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[HanCinema's Korea Diaries] "Angang" June 25th-27th

While Angang is technically considered a part of Gyeongju, the township is actually closer to Pohang than it is to Gyeongju proper. Even so, it's only a bus trip away, and is filled with its own collection of artifacts, most notably Yangdong Village (양동마을). As tourist locations go Yangdong Village is a little weird. In practical terms it's just a normal Korean neighborhood with unusually old houses. People actually live there, surrounded by artwork that plays up the location's history.

Like this calligraphy, for example. I have no idea what any of it says. Actually, even Chinese people have trouble reading stuff this old. It just looks cool for the sake of looking cool mostly.

This kind of picture has more intrinsic beauty, on account of it being a picture of flowers. And in this case the inscription is even in Korean, although it is somewhat confusingly transcribed from top to down and right to left. It reads something like, beautiful lights and bright scent together represent the blooming beauty of pond flowers which mark the centuries old majesty of this late autumn template. Indeed, the words are pretty too.

Now, more about the houses. This one probably looks decently distinctive, right? Actually, it's just a normal residence like pretty much everything else in the village. Although I am not aware of any drama having ever been filmed in Yangdong Village, it has almost the exact correct aesthetic for one. Well, except for all the houses that have satellite dishes sticking out of them anyway.

...It's in the right-center part, by the way. Modern fixtures like satellite dishes are easy to miss because they're simply not the first thing about these houses that stands out. Really, I can see why people would want to live in houses like this, even if it means they are effectively living in a tourist park.

Ah, but what a park it is! Every minor detail of the surroundings in Yangdong Village just scream romance. Of all the locations I've been to in Korea, this is probably the single best one to go to for a date. There's a beautiful backdrop, ample material for casual conversation, yet the place is so manifestly not crowded it's surprisingly easy to get a moment of privacy. It's a bit of a pity that only people living Gyeongju or Pohang can realistically take advantage of it though.

Yet even upon leaving the village, once again you get an eyeful of its lovely murals. This is probably among the better uses of a reflecting pool I've ever seen. Not totally sure whether it always looks like this, though, or whether I just happened to be leaving at the right time for the sunlight to create this effect.

I'm always at a bit of a loss for how to describe beauty, though. It's not that I'm dumbstruck, it's just that things are beautiful because they are beautiful. Trying to pretty them up with a bunch of fancy outsider words just sort of dilutes the impact. While only a few of the houses in Yangdong Village have any kind of interesting history about them, focusing on them at all detracts from taking the location in totality, which is really how it should be seen at all. Just a place where people live.

Meanwhile, out in Angang proper, here's a more normal Korean citizen burning...something. People out on farms are always burning stuff and I never know why. This isn't just a Korean thing. My mother always does it too, insisting we have to set things on fire in the burn pile. Ah well. This too is beauty, in its own way.

Article by William Schwartz

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