Glorious Vacation: Day 2 (Election Day)

I stayed in my motel room until dinner to watch CNN (HILARIOUS!!!), the concession and acceptance speeches. Overall, I was rather pleased with the outcome.

Buoyed by my smug liberal schadenfreude, I went across town to "Tteokgalbi Street" which is not as cohesive or as well-advertised as the Budae Jjigae Street in Uijeongbu. Frustrating! Nonetheless, I found a restaurant (not too skeezy, not too fancy) and gorged myself on tteokgalbi. It seems to be a regional specialty that I have also never heard of before! Before a few days ago, anyway, when I was casting about on the Internet to see what I should do/eat in Gwangju.

It was a bit of a shenanigans situation to find the place, but I did! On the subway ride over, an ajumma decided to dote on me. She offered to hold my bag (which, despite reading in my "Rough Guide to Korea" that this is a thing that happens all the time, WAS THE FIRST TIME A STRANGER'S DONE THAT EVER), and then when the seat next to her opened up she pulled on my sleeve to let me know the seat was open. After the first couple stops she dug into her purse and forced some candies into my hand. I smiled and said thank you, and put them in my purse for later (I seriously was going to save them for after my planned calorie binge of a dinner). Right before her stop came up, she also handed me a bag full of tteok! Aw! If she had gotten off at my stop I would have asked her to come to dinner with me. I had a couple right then because I was hungry and I also wanted her to know that I appreciated her gifts of food.

Gwangju is in Jeolla province, which is considered the bread basket of Korea. There is an astounding variety of food available and I will never get a chance to eat it all (especially because I hate going to restaurants alone and also because of my above seafood rule). Jong-min assured me I woud notice the difference if I ever went out to eat: "They'll have a lot more side dishes than they do in Seoul. They just have so much more food. They always have." At my tteok galbi dinner I had ten different banchan. TEN! The last time I'd had so many was when I got ssambap in Gyeongju. There were four kinds of kimchi alone, plus bean sprouts and daikon and anchovies (pass) and red beans in sesame oil. Not to mention a wide variety of greenery in which to wrap the meat, instead of just the usual romaine lettuce; the best was a very mild perilla leaf.

After I had sated myself on minced rib meat and garlic, I went back to my motel room and enjoyed a bottle of makgeolli before turning in early. Things to do the next morning, after all!

Post-Teaching Itinerary

My job ends on Halloween, as I might have mentioned before. But I don't leave Korea until November 30th; I'm giving myself a month of free time in the Land of the Morning Calm to chill out, see the sights, and just generally be a lazy bum in a country where liquor runs about $1 US a bottle.

So far my plans include going to Gwangju, Jeonju (bibimbap!!) Busan, the Dragon Hill Spa in Yongsan, the comfort women protests in Seoul, and a weekend trip to Jusanji (I think that's the name) Lake with my Korean friend Jenny. There's the foreigner Thanksgiving get-together at a pension my friend Leah wants to pull together as well, and perhaps a hike up Seoraksan.

Since I'm nominally participating in NaNoWriMo this year, all of this will have to be squeezed around me cranking out 50,000 words of young adult fantasy bullshit that will hopefully become something good.

I saw a great quote on Pinterest (I'm a girl, I have to, it's part of the new rules of the girls' club) which, in a stereotypically over-dramatic fashion, is, like, my life, you guys!! OMG!!!

Only, pretend that it says "goodbye" and not "goddbye."

I like to imagine a future where all of my awesome friends from Korea are still my awesome friends thirty years from now. I know that's not realistic, but, well, hope is the greatest of things and all that jazz. Coping with the fact that I will never see many of them face-to-face after I catch that plane in Incheon is already tough enough.

Gochujang: Some Uses

I haven't been posting as much as I would like. I do have a lot on my mind (my day trip to Dongducheon and the "Special Foreigner Tourism Zone" in Bosan; introversion and Korea; the chicken delivery shop down the street) but I don't have the mental wherewithal to focus and write those pieces.

