Gyeongju: Day Two

Our second day in Gyeongju we thought it would be prudent to find some indoor activities to do to stay out of the cold. We decided on the Gyeongju World Culture EXPO Park. (I have no idea why the all caps EXPO.) It has several buildings on site and of course the exhibition hall itself. Unfortunately, there was no real exhibit in the EXPO going on at the time, just a display promoting the upcoming Thailand culture exchange and a small display of what I assume to be local artisans works.

The true centerpiece of the park is the Gyeongju Tower, that only has two actual floors, an observation deck and an exhibit floor. The exhibit floor contained Shilla related items from the Gyeongju museum of which I'm pretty certain at least some were replicas of the real museum pieces.

View over Shilla Millennium Park

overlooking the topiary garden

We went to the fossil museum located in the grounds, which proved to be of much better quality than I expected. It contained several complete prehistoric sea creature fossils, a few land animal fossils, plant fossils, and numerous rock displays and petrified wood. The girls had more fun playing with the snow and cement dinosaurs outside the entrance. You can see them in the center of the photo below.

There was also a building of popular Korean kids characters which, oddly, were all named in English letters. It also contained an art gallery of copies of famous pieces of art, such as the Mona Lisa, Prima Ballerina, etc. Why they chose to combine those two particular categories, who knows?

We walked around the outdoor sculpture garden and the topiary garden, both of which I'm sure would have been much nicer if it had been spring or summer. Nothing of extraordinary interest in the way of sculptures. This seemed to be the best one and the one displayed on the ad:

in the topiary garden

Our final stop before leaving Gyeongju was also our favorite: sledding on the frozen canal. The cold does have its advantages! They had a tent set up (with a smelly fire going) where we were able to rent a sled and pull the girls and each other around. It was a ton of fun!