Hwaseong

On Sunday we went to the Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon. The fortress itself is 5.8km long, and the city inside is called Hwaseong. This picture is of the south gate Paldalmum. This is a bad picture of it, it's actually really amazing looking but I should have taken a photo from another angle.

Where I'm standing is the start of the Namun market, it's quite popular in Suwon.

From there we walked about 10minutes with no real idea where we should go until we found a sign pointing us towards a Buddist temple. There we found this huge golden Budda. I'm not sure if you click on the picture if it gets bigger, down near the bottom at the top of the stairs are Nick and Cam. That might give you a sense of the size.

The Budda wasn't a part of the fortress, just a temple of the city. From here we could see where we (probably) wanted to go.

We walked up a bank (a steep bank!) and found this. It's called Seojangdae (I think?) and is the western command post. They've got a guard who stands there, but I'm pretty sure he's just there for tourists because he let some kids play with his sword and when he wasn't posing in photos he was mainly texting.

We're up this little viewing tower to take this photo. You called see all of Suwon - and it all looked the same. Buildings.

From here we walked along the fortress wall for about 1/2 a kilometre. It was pretty cool, mainly because we were heading down hill. There were a lot of very sweaty Americans coming the other way.

We got off the fortress wall to go see King Jeongjo's Bronze Statue. I'm pretty sure the King is the one who built the fortress, and he had this built in honour of either his father or son.. I'm pretty sure.. It's pretty sweet anyway. Didn't look real bronze though.

From here we could hear noises of like, some kind of event. So we walked towards the sound and found Hwaseong Haenggung which is the Palace of Hweaseong. It's pretty cool, it's set up as the Queen's birthday party. You pay 1500w to get in and you just look around and play with some stuff.

This is the boys trying to throw arrows into little pots. It's pretty weird. We thought this was the Korean archery the lonely planet guide promised us, but to our delight, we were mistaken.

This is some kind of ancient sea-saw. It was pretty sweet, and the ladies you can see in the background were real awesome at it. Pretty much what you had to do was bounce the other person real high, then when they came down they had to bounce you real high. It was way harder than it sounds. And pretty hard on the knees too.

In the palace we found these guys. The boys quickly made friends, Nick took a special liking to the lovely lady. We thing she probably liked him too.

After this we walked about a kilometre through the middle of the town, seeing no more of the fortress, to Yeonmudae in order to find Korean archery. We found it, paid another 1500W and got 5 arrows to shoot at some pig targets. We didn't get a chance to take photos because we all had to shoot at the same time, but Nick got told off for shooting at the kids target. He hit it though.


So all in all we estimate that we saw less than a kilometre of fortress. But we'll go again, probably without Nick, who's not real big on sight seeing.