Part of that is because I've been stepping up my cooking game a notch. It's arguable whether or not that's a "poor skill" in Korea, where eating out is so cheap, but it's a useful skill and I like it. It also doesn't help that everyone in the world keeps posting delicious-looking recipes to Pinterest.

Of course, available ingredients in Korea are different than back home, so alterations must sometimes be made. You can experiment, too. My favorite thing to experiment with is the seminal Korean ingredient gochujang. Here are three non-Korean dishes that, I think, are vastly improved by red chili pepper paste.

1. Omelettes


Fry up your egg; before adding your stuffing, add some gochujang.

2. Shakshouksa

This was a Pinterest find: The Shiksa in the Kitchen's shakshuka recipe. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to try it. Lacking tomato paste, I used gochujang instead. Mmm, flavorful. 

3. Quesadillas

Same principle as the omelette: before you load up your tortilla with ingredients (mine were peppers, onions, and cheese), spread a dollop of gochujang on it. 

4. Bonus, Non-Culinary Use

It makes great fake blood!

The Best Pizza in Seoul (Or, Thank You For Sucking, LG)

LG is my cell phone provider and with my most recent phone it seems they've just given up. I'd say about a third of the texts I send Jong-min never get there, and instead he gets a message saying they're from a number no longer in use. And, likewise, some of his texts never get to me.

Neither of us realized this until about 9:30 this past Saturday night, when he finally got a hold of me by actually calling and I found out that no, he hadn't been blowing me off all day (he was supposed to come up to visit me in Uijeongbu, and this was the third in a series of scheduled visits that inevitably had to be put off), my phone had just been fucking me over.

Fortunately I was with a friend of mine with a real apartment and an electric piano so I blew off some of my rage-against-the-machine by beating the shit out of the first few bars of Schubert's Moment Musical No. 5.

Relevant to this, I guess: I took piano lessons for all of my growing-up years and (until the end of high school) took it fairly seriously. I was an orch dork and a bando too, but piano is my first (and best) instrument; this piece is my go-to rage song/musical therapy choice. I played it a lot in high school, because I was a stupid teenager who was pissed off a lot. I've mostly since mellowed out, so the fact that I felt it necessary to abuse poor Schubert says a lot about how I felt at that particular moment in time.

Beating up Schubert did a lot to make me feel better, but on Sunday I still woke up pissed. Determined to make the best of weekend plans ruined, I texted Jong-min and said I was free if he wanted to get dinner in Seoul to make up for our failed outing.

Lest I sound like a desperate creeper: back in my Sherlock days, Jong-min and I would easily see each other once a week, if not twice. Since I've come back, our schedules haven't been nearly as complementary and we're lucky to see each other twice a month. A missed friend-date now stings a bit more than it would otherwise. 

Besides, I figured it was about time I learn where the 3100 (Daejin Uni - Uijeongbu - Gangnam) bus stop is, so we decided to meet at 6:30 at Sinnonhyeon station and grab some eats. 

Our meandering took us to a place a few blocks back from Gangnam-ro with the banal name of New York Pizza. It seemed a lot quieter than the surrounding coffee shops and restaurants (some of which had lines out the door), and the entrance boasted an owner who had gone to New York city to learn how to make New York-style pizza.

After five minutes faffing about and debating whether we should try a nearby Spanish restaurant instead, we went for the pizza. "It's hard to fuck up pizza. Even bad pizza is still good food."

They didn't fuck it up, though. It was amazing.

I'm not the kind of person who gets homesick a lot. The things I do crave, I either do without (whole wheat potato bread) or make myself (pirogi). Pizza isn't really one of those things. I don't have the beef with Korean pizza that some people do. Sure, it's different than home but it's still good enough to eat. There's even an Italian place in Minlak-dong my friends and I frequent that does really tasty Italian-style artisan pizzas.

But American New York style pizza, greasy and thin with a nice dough-y crust and without any renegade corn is not that common here. There is a niche to fill and New York Pizza does it well. So well that I didn't realize I missed it until I had some. Jong-min was equally impressed. 

There are some foreigners who
would kill a man for this.

The owner speaks pretty good English. He even came over to ask me what I thought of the pizza (I guess because as a foreigner/American I was like a litmus test for him?), which I couldn't praise enough. Because holy shit.

