Liz21

My final day in Jeju I spent in the capital city, Jeju-si. For the most part, I walked around the city, drinking in the sights and smells. Just a small aside here to moan about the tourist maps in Korea. None of them are to scale so it is really, really hard to get a sense of how long going between two places on the map will take you. They hardly, if ever, give you the sodding street names - instead putting in random and rather useless landmarks (generally hotels, shopping centres or hospitals whose names in real life may, or then again may not, be in English). And they never NEVER give you the place in hangeul as well. So if you are, say, speaking to someone who can't read English (or Korean words written ... read more

I decided to have a full day today, partly because there is so much to do, and partly to make up for doing practically nothing those two days in Busan. So, with the best intentions I was up and ready early and decided to take the bus into town. Oops. We headed off in completely the wrong direction and then stopped at some random high school for about 15 minutes. At which point the driver, bless him, decided (rightly) that I was lost and (hmmm) that he was going to help me. He was very kind but between his non-existent English and my non-existent Korean it was painful, to say the least. In the end, we did manage to agree that the bus would take me to the right place (once it got going again), so ... read more

Having made it safely out of Gyeongju - despite it blowing a gale and sheeting rain - and through the eye of the storm to the port city of Busan, I was sightly relieved/strangely disappointed to find that the storm had already passed Busan and, although it was still a little windy, it was dry. I had, partly because of the typhoon, booked myself a room in a proper hotel as a little treat and, frankly, spent most of my two days in Busan relaxing. I did, however, manage to make it to Busan's Chinatown so I had my Chinese food fix - well, Chinese food Korean-style, at least. And I also made it to Jalgachi fish market, which is a fairly famous bustling chaos of place that sells anything (and I mean anything) that comes ... read more

Fairly quiet day today (and no photos I'm afraid). I headed off (in the drizzle) for the Gyeongju National Museum, where all the treasures unearthed in the Silla tombs have been carted off to and displayed. For the most part, the excavation of the tombs didn't start until the 1970s (the first royal tomb was discovered when the "hill" was levelled in preparation for building works. Starting so late means that the excavation was highly organised and carefully documented at each stage. The National Museum is split into three buildings: the archeological building, which contains a collection of the most breath-taking artefacts from the various Silla royal tombs, the Buddhist art building and the Anapji building, which contains a selection of the artefacts recovered from the Anapji pond, which was the site of a Silla palace. ... read more

Before the oh-so-talked-of Joseon dynasty, there was the Silla ("Shilla") dynasty. A small collection of clans and peoples on Korea's South West coast that banded together and expanded between around 70 BC and 1000 AD. And their capital was Gyeongju. The (small) city was earmarked early on as culturally important in Korean history and has been carefully (one might almost say obsessively) kept very traditional. Former President, Park Chung-Hee (fun fact - assassinated father of the current Presidential candidate Park) used quite draconian measures - prescribing that there were to be no buildings above a certain height, imposing strict planning permission conditions and requiring all roof to be the traditional Korean tiled roof. This has meant that, while the city has remained highly traditional - and you can actually look around you to the mountains surrouding ... read more