Day 8: The Hills and the Beach
Anyway, with that random aside over, let's talk about the last day in Gyeongju. The day started with some unexpected news that there would be rain mid-day. The forecast looked a bit better for the one stop that was somewhat outside town - the Belguksa Temple, so I decided to head there first. After about a 15 minute uber taxi ride into the hills, i reached and while it wasn't raining, halfway through my walk around the temple grounds something cooler happened: it started snowing. At one point it was quite heavy (though not really cool enough to stick). It was magical. It seems I've avoided a snowstorm that Seoul had, but to get some snow on this trip was a delight and made for some awesome pictures and videos.
The t4emple complex itself is beautiful and built well into the hills. The architecture itself is fairly common - that same shade of Royal Korean Green being the primary pallatte What the Belguksa had in a bit more scale is beautiful temple interiors, with shining gold buddhas in each one. There were no picture signs that everyone, me included, just decided didn't exist. There were also some really nice decorative lanterns and balloons and what-not - again all of this color and the falling white snow was lovely.
The next stop was halfway back at the Gyeongju Expo Park, of which I didn't know existed. I went there because the Gyeongju Tower is in its ground. The Gyeongju Tower is one of the more unique buildings - it's basically a fairly standard rectangular shaped office building, but with the relief of a pagoda cut out in the middle. It's stunning. the rest of the Expo grounds were interesting, including a nice, if small, art museum located at the North End of the grounds. It took about 30 minutes to walk through all of it, with the beautiful tower visible in its regality from every angle.
From there I ubered back to the main town to go for lunch to a truly special little dumpling shop. It isn't a true hole in teh wall, since it is quite well reputed and centrally located, but there's a picture menu with like 8 variations of dumpling. I ordered a set of the pork dumplings and veggie dumplings (with little pork - as the picture prompt notes). The guy basically takes a steel steamign dish and pops it on a steamer outside, flips a switch and steam pours on, enough so that some of the steam comes back in teh small restaurant,. It was honestly amazing. Good enough I ordered a set of the fried pork dumplings to go - already picking what my late night meal will be hours later (though expect me tomororw or Friday to check out a place I can add to my late nigth eating spots ranking).
The final tourism spot in Gyeongju was their National Museum, set in a park at hte South end of one of the main parks that I detailed yesterday. The Museum is actually a park in itself without about 6 Museum Halls strewn about. Three of them were closed, which is sad - though the person at the ticket counter said one of them is generally closed except for special exhibits about 25% of the time. That said, the two main buildings that were open were quite enjoyable. The first was the Silla Museum, which is the main building in the complex, outlining the story of the Silla people from rise to eventual fall (though they are super quick on the fall part) told alongside a whole host of artifacts. Some are from the super old days so they're basically spears and arrows and stuff that look the same from other artifacts of that time everywhere. As we went more into Modern era, it became a lot of gold, jade, bronze and jewelry. The gold crowns were amazing.
The best part was a room that detailed what was in the tombs (the mounds around the city center), with every item uncovered from one tomb. It's a lot. And it's overwhelming in reality - so many pots, iron arrows, jewels and of course gold regalia. And they said the specific person whose tomb they were laying out wasn't even the King or Prince, but more a high noble consiglierie type.
The other main building taht was open is the Silla Art Museum, which was overtaken by various exhibits detailing buddha sculpture, painting, bronze and gold statue work, from that time. From what I understand, the museum basically picks some subject from the Silla times to focus on twice a year, and right now it was how buddhism started as a subculture, than fully took over. The Gyeongju Museum to be honest might be the best site within the city, and a great way to end my time there before I caught my uber back to Busan, with a quick stop at Coffee Place one last time to gulp down what is now without a doubt in my mind the best cappuccino I've ever had.
The drive to Busan was at first unmemorable, but then became so once you started hitting the Busan exurbs - a good 30 minutes out of the city. The sprawl is real, even in Busan which is far smaller than Seoul but still feels like a massive city. My hotel - the Fairfield Marriott - is about two blocks in from Haeudau Beach, one of the more popular upmarket areas of Busan. I came to learn pretty quickly that Busan is basically like four or five different small cities cut into and built onto various parts of the winding hills, valleys and beaches. They're impressively connected through tunnels built into the hills between the various parts, but because of this you never really feel the full extent of Busan's size.
I remained around the general Haeundae area for my pre-dinner craft beer trip, this time to Gorilla Brewing, a Busan institution. They had a really nice stout adn sour (their specialty) and was a convenient ten minute walk from the hotel. Ten minutes in teh other direction gets you to Anga, a pork only korean bbq spot that was humming when I got there around 8:45 - though surprisingly I was the last one there when I left around 9:45. The place is open till midnight on Wednesday's, so maybe its just a slow night?
Following I took an uber over to Seomyeon, the main commercial & late night hub of Busan. There were two cocktail spots I wanted to check out, to do a bit of scouting for my tomorrow adn Friday night as well. I went to Alt.Comma (stylized as "Alt,") first which was classic Korean exacting perfection, much like Bar Prep the night before in Gyeongju. There was a long bar behind which the mixologist cooked up mostly bourban based cocktails with chemist like precision. They also had home-made chocolate to much on. The place was perfect.
The other was Wood Side Bar, which was about 90% as perfect - the main difference being it was more of a whiskey bar in the sense most of their extensive menu was whiskeys from around the world. They had cocktails, but primarily just the "standard" ones - which of cousre they made really well, but I was going for / expecting a bit more inventiveness. My final stop was as I was walking around the buzzing, humming Seomyeon inner roads (already thinking about how wild it will be on the weekend...), I stopped at Fuzzy Navel, another cocktail spot, for one last cocktail before i headed back to the Fairfield. Busan was surprisingly quiet in all these spots (save for Fuzzy Navel and those surrounding blocks) for a major city - say when I compared it to my time in Seoul midweek - but still has a lot of promise.