I'm pretty sure the place is rather new. I'm not seeing it mentioned online anywhere, nor does it seem to have a web presence (at least one in English).  For all I know, I may have been the first foreign customer to find the place. I really hope it takes off, and I see no reason why it shouldn't, because there are so many American/Canadians homesick for exactly that. The downside is, it's damn expensive pizza (like 27,000 won for a 14" "couple" pizza), but maybe he'll be able to bring the prices down in the future, once business picks up a bit.

They make your pizza to order right behind the counter, which is always a fun time. The interior is nice, too. And either they pay for some kind of Internet radio, or they keep the stereo loaded up with a nice selection of old anglophone top 40 hits, (or they keep it tuned to whatever American military radio station there is?) because this was the first time I've heard The Monkees, Deep Purple, or George Harrison while I've been out and about. That was just as much fun for me as the food. (Jong-min, who is not the most musically literate of people, clearly was not as amused as I was.)

In fact, recounting just how tasty it was has pretty much wiped the memory of my shit phone from my brain, which was my whole reason for posting in the first place. That's how good it is, guys: it's magical memory-wiping pizza. It's like the neuralizer from Men in Black

So, if my phone is so shit, why should I be thanking LG?

Well, if their service hadn't sucked, Jong-min would have come up to Uijeongbu on Saturday. If he had come up to Uijeongbu on Saturday, I wouldn't have felt the need to suggest we get dinner in Gangnam on Sunday. And if we hadn't had dinner in Gangnam on Sunday, then we wouldn't have found New York Pizza. .

New York Pizza is near exit 10 of Gangnam station, set up the hill, a few blocks away from the main road. Because we were just kind of meandering, I didn't keep track of where we were. It'll take you a bit of hunting, but if you're a bit homesick and in need of artery-clogging pizza, head to Gangnam to see if you can find New York Pizza. Absolutely worth it. 

Min-ji, continued:

Back when Min-ji's class was reading and talking about NYC, I asked them to work in teams to come up with reasons why either Seoul or NYC is the best place to visit. Min-ji and her partner, Kristin, had Seoul.

"Korean food is very delicious," she suggested to Kristin (more on Kristin in another post). Kristin enthusiastically agreed and they started listing delicious Korean food. This class is pretty late in the day so food comes up a lot no matter what the subject is. Everyone always seems to be hungry, myself included.

"Ddeok bokki!"

"Samgyeopsal!"

"Galbijjim!"

"Boshin—" but Min-ji caught herself before finishing. (Boshintang, as you may or may not recall, is dog meat stew.)

"Why not? Boshintang is very delicious," I suggested.

"Really? Teacher? You had boshintang?"

"One time. It was good."

The look on Min-ji's face was a mix of surprise and...not quite anger. Admonishment. Scolding. "Teacher, that is terrible. You shouldn't eat it. I have a dog!"

"But your dog isn't the kind of dog that's in boshintang, is it?"

"No, but that's still bad. My dad really likes boshintang, but my mom says he can't eat it now."

"Well, it was a long time ago. I'm probably not going to have it again."

"Good!"

And then back to work.

The Great Pierogi Reckoning

One of my kindergarten students went to a farm over their three-day hagwon vacation and picked some potatoes. ("On my vacation, I found out what it was like to be a day laborer!") Her mother, in a gesture you see far more often in Korea than in the US, gave both me and their "homeroom" teacher a giant shopping bag full of potatoes from the trip.


Mmm...

And as far as I'm concerned, there's only one thing you do with potatoes: starchy Eastern European goodness!

So that's what I did with my weekend: schlep back and forth to HomePlus for supplies and ingredients and make what promise to be delicious little packages of joy that I can fry up for dinner whenever I come home from a terrible, rotten, no-good, very bad day.


Round One: Finished

I have so much filling, though, that this will probably be a project for a few days.

(Korea has its own dumplings too, of course; but nothing that comes close to approximating the starch-in-a-starch of a good old-fashioned potato pierogi.)

A taste of my home away from home

Look what I found in Chinatown!

