Last blog I wrote how we had traveled by train to Gyeongju in the southeast part of South Korea. As soon as we got there we took a bus up to see an old folk village that we absolutely loved. Well it turns out that we met another tourist on the bus that told us about a night tour she was taking around Gyeongju, because the World Heritage Site of a town was breathtaking in the evening with everything all lit up.
She was not kidding!!!! It was amazing as we visited Donggung Palace & Wolji Pond, Cheomseongdae Observatory, and Woljeonggyo Bridge. The amazing thing is how much we enjoyed the tour even though it was all in Korean. In fact we would get off the bus and the tour guide would say “you look….10 minutes…..now go” and then turn around and give a speech to everyone else in Korean telling all about the site.
The next morning we went to another nearby World Heritage Site that I will tell you about in the next blog, but when we got back to town we checked out the Daereungwon Tomb Complex. These tombs are amazing in the fact that they are 20-60 hills right in the middle of town. One of them was excavated and you could go inside and see what a royal Silla tomb looked like. It was so cool!!!!!
As I said the Gyeongju Historic Area is a World Heritage Site and the discription for it is “The Gyeongju Historic Areas contain a remarkable concentration of outstanding examples of Korean Buddhist art, in the form of sculptures, reliefs, pagodas, and the remains of temples and palaces from the flowering, in particular between the 7th and 10th centuries, of this form of unique artistic expression.”
