Trip to Gyeongju : Part 1

Jiran and I took a trip up to Gyeongju, which is a historical city to the north of Busan. The bus trip took about 1 hour, through fairly mountainous Korean terrain. As our bus pulled into the depot, we could see that it was lightly snowing.

After a quick coffee break, we caught a taxi to the Gyeongju museum, as it wasn't going to be open on the following day, when our bus tour was scheduled. It was about now that I started to wish I had put on my thermals earlier.

There was lots of interesting stuff at the museum, about the Silla kingdom. The Silla, reigned in Korea for roughly 1000 years until 953AD. Gyeongju was the capital city of the Silla kingdom and seemingly a mountain of artifacts have been excavated from the many sites around Gyeongju. I wont write too much about the museum, as this is already becoming quite a large post. I will post a couple of pictures about the cool Silla drinking game they played with this oddly shaped dice.













We spent a few hours at the museum, the snow steadily getting heavier. When we left, as we waited for a taxi out the front it seemed to take forever. I cursed my lack of foresight regarding the thermals. Finally, a taxi showed up and we headed to our accomodation, a traditional Korean guesthouse.




As we headed in the main gate, the Sarang Chae guesthouse looked most picturesque. It had been snowing for a few hours now and it was just starting to build up on the roof tops and furniture in the courtyard. We met the propreiter and dropped off our bags.





I then learnt the hard way that traditional Korean houses weren't built for people of my stature. After taking my shoes off as is Korean custom, I turned to head in the door way and headbutted the large post running along the top of the door frame. Thankfully it connected straight on with my forehead and left nothing more than a small red mark. It could have been much worse if it had been on an edge of the wood. The picture on the left show the door to the bathroom in our room. The front door was about the same size.


We went off to get some dinner and then gave Jiran's parents a call to tell them that we had arrived safely. Then we turned in for the night. I was thinking that should it continue to snow through the night, it would make for quite a scene the following day on our tour.

The traditional Korean bed, isn't actually a bed at all but you sleep on the heated floor on top of a couple of fairly thick blankets. This took some getting used to. I found it quite difficult to sleep on my side, which I am used to, as my hips where hard up against the floor. Sleeping on your back is the proper technique, but i couldn't really get the hang of it, so i got a few hours sleeping on my side.

When we woke up the following morning this is the sight we were greeted with.