Follow-up

Here is a really informative write-up on dog consumption in Korea. (Thanks to Maddie for the link.)

I'm gonna get you little fishy...

This weekend I decided I better start actually doing stuff with my remaining days in Korea. I killed two birds with one stone on Saturday, as it turned out.

The first bird was the COEX aquarium. Part of the COEX mall (literally part of, the entrance and exit are right in the mall), it's a pretty impressive aquarium, though a bit different from how we do at home. And, in a stroke of POOR PLANNING, I forgot to check the batteries in my camera and alas they were out. So I'm stealing photos from other K-blogs.


The first of many lifted images to come.

First of all, you're shuttled through the entire aquarium in just one direction. There's no milling about and picking and choosing where to go first, second, third...they tell you. It's all one-way, no going back. That was annoying, but on the plus side, a lot of the signage was in English as well as Korean and the presentation was pretty well-done. It was a bit depressing, as it seemed less about being a home for fish and a place to educate the public about marine life and more about being gimmicky, but whatever sells tickets, I suppose.

They started with exhibits of native Korean fish and the ecosystems of rice paddies (of course). They had an exhibit of "Korean fish versus foreign fish, FIGHT!" and I was hoping that it would be, like, an aquatic showdown for the ages but apparently it was just an area to compare Korean fish with fish from other countries. LAME. This was also the one and only time in Korea where I've seen the word "foreign" mean "any other country" and not just "white/Western"—they had Japanese and Chinese fish "fighting" the Korean fish just as often as American ones. (But no British or Australian fish, sorry!)

They had a mock koi pond set up (remember my earlier point about gimmicky?) in the next room, and then the piece de resistance: the Weird-Ass Art Aquarium Exhibit. I'm lifting pictures from other blogs because it's just better that way.



Fish in a toilet bowl!



Fish in a phonebooth!



Fish in a sink!



Fish in a microwave!



Fish in your chemistry set!

You get the picture. The entrance to the Weird-Ass Art Aquarium Exhibit read: "Throw away the prejudice that fish live in bowls only!" Consider that prejudice discarded, Korea. Thanks.

Then came an Amazonian display, which was cool, minus the two monkeys they had in a tiny glass cage smaller than my bathroom. Poor little guys. Inexplicably the "Amazonian" room also had Egyptian Fruit Bats. Geography fail.



They were cute, though. But I have an unnatural fondness for bats, thanks to years of professional spelunking tour-guiding. The Korean girls next to me seemed a bit freaked out, as evidenced by their obnoxious shrieking every time a bat flew near the glass.

The other cool thing in the Amazonian exhibit was the two-headed turtle. Aww yeah:



Then came the really aquarium-y part of the aquarium: a giant tank of water with lots of different kinds of marine life: fish, sea turtles, sharks, rays, and all of that good stuff. There was a tunnel through this tank, so you could get right into things, so to speak.

At the end of the tunnel were more big tanks, one with manatees (given the signs they had advertising the manatees in the mall, I guess they were newly-acquired or on loan?) and one with seals. I felt kind of bad for both animals, their tanks were kind of small without anything in them. Just water. It must be boring to swim around in a box all day, even if you're a manatee.

Then you got dumped out into a snack stand (no sushi!), with a display about penguins, and then up the stairs into the gift shop, which opens right into the mall (so of course you can mill about in the gift shop and come in and out as you please....nowhere else, of course).

Despite my lack of picture-taking, it was a lot of fun, and only 10,000 won to get in. That's like...eight dollars. Nice.

Bird number one: dead. Bird number two's days were numbered when I got a text from a friend (while I was saying hello to the manatees).

"What's this about you wanting to eat Labrador?"

I had been curious about 보신탕 (bo-shin-tang) since I got here, since that was the second question people usually asked me about teaching in Korea. (The first one being, "North or South?" Hm, I wonder...) But I am a timid person and I didn't want to just wander into a 보신탕 restaurant on my own. I can barely order in proper restaurants as it is, plus I had heard from other people that it smelled and tasted awful; I didn't want to order something by myself that I might not be able to finish. So I had been looking for someone to go with me for a while.

