Daegu to Gyeongju on the KTX
Now I am in Gyeongju. I have not been here before. Apparently it was the ancient capital of the ancient Silla kingdom. This means it is featured on over 9000 tv shows where people cry in slow motion.
So far I have seen only a bit of that ancientness, what I have mainly seen is grey skies and grey concrete. It is not a small place, the population is 260k, and probably a lot more than that on weekends. I am not here on a weekend, and I do also think it has the whole 'mostly closed on Monday' thing going on.
Getting here from Daegu was surprisingly speedy. First of all a subway, then a bullet train first class seat, for 20 minutes, then a bus. The bus could have been a challenge but there were a lot of choices and they all roughly went to where I needed to go.
Then the real challenge started.
I could not check into my hotel until 5pm. I was in town at 1pm. They did not have anyone on the check in at all when I got there, it was all closed up. After translating some Korean signs I found out in the basement they have free bag lockers for people arriving early, the big ones were all taken, so I put my big bag on the top of the whole locker setup. There was one available for my backpack which has all my valuables. Fortunately no one stole my big bag of dirty underpants.
So then it was just a matter of wandering around aimlessly, for 4 hours. Which was surprisingly tiring. And now it is already quite late.
Daegu is the colourful city, they plant flowers everywhere. Here are some flowers.
The inside of the Daegu station is very good, in someways there are more stores and restaurants than even the main station in Seoul. Also it is attached to the enormous department store I visited a few nights ago.
A feature inside all Korean stores and stations are these air purifying machines. Probably a COVID invention someone got rich off. Most of them are not working. Here only one out of the three pictured is still working.
Here comes my train!
I got a first class seat for the 20 minute journey. Which cost about an extra $1.
Here is Gyeongju station. Now this will be confusing if you are coming here in the near future. Until recently this was called SinGyeongju station, Sin meaning 'new'. But they have since ripped the old station out of the middle of Gyeongju altogether, and renamed this one just Gyeongju station. Google does not know about this and still thinks slow trains run into the middle of Gyeongju city. They no longer do, and the city is over 20km away, hence you must take a bus. The bus is mainly on a freeway so it does not take long.
And here is proof that you need to take a bus.
For my first photo in Gyeongju, a market that looks like any other market in Korea.
On my 4 hour pointless wander I wandered to the most bland parts of the city.
Although the local burger king was looking pretty cool.
If you feel like being crippled in a creative way, Gyeongju has a plethora of options for tourists.
Imagine being on the news for being in a serious snoopy bike accident?
Photo taken to prove I was actually in Gyeongju.
Now for something historic. Funeral mounds!
Are they funeral mounds or Tombs? Well there is a museum, so I went in to find out. Also I do not know what the difference is between a funeral mound and a tomb anyway.
Inside the museum they have recreated the inside of one of the tombs. Which is rocks, wooden structures, and a central crypt.
The streets nearby are nice, and there are busy neon areas nearby that I will photograph later. This particular street is all tourist gift shops, and mostly closed on Monday.
I do not really know what this is, it is not a door, but it looks like those giant stone tablets that try to crush you in Mario Kart.
Here is the outside of my hotel. It is quite new.
And now the all important hotel shots. The room is large, there is a little table and chair off to my left not shown. Thet tv is the biggest tv I have ever sat in front of, and as I type this I am sitting one foot away from it. Also I would like to thank the previous guests who left their netflix account logged in, same thing happened at the previous hotel too. Oh and of course, wooden floor.
The bathroom is also huge. Separate bath. I am standing on a raised area inside the large bathroom, but the entire pictured area all floods when you take a shower, the shower does not go into the bath. At least the toilet is raised above the shower area in this one which is not always the case!
I think for dinner I will just continue to explore the local area after dark, my mindless wandering today has resulted in almost 30k steps!
Gyeongju shopping area
Tonight's outing was short, local and filled with cubes of steak.
Then my computer broke. After some stern words with it and a few unexpected blue screens of death followed by dell diagnostics telling me everything is fine, it now seems to be working again. It decided to throw a fit right as I was adjusting the brightness of the steak photo. So that probably explains why it broke then, dell hates beef.
It is very quiet here on a Monday night. Many things were shut. I kept an eye on the tombs, in case there were tomb raiders, or zombies. The worst I saw was some young girls racing around on full sized scooters, Korean girls too young to be riding them, and they were behaving like idiots screaming and weaving around. They also had bluetooth speakers mounted on them blasting some kind of chipmunk voiced k-pop.
The other thing of note, I was wandering around when a long haired middle aged Korean man asked me where I was from, so I tell him Australia, next thing he asks is, you like heavy metal music? So we chat for a while, he owns a local vinyl (record) store, despite never being outside of Korea his English was excellent. He then tells me he is very rich, the store is a hobby, and we should go out drinking and talk about heavy metal music - his shout. I tell him I do not drink, he refused to believe that an Australian is not an alcoholic, all Australians he meets are alcoholics etc.
So I either let down a genuine Korean man who just wanted to talk music, or I escaped a situation which would have ended up with me tied up naked inside a guys dungeon (burial tomb).
Tonight will be mostly photos of nice looking streets. Here is one.
Here is another. There are temporary water pipes running above many of the streets and some are dug up. They must be replacing the water main. Reminds me of home where that has been going on for about 4 years now.
See, more elevated water pipes and some of the street dug up. Very quiet tonight.
Apparently this is gold street. There is a lot of interesting lighting along many of the streets.
Behold, the granddaddy of all funeral mounds. So grand that awesome trees grow out of it!
And finally, the cube steak dinner that crashed my computer. Note that the picture I ordered from did not come with chips, the rice was on the plate, along with vegetables. Instead I got chips and salad, and rice on the side. Still it was delicious, the steak was of a high quality and cooked in something pleasantly chilli infused.
Tomorrow may be a hiking day of sorts, I suspect the trail behind the main tourist attraction is currently cut short. I shall go and find out.