Gyeong-ju

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We took a bus (1 hour) from Busan to Gyeong-ju. We stayed at Guesthouse Santa – a hard to find, right in the middle of downtown, clean and wonderful hostel. The owner doesn’t speak much English but is very nice and helpful. He also had REAL (fair trade and organic too!) coffee to drink for breakfast. Mmmm...

Gyeongju is a small town for Korea. Its population is about 300 000 compared to Seoul's 10 million and Busan’s 4 million. This made it very nice and relaxing to walk around town. Gyeongju was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Silla(57 BC – 935 AD) which ruled about two-thirds of Korea. The town is scattered with 'Tumuli' or ancient burial mounds. It makes for a lot of interesting green space in the city!

For dinner we went for Ssambap, a famous meal from the area. Ssambap is a rice (bap) dish served with vegetable leaves, almost 30 side dishes (banchan), and condiments (gochujang - Korea's famous chili pepper paste). Ssam means 'wrapped' in Korean so a combination of rice, side dishes, and condiments are wrapped into a leaf and eaten in one bite. A very fun and filling experience!



On our second day in Gyeongju we rented bicycles. Since we had no idea where to go, our first stop was the Tourist Information Center. They proceeded to tell us that the best temple was too far away by bike. Well, 16km later, on the smallest, oldest, crappiest bikes Korea has to offer we made it to Bulguksa Temple. We had extremely sore butts but we made it! The temple, a UNESCO site, was beautiful!



We chose not to continue on to the Seokguram Grotto and instead headed back towards the city by taking a detour to Lake Bomun. All in all we probably biked about 40km. Ow.

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