So I wandered back through COEX mall to Samseung station (which took a good fifteen minutes, COEX is huge!) and met up with Mark in Gunja to find a restaurant he had come across earlier.

We got some nasty looks when we first came in—foreigners in Korea have sometimes protested outside restaurants that serve dog-based dishes and generally been big assholes about it. The waitress did a bit of a double take when we ordered—maybe because 보신탕 is considered to be good for men's "stamina" (virility) and a 23-year-old girl really has no need for virility enhancers? or that foreigners were eating dog? unsure—but obliged.

"What did it taste like?" you ask, morbidly curious. The answer is: exactly like beef. Maybe just a bit tougher and stringier. It didn't smell of wet dog, like some people had described it, and it tasted just like good beef.



I have picture proof of this on Mark's camera, but that will have to wait until I get it from him.

As an aside, Wikipedia tells me that it's illegal to sell dog meat in Korea now, but that raising dogs for meat is still legal...kind of. (It's not like they cap the family pet and throw it in a soup; the dog you eat has been raised for consumption like cows, chickens, or pigs.) More information from Wikipedia:

In recent years, many Korean people have changed their attitudes towards eating dog meat from "personal choice" to "unnecessary cruelty." Animal rights activists in South Korea protest against the custom of eating dog meat. Some Koreans state that "civilised people don’t eat dogs in Korea". A recent survey by the Korean Ministry of Agriculture showed that 59% of Koreans aged under 30 would not eat dog. Some 62% of the same age group said they regard dogs as pets, not food. Many young Koreans think those who eat dog are an anachronism. Although early Western media reports stated that some dogs were beaten to death, the dogs are not butchered in that way these days and usually [are] instantly killed by a blow with an electronic rod.

So it seems to be phasing out. Even Jong-min, by his own admission, has never had dog. Good thing? Bad thing? Neutral?

Rating: 4 out of 5 Lassies. Hearty, filling, but not spectacular. But I wouldn't say no if someone invited me out again.


ETA:

Picture proof!

Gyeongju Trip Debriefing

Day 0

Friday night, I packed my bags and hopped the subway into Seoul. The bus we were going to take to Gyeongju left from Seoul (we couldn't find a direct one from Uijeongbu) and the express bus terminal just so happened to be nearish to Kondae, a neighborhood I'm a little bit familiar with—familiar enough to know that there's a jjimjilbang nearby. With a little bit of navigational help from a friend, I stripped down, washed up, and crashed for the night just two subway stops away from where I had to be in the morning. Efficiency win.

Day 1

I woke up at seven, relatively well-rested and relatively clean. I got my shit back together and hopped on the subway to Gangbyeon, where I met Maddie. Or rather, where she randomly found me as I was bumbling my way through the exit corral.

The bus terminal was right across the street. To our dismay, the 8.10 bus was sold out (booking tickets in advance being an impossibility for us foreigners, thanks Korea!) so we bought three tickets on the next bus out—at 9.10—and wasted the next hour or so at Tom & Tom's. Breda found us, we shot the shit, and then we piled on the bus to Gyeongju.

A word about buses in Korea:

The only comparable bus trip I'd ever taken prior to this was an epic, multi-day Greyhound odyssey out to Chicago to visit Exegis right before I came to Korea, involving misinformed bus drivers, missed transfers, spaced-out pill-poppers, laid-off truckers, and sleeping on the floor of the Cleveland Greyhound station. An experience I wouldn't necessarily mind repeating...but certainly not an entirely comfortable one.

The bus to Gyeongju left right on time. There were fewer seats than in your typical Greyhound-type coach, which meant room to (almost) fully recline in the back and extend the leg rest in the front. Despite getting a decent night's rest at the jjimjilbang, I passed out almost immediately. Sleeping is my number one favorite way to pass long trips: by car, by bus, by plane...whatever. Man, I love sleeping.

The cost was also significantly less than my Greyhound trip (about $37 there and back; it was probably about one-third to one-half the distance, but even adjusting for the difference in distance the price was a steal). It seems also that Korean bus companies don't do overbooking, since you had the option online to select your seat and the ones that were already sold were grayed-out. Then again, this is hardly peak travel season so maybe that'd be different during, say, Chuseok.

