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Published: October 15th 2011
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It took writing this blog entry for me to realize how busy I’ve been. Actually, I wrote it and there was too much so then I split it into two different entries—this and the next one about Gwangju. The great thing about Daegu is that we are in a good location to travel around the country. The hard thing is deciding when to go and hoping the weather cooperates. Actually it’s finally generally good hiking weather, but the leaves are just beginning to turn. In this entry, let me tell you about my trips to Gyeongju and the Andong Mask Festival, and hiking Mt. Palgong again.
Before I went to Japan, my friend and I traveled to the city of Gyeongju for a day trip. It’s a little over an hour from Daegu by bus or train. Locally, the city is known for their special tiny sweet buns filled with red bean paste. (I should mention that almost EVERY place with people living in it in Korea is “known for” some special food, be it apples, live squid, bibimbap, or side dishes). Gyeongju is also well-known because it used to be the capital of the Shilla dynasty in Korea. There
Watch Out!
CCTV in the middle of a field! are still a good number of relics around, but many things there have been rebuilt.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. Some people said it was really nice. Others were underwhelmed. We figured that it was so close it would be dumb not to at least check it out. It turned out to be a medium-sized town. Most of the sights were a good walk from the station.
We first went to see an observatory and burial mounds. This is away from the town and in open fields near woods. It was nice to be out away from a town. This is where people could rent bicycles and ride around, but we didn’t. The observatory was really a tower that was maybe 3 stories tall. Some of the trees were just as high, so I’m not sure its purpose. The burial mounds were pretty cool-looking. Usually you can see burial mounds scattered randomly all over Korea, but they are maybe 5 feet tall, and from the outside they just look like grassy hills. These ones were about 15 feet tall, and yes they still just looked like grassy hills. The most important people from the dynasty were buried
Nice Flowers
Near Observatory in Gyeongju in them.
Next we went to Anab Pond (Anapji). This was a man-made lake with some pavilions and gardens around it that the royal family used. It was built in the 600’s in Asia, but it really reminded me of Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna (where I would go before and after my many visits to the Czech consulate). I was surprised at the similarity between what the wealthy did at different times and in different places. There was a museum (apparently a good one) at the entrance to the pond, but we didn’t have time to go. As soon as we got to Anapji, it started to rain. The sky had looked a bit dark but the clouds were moving quickly, so we figured it would finish and clear up. We should have known not to trust the weather forecasts which had said only clouds.
We ate some lunch and embarked on the next part of our trip. We had to take a bus to get to Bulguk Temple (Bulguksa). We walked up part of the mountain to reach the temple as the weather turned hurricane-like. We bought some cheap ponchos from clever salespeople along the trail. It
may have been the weather affecting my perspective, but to me Bulguksa looked like almost every other temple I’ve been to. When we got back to the bottom of the hill, the weather had cleared a bit. We debated for a while whether to go to Seokguram Grotto, asked the tourism people, and finally decided to go since we were already all the way out there. We didn’t exactly know what a grotto was, and it turns out it’s a Buddha statue within a rock recess (almost a cave). It was interesting, but at that point we were cold and ready to go home. Also no pictures allowed (on this trip I learned it’s disrespectful to take pictures of Buddha statues—surprising considering how many pictures of them exist). If the weather had been nicer, I think it would have been a better trip. I would recommend going to Gyeongju on a nice day, even just to get away from the city.
I also recently re-hiked Mt. Palgong. It was a beautiful day. We went to one peak, then hiked along a stream to a temple (Yeombulam). Unfortunately my camera died along the way. The path up to Yeombulam has
a lot of rock piles which are pretty cool.
The last thing I’ll write about in this entry is going to the Andong Mask Festival. Andong is a small city an hour and a half north of Daegu. I heard about a volunteer organization, Mannam, which was organizing a trip for foreigners to go to the festival and volunteer a little, so I signed up with a friend. It turned out to be a lot of college-age Koreans and maybe 8 foreigners. The Koreans were really nice and most attempted to talk to us in English, some with really good English. We had a few hours to go around the festival. It’s probably the most diverse festival I’ve been to in Korea, with performers from around the world and some foreign booths. We didn’t end up paying to see a real “Mask Dance” show, but we did see a few other performances. I think the real Mask Dances would have been neat and worth the 4-5,000 won. I can say the free shows we saw were entertaining. Our volunteering turned out to basically be to put temporary tattoos on kids. We also tried to tell other foreigners about Mannam
More Burial Mounds
We should have known the storm was a-comin' (which was a bit difficult since we had only just heard about it 2 hours earlier). Overall, it was a good trip.
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