The weather is starting to get nice here on our side of the world.  People are starting to plant flowers.  It is starting to feel liked spring.  As a result, we are motivated again to take on the outside world and try to see more of Korea. 

This past weekend we went to Gongju which is about 45 minutes to an hour west/southwest of Daejeon.   This is one of the former capitals of the Baekje dynasty era.   There are tombs of kings there.  The tombs looked like large mounds of dirt from the outside.  For preservation reasons you could not go into the original tombs but they did have a nice museum that had displays of the various styles of tombs and the artifacts found in the tombs.  Much like the tombs in Egypt, the majority of the tombs had been robbed prior to their discovery by the scientific community. There was one exception though, the tomb of King Muryeon.  His tomb was found by accident when they were building a path up to the tombs on the top of the mountain.  Because of  Muryeon tomb they could date the other tombs.  It is unknown as to why his tomb was not robbed but apparently he was a very well loved king. 

The cool thing was that they has replicas of the various tombs  and how they found King Muryeon tomb so you could get a sense of what they were like.   There was quite a bit of the description in English which was nice but a little confusing and Chris and I walked out with probably as many questions about the tombs as we walked in with. Oh well, such is life living in a foreign country where you can't fully speak the language.

After we went to the tombs we decide to see what else was in the area.  We had been handed a book from the tourist information center so we flipped through it to see what looked interesting. Chris decided that the cheering Buddhas would be neat to see so off we went in search of the temple with the cheering Buddha section.  Ok well they really weren't cheering but it sure looks like it if you see them.  There are over 1000 Buddhas that are about the height of the average women that surround a very large Buddha.  Behind the large Buddha are 333,333 6 inch high Buddhas.  We thought this would be the only Buddhas at this temple but we were wrong.  This was the land of the big Buddha. Where big Buddhas come to grow.  There were Seven large Buddhas and an untold number of small Buddhas at this temple.  I am not quite sure what the head priest has in mind but apparently he is not done.  He has some thirty year goal in mind.  Maybe he want s to get into the Guinness Book of World Records or something with most Buddhas per square foot. 

It was interesting.  The thing I liked was the sound of the bells that were hung around the base of the large Buddha that was surround by the Buddha cheering section.  The sound of hundreds of bells or wind chimes that are all the same was very relaxing.  We took a video clip so you could get some sense of the experience but it still is not likely to give you the whole experience.