Anyway, we rolled into Gyeongju at about ten past one in the afternoon. Our first order of business was to find lodgings, which was pretty easy to do since the bus terminal was in the middle of a sea of motels. We chose a place to stay based on "what looked the sketchiest" and snagged a room at a 여관 (yeogwan):



We dropped off our bags and set off to wonder around the historic section of Gyeongju, the most notable of which seemed to be a large park on the edge of town, with loads of artifacts everywhere, and places where things had once been but were no longer, like Banwolseong, a Silla-era palace. All that's left are a few short walls and an ice storage house (National Treasure number 66).


People on rented ice sleds on a pond near Banwolseong.

Banwolseong sits on a large hill that overlooks a big, kind of flat field that's mostly just one big park—and cemetery. Tombs dot the landscape and they're rather hard to miss:


From TravelThayer


We also wandered by the oldest observatory in East Asia, Cheomseongdae. It's kind of a big deal; they even feature it on the cover of the Gyeongju tourist maps.



Korea doesn't really do historical presentation well—generally speaking. There was little presentation or explanation of anything aside from a sign with a brief explanation. (Supposedly there was a video playing in a small building next to Cheomseongdae, but I didn't see it and it wouldn't have been much good to me anyway). The tombs weren't really marked or explained, they were just...there. The atmosphere was less "here's a bunch of really important, historic stuff" and more "here's a park and there just happens to be a bunch of old stuff in the middle of it." Families were running around, eating snacks, carousing about on ice sleds (that I mentioned earlier) and, since it was a windy day, flying kites.



We stopped at a cafe for a quick pick-me-up of coffee (or strawberry juice for me) and toast, and did an about-face to check out Gyeongju National Museum. Lots of archeological excavation was done in Gyeongju by the Japanese, for better or for worse, and a lot of the artifacts ended up in the museum...eventually. Some may still be in Japan, even. I don't know.

There was no entrance fee, surprisingly. We killed some time outside the museum, investigating some of the outdoor pieces and taking pictures.



One of the two buildings that make up the Gyeongju National Museum.









National Treasure number 29: the Divine Bell of King Seongdeok the Great. Supposedly, you can hear it ringing from over forty miles away. You can't ring it to try out, obviously, but they have a recording you can play. Someone pressed the play button while I was farting around taking pictures and it scared the bejeezus out of me. But 성덕대왕신 종 was only the first of many bells we would see in Gyeongju.

Gyeongju National Museum is actually a really modern and well-put-together museum, with more information, better organization, and better presentation than the other museum I've been to in Korea—but apparently Gyeongju National Museum is considered the best in the country, so there you have it. Unfortunately all of the pictures I took of the stuff inside turned out kind of crappy; besides which pictures of Buddha statues and pieces of Buddha statues tend to blur together after a while.

When we had our fill of the museum, we hopped a cab back to the Express Bus Terminal on the other side of town, so we could buy return tickets and find somewhere to eat. Buying the tickets proved to be easy; finding somewhere to eat (since we were set on ssambap, a regional specialty) was less so. Gyeongju is a coastal city fueled mostly by tourism, and in the chilly off season of January there weren't many tourists to be found. Everywhere seemed closed or getting ready to close. Asking people to give us directions to a ssambap restaurant—any ssambap restaurant—proved rather fruitless, probably because in part we knew enough Korean to ask about ssambap's location, but not enough to understand the answer. After fruitless inquiries at nearby motels and convenience stores, we pulled the "jump in a cab and tell him what you want" trick. Fortunately for us, it worked out perfectly.

"Ssambap?"

Our cab driver looked puzzled for a minute, then his face lit up. He said something in Korean, which I'm sure would translate to something like, "Ssambap? I know just the place!" and off we went.

The ssambap place he took us too ended up being rather near where we had been earlier in the day—we might have found it on our own while wandering there. We paid the fare, said our thank yous, and sat down to some good eats.

