and pointing from a kind gentleman at the bus stop, we found that the buses were really not running due to a marathon going on in town today. So we decided to walk along the would-be bus rout to try and find the trail head. Along the way we passed the marathon path and saw some of the runners! After wandering through numerous rice patties, farm lands, along streams, and over very busy streets we think we found the trail head. It was a wonderful hike and did see many interesting and amazing things along the way. It also had some incredible vies of the mountains and valleys in the area.

After heading down the mountain and making it back to town we decided to take a bus to the lake-resort area closeby to wander around and find some dinner. We arrived in town and after finding our way to the lake we were greated by about a hundred kids on motorized kid-sized vehicals riding around the plaza area. It was hilarious. The parents could rent cars, bikes, motorcycles, etc for the kids to ride around on. And amazingly we never saw a collision! It was pertty funny. We also witnessed the duck paddel boats and full sized duck-tour boat-quite literaly a boat shaped like a duck. We also were ablel to see the famed matching-shirts-couples. Every young we saw were wearing matchign shirts...quite funny. After being entertained by true Korean culture Scott and I headed to a reataurant to eat. Howerver, on the way over we heard so great K-pop (Korean Pop music) and decided to check it out. It turns out that the Hip Hop Academy was haivng a performance. It was quite entertaining. We finally did get a delicious meal and headed back into the main city to catch our train back home.