LIFE ON 'THE PENN': Rambling Randomness

It only takes a short time to recover from one trip before I'm rarin' to go on the next! Since we have to stay local for now I've been watching the brown signs; you know, the ones that mean 'historical spot ahead'. I spotted one that said Gayasan Botanical Gardens, so one Sunday after church we went. The signs for the garden were intermittent after we got off the main road, but we found it without too much difficulty. The drive was fairly mundane until we were almost there, then there were some beautiful flowers and a few statues and a pagoda along the road. I made Matt stop at the pagoda for a picture. It was built in 802 as part of a large Buddhist temple complex that was destroyed in the Japanese invasion during the 1590s.

When we arrived at the gardens there were two paths and we couldn't tell which way to go as there were no more signs. So we followed the crowd. Turns out your mom was right, don't follow; the crowd was wrong! We ended up walking up a very steep hill to a newly and not completely constructed Buddhist temple. At least the scenery was pretty! This was at a fairly high altitude so the climate was milder and the cherry blossoms were still in full bloom here. I like this shot:

These show how rocky the terrain is here!

The garden itself was disappointing since there was nothing in bloom except a few azaleas, which are all around our apartment and everywhere else, so big deal. And that was a Sunday afternoon.

The following Saturday I wanted to go to Juwangsan National Park and walk on the trails. Somehow we didn't make it. I won't say how, just somehow. (We ended up in Andong again!!) There was a lovely place we stopped to have a picnic. It looked like it was once a really beautiful garden but hasn't been tended to recently. Spring in Korea is fantastic and these are a few examples of why:

Flowers like these are everywhere! But so fleeting. It was a great scenic spot and I took a few more pictures of the things around us.

We never did make it to Juwangsan Park. Guess we were meant to see other things instead. Since we were in Andong I wanted to try to get to the mask museum that I had been wanting to see the first two times we were here. However, the road signs were shall we say spotty, so we ended up on the wrong road. Instead we stopped at Bongjeongsa, where the oldest wooden building in Korea is located, circa 1363. I cannot attest to the veracity of that statement because to be honest it seemed in pretty good condition to be 600+ years old. Here is the building. You had to climb a set of stone steps up to a small courtyard that wasn't big enough to take a full shot, so I had to take the picture from the steps.