Ssambap is a regional specialty, though like with any regional specialty you can probably get it anywhere in Korea (kind of like you could get Philly cheesesteaks at the campus diner at Hamilton)—in fact, you definitely can, because there's a ssambap restaurant across the street from my apartment building here in Uijeongbu. It's nothing too terribly complicated: just rice and a plethora of banchan.

Backpedal: banchan are the side dishes you get with any and every meal here in Korea, usually you get three, four, maybe five.


The banchan are in those beige dishes in the middle of the table. There are two "sets" being split between the five of us: four banchan.

Ssambap you get...a lot more.



Twenty-plus banchan.

That's it. You wrap them in lettuce leaves or sesame leaves with some rice, like with samgyeopsal, and chow down. It's basically like having a meal of nothing but garlic bread, buttered rolls, and coleslaw. My personal favorite was the sweet potatoes. They also served us a jjigae (stew) of some sort—I forget which—which was excellent when mixed with rice.

We had a long, leisurely dinner that lasted about an hour. For the vast majority of the time, we were the only customers in the restaurant: earlier point about Gyeongju being a ghost town reinforced. Indeed, as we had been walking around town that day, Breda commented about how quiet it was and how few people there were. The emptiness hadn't particularly struck me then, since there were still buildings and traffic and an urban-looking landscape and, from time to time, other people, but being the only customers in a restaurant—at dinnertime—made it painfully clear. This was a town that would shrivel up into little more than a one-horse village without all of the Shilla-era leftovers lying around.

Eventually we worked up the inertia to leave—just as a couple of families came in to eat— and hailed a cab back to our yeogwon. It was dark, by now, and chilly. We didn't want to do anymore outdoorsy things today. But it was still Saturday night, and Saturday night is a night for drinking in Korea—especially since all of us had foregone our Friday night drinking in order to be up on time.

There was brief discussion of going back downtown, which seemed relatively lively and bustling—or at least with enough neon signage to feign liveliness—but none of us wanted to go back out in the cold. We compromised by going to the nearby FamilyMart for soju, makgeolli, and cards, and spent the next few hours drinking and playing Bullshit and Egyptian Rat Screw. The latter we all remembered playing as kids, but we could only half remember the rules and Maddie had to look them up on Wikipedia for us...with her Kindle.




Between the cold outside and the warm floor and getting up early that morning, we all dozed off at around 11 or midnight. And let me tell you: sleeping on a mat on a heated floor with a big fluffy comforter on top of you is pretty much the most delicious thing ever. It's like sleeping in a warm fluffy cloud, or a womb. When the next morning came, I didn't want to get up.

Day 2

But get up I did. A quick shower, breakfast at Ye Olde Paris Baguette, and we took the bus out to Bulguksa. The bus stopped at the bottom of the hill, where ajummas harassed us and tried to give us business cards for their restaurants. We waved them off and started the walk uphill, since of course you're not going to put your big important Buddhist temple anywhere but on the top of a giant hill.


Your reward for surviving the climb? Cheap trinkets made in China!



Bulguksa was built in honor of Prime Minister Kim Daeseon's deceased parents. There's some legend about a dream he had, where he saw a dragon flying around the site with a bead in its mouth, and so there's a lot of "dragon and bead" imagery:









Bulguksa is still a functioning temple. I could hear the woodblock's signature beat droning on while we were visiting, a sound I knew well from going to the zendo back home. You could see people bowing to the various Buddhas, even, and no photography was allowed.


One of the buildings with people bowing and praying; I think this one also hosts one of the two seated Buddha statues that are considered National Treasures.


It's actually something like the regional headquarters for the Jogye sect in Gyeongju, and to call it a temple is kind of misleading. "Temple" implies one building. Rather, it's a collection of assorted buildings and shrines, with sections walled off and stairs and paths leading this way and that, with lots of nature incorporated and involved.






Drinking fountain by the front gate.



Of course, the architecture is beautiful too; hence Bulguksa's UNESCO World Heritage listing. Unfortunately, much of Bulguksa "is" wooden and thus was prone to damage by things like termites, rot, fire, and so on. Much of it had been destroyed or fallen into disrepair under Japanese colonial rule and so what you see today is reconstructed.


