Gyeongju
This past Christmas I visited my parents in Korea. Due to Omicron, some plans had to shift. Most notably, despite having an approved Quarantine Exemption, the regulations changed and my siblings and I still had to quarantine for 10 days. But we were still able to get quite a bit of traveling in!
One of the places we went to for a quick day trip was Gyeongju. It was my first time visiting, and I was super excited because I had always wanted to see Cheomseongdae. In case you don't know, Cheomseongdae is one of the oldest astronomical observatories in the world. Certainly one of, if not the, oldest surviving one. It was built under the direction of Queen Seondeok sometime in the 7th century. There's a little wiki blurb on it if you're interested in reading more.
My first association with Cheomseongdae is that it's illustration appeared on the Korean alphabet poster we had hanging in our room as kids. In Korean it is written as 첨성대, so it was used as the example word for the letter ㅊ (ch). I think read about Queen Seondeok in a middle-grade book called "Sondok: Princess of the Moon and Stars" This was part of The Royal Diaries series, which I remember was being sold in scholastic book orders. Maybe you remember these?
They were historical novels featuring princesses from all across the world, written in the style of a diary. My mom bought me the Princess Seondeok and Anastasia books. Seondeok herself has always been represented as extremely smart and wise. There are a few legends about her deduction skills, and you can read a little more here if you're interested. If you play video games, you might be familiar with her as the leader of Korea in Civilization VI (which I play relatively frequently lol).
Anyways, all this to say that I have wanted to see Cheomseongdae in person for a really long time, so I was very excited for this trip.
Gyeongju being the capital of Silla, one of the three kingdoms of Korea before the country was unified, has a ton of historic sites. Since we were only there for a day, we weren't able to see all of them. But we did, of course, get to see Cheomseongdae.
My mom told me she thought Cheomseongdae was really cute, and I have to agree. There's something so charming about it! Also wild to think it's lasted 14 centuries. I will say, it's not a very tall building, but honestly for back then, I think it's still significant. I'd say it's around 3 stories high. You can't really get up close and personal with it for obvious reasons, so from a distance it looks a little small, but I still like it. It looks kind of like a bottle. I wonder what the view is like from the top.
Naturally I had to draw it. I decided to just stick with a pencil sketch. You can see I tried to use a pen but to no avail haha. It was also REALLY windy! And quite cold, so my fingers were freezing trying to draw this thing. Worth it, though, in my opinion. I got a little stamp as well.
Besides Cheomseongdae, we also went to walk around the tombs nearby.
A lot of these are royal tombs. I'm not sure why they are rounded like this, but I think they look pretty neat. Just don't climb on top of them! Not only is it disrespectful, but it can lead to erosion, and you could be fined pretty heavily.
We had dinner afterwards, and then went back out at night and got to go inside one of the tombs (Daerungwon Tomb Complex) which had a little museum inside.
A lot of the museum pieces were replicas, but even that I think is pretty impressive on its own. I imagine so much research goes into recreating old artifacts in an authentic way, using the correct materials. And you can see a lot of these items are incredibly intricate. I think the original pieces are at the Gyeongju National Museum, which we didn't get a chance to visit. It was also pretty neat getting to see diagrams of how the tombs were built and excavated.
Afterwards, we walked a little more at night and got one more shot of Cheomseongdae lit up. A couple planets were also visible and made a neat line above the tombs!
Some more photos of Gyeongju!
Overall, I really enjoyed myself! I'd love to come visit again with some warmer weather and a couple more days to see the other sites. There's also an amusement park nearby that my siblings really enjoyed when they visited previously, so I'd love to check that out.
Thank you for reading! If you've visited Gyeongju, let me know how your experience was!