Gyeongju

So Gyeongju was really great. It's a fairly small city, only a couple hundred thousand people, and the downtown area is actually kind of dirty, but the surrounding areas were really nice. We stayed in a famous youth hostel in the downtown area, run by a man named Mr. Kwon. He actually spoke very good English, and was really nice. The hostel had a lot of visitors from all over the world, and each night we spent outside on the roof drinking soju and beer, passing around an acoustic guitar and singing songs, and just talking with everyone. One night we went to a karaoke bar for a couple of hours and then went back to the roof.

On Saturday we went to a very famous temple located on the side of a mountain, and then over to a place called Millennium Park where we did some riding on ATVs through a gorge in a valley surrounded by mountains. Later that night there was supposed to be a concert at a nearby Lake resort area, but it was apparently canceled for Chusok, which was unfortunate.

On Sunday (Chusok day), we went to the coast to hit the beach. The water was nice but there was pollution all along most of the beach, a really disgusting amount of it too. It was really unfortunate because there were a lot of really neat rock formations that you could climb and look out into the ocean, but even most of those had some really nasty stuff on and around them. There were many fishermen casting their lines into the water from on the rocks, but we didn't see anybody catch anything. My friend Laura and I did some body surfing for awhile, so at least we got to do that.

After the beach we went to visit a hotel that had a Spa and Sauna room built around some natural hot springs. This was really great, because the Koreans refer to these as Bath Houses, and it's a really refreshing way to get very clean and exfoliate and... all that crazy spa stuff. The facility was VERY clean and well maintained. The only kicker was that in Korea, you go into these places completely nude. They are obviously segregated by gender, but it still really takes some time to get used to walking around what is essentially a huge bath tub completely naked with 50-100 other people. It wasn't just one pool though, there were maybe 10 different pools that were at different temperatures and had different jets and waterfalls and such designed to massage different areas of the body. There were also saunas and an outdoor hot tub. And after getting out, there was a fancy changing area where you could put in hair gel and body lotion and cologne and such. And to top it all off, all this unlimited amount of spa time came at a cost of a mere seven dollars.

We left Monday around noon after picking up gifts (Gyeongju Barley Bread) for our co-workers, which is also Korean tradition. We got to and from Gyeongju via the train, a ticket for which costs around seven dollars one way. The trip from Gyeongju was uneventful, but on the train ride TO Gyeongju, the Korean man I sat next to spoke pretty good English and invited me (for no other reason than that I was an interesting foreigner) to the beverage car to have a few beers with him and his friend that he was traveling with.

And after a long day of traveling with a huge load of luggage and gifts, I am finally home. I dropped off all my rolls of film to be developed and will be picking them up tomorrow: 120 pictures to be developed and put on CD for a cost of $28. In America it would cost around twice that much. I love this country =)