Close-up of a roof tile






Another National Treasure: the stairs to the entrance of Bulguksa. They're supposed to represent enlightenment.


Another bronze bell. One of the unique features of Korean bells, according to what the signage in Gyeongju mentioned, is the dwangja: the striking point of the bell. In Korean bells, these are ornately decorated and constructed. as you can see here. I make no guarantee of the veracity of said fact, based on my poor memory and the good chances of a bad translation.


Dragon on top of the bell.

One of the many little alcoves we chanced upon was devoted entirely to stacking rocks, which is apparently somehow related to good luck?






Caught in the act!

And by some miracle they stay stacked, and while I'm sure sometimes people bump into them, everyone seems to respect the work gone in to making these little piles. A small boy getting his picture taken made a gesture as if to knock them over, but it was clearly intended as a joke.

Eventually we finished at Bulguksa and hopped on the shuttle bus that does nothing but run between Bulguksa and Seokguram. You have the option of hiking between the two, as well, but it was cold out and, as it turns out, the hike would have been pretty much uphill the whole way. Yeah, I don't think so.


Now entering Seokguram.

Yep, another bell. Also, minor aside and point of interest: all of these bronze bells might look familiar. Korea sent one to L.A. back in the day, referred to as the Bell of Friendship. Years later, it was featured in the background of a few scenes in The Usual Suspects.



It's a medium-long walk from the "entrance" of Seokguram to the grotto itself. The path hugs the side of a rather steep hill, without any walls or safety railings. I guess Korea figures that if your sense of self preservation isn't strong enough to keep you from falling off the edge of the path, your genes are better off eliminated from the pool.



Seokguram as it is today is fairly well preserved, sealed behind glass and out of the reach of grabby tourists, mold, moisture, and other things perilous to rocks. Apparently there were quite a few goofs during reconstruction attempts, and that it's here today at all is no small matter. No pictures are allowed inside (less for preservation concerns and more out of religious respect, I think) so I raided the Internet for this part.






Though this one is my own; people have the option of hanging paper lanterns from the ceiling, I guess with some kind of wish or prayer attached to it. I ninja'd this pictures with some mad freaking skills.

I'm not entirely sure what Seokguram was used for; my guess would be a private space for the royal family to worship. Anyway, it's beautiful and it's too bad that you can't get up to see it firsthand. A wooden building was constructed around the entrance to the grotto some time before they put the glass up; with the glass you don't really need the building anymore but they haven't gotten around to tearing it down. So it's a bit cramped and hard to see (even though this is hardly peak travel time).

After we all got an eyeful, we milled about the area outside Seokguram a bit. You could pay ten thousand won and write something on a tile for future visitors to see—lots of international languages here, with Russian and Danish and Spanish as well as English—but ten thousand seemed a bit pricey. I picked up some postcards (since I couldn't take pictures myself) and we wandered back down the path, the way we came.

Our original plan had been to check out the market or tea house in downtown Gyeongju after Bulguksa and Seokguram, but we were all pooped—Maddie and Breda were feeling a bit under the weather—so we checked out of our yeogwon, had a quick meal at a gimbap restaurant near the station, and milled around until our bus back to the 'bu. Maddie and I bought some Gyeongju Bbang (Gyeongju Bread—pretty much some dough around a bunch of red bean paste) for the crew at Sherlock, and soon it was time to go.

Despite sleeping long and well the previous night, I passed out nearly as soon as I put my seat back on the bus. Like I said, I love sleeping. The ride back up to Uijeongbu was only four and a half hours, which was blazingly fast (considering that it was four hours from central Seoul, and that it usually takes a full hour to get Seoul from Uijeongbu).

Nonetheless it was still pretty late when we rolled back into the dong, 10.30 PM or so, a full forty-eight hours after I had originally left for the weekend. Forty-eight hours jam-packed with adventure. So much adventure, in fact, that I've been sitting on this damn blog entry for two days (and change!). How Maddie and Breda managed to put together write-ups in half that amount of time astounds me. You go girls.