Gyeongju

For a couple of nights last week we took a break away from Seoul to Gyeongju, a historical city at the south of Korea.

It's a great place bursting with cultural relics to see. There are tonnes of tombs where kings from the Silla kingdom (57BC-935 AD) were buried. The tombs, known as tumuli, look just like big, grass-covered mounds. Inside they had a chamber where the king was buried along with many aritifacts such as gold crowns and pottery. We also saw, from a distance, a very unique tomb - an underwater one. It was nice as we got to go to the beach and saw the rock in the sea where the tomb lies.

One of the highlights for me was the Anapji pond. It was built by the Silla people with the intention of creating an imaginary perfect world like a utopia. It is constructed so that from any point of the pond one is unable to get a whole view of it.

We went to a Buddist temple, Baekryulsa, which was very impressive. It was set amongst a forest and looked beautiful. While we wandered round there were monks worshipping which was fascinating to see.

In addition to all the cultural stuff we went to a shooting range. I asked for a James Bond gun, so was given a (real!) Walter PPK and shot 10 shots at a paper target. My accuracy was 68% which they said was pretty average for a first timer. Awesome :)

After 2 days of seeing tombs, statues, ponds, temples, bells and the like we felt like we'd had an overload of cultural stuff. If that wasn't reason enough to head back to Seoul, our bus crashed into the side of a truck as we were getting to the end of the day. Thankfully noone was hurt, but tonnes of glass splattered into the aisle and the front of the bus was badly crumpled.