Gyeongju

Two days in Teletubby land, also known as Gyeongju or the Golden City according to the tourist board. This is an old capital city of the Silla Kingdom and is also known as 'the museum without walls', as if it needed any more names.
The city itself is quite small but full of things to do and we were happy to find that you can walk everywhere easily. We saw a park full of giant grassy mounds which are tombs for the old royal family. Some are still being excavated and there is a small museum inside one of them with gold armour for the horses and their riders. It was very tempting to climb one but the threatened 2 year prison sentence was enough to put us off.
We also walked around an old town where all the buildings have the old fashioned architecture, visited an amazing bridge over the River, and saw an ancient astrological observatory.
We spent the evenings in the night market sampling as much of the food as we could, as usual. We've noticed that the Koreans love to add sugar to everything, including cheese and egg toasties and hot dogs. It's a bit strange at first but not as bad as it sounds! Our favourites this time were mung bean pancakes, sweet sticky fried pork and black raspberry wine, well fincsi :)
One more thing that this city is famous for is Gyeongju bread. There are bakeries all around selling boxes of 10 or 20 of these little buns which are full of sweet red bean paste, not bad, but one was enough.
For our last night in Korea we headed back to Busan from where we would fly to Taiwan. We escaped a very rainy night in a restaurant where we had budae jjigae another cook-it-yourself dish which was like a giant noodle soup full of different meat and vegetables, another one to remember to try at home!Read more