Bohemian Gyeongju

Gyeongju was for a millennium the capital city of the kingdom of Silla, which ruled all of the Korean peninsula from the 7th through 10th centuries. While the legacy of its regal past is everywhere in evidence in the form of the many massive burial mounds scattered in and around the city, and is on display at the fantastic Gyeongju National Museum, nowadays it is a small, unassuming city. It has no skyline to speak of, and thrives mainly on tourism. There is here none of the modern-day urban bustle of Seoul, the megalopolis capital of South Korea.

But there is a kind of romantic luster limning Gyeongju that seems to attract a certain type of outsider. Artists, calligraphers, history buffs, counter-culturalists, drop-outs, and iconoclasts have come here to settle. All over town there are signs in Chinese characters, propped up against dilapidated buildings in out-of-the-way narrow alleys, announcing the presence of a "Three Kingdoms History Research Study Group" or an "Ancient Calligraphy Studio".

Many of these folks seem to end up opening restaurants, which function as expressions of their artistic sensibilities or as gathering places for their like-minded friends.

So it's not unusual to find restaurants whose walls are decorated with classical poetry and whose bookshelves are lined with volumes on history and archeology. In the evenings there are little salons where conversation, lubricated by soju, lingers long into the night.

The poems below were on the wall of a loach-soup place we went to months ago. The presentation isn't anything special, just computer printouts, but this is the sort of thing that can appeal only to a small subset of the population. (Bear in mind that most Koreans can no longer read Chinese characters, let alone poems written in Classical Chinese.)

We recently ate lunch on the site of the former school of the Chinese-Korean community of Gyeongju. It was purchased by a middle-aged man who opened a small artsy printing studio and grilled kalbi restaurant on the grounds.

The printing studio, Wol In Jae 月印齋

The plaque for the Chinese-Korean school still stands outside the gate.

Inside the walls were decorated with all sorts of artistic photographs, ranging from landscape scenes to candid portraits.

But the pictures that struck our eyes were the 9 in the frame on the right of the above picture, shown again below:

These are all 20th-century scenes related to the Chinese-Korean school when it was in operation. On the lower right you can see a map of China on the classroom wall, and in the lower center photo are portraits of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek.

We didn't know anything about the place, but a young man—who turned out to be the owner—a little drunk from some lunchtime revelry with friends, wandered over to talk to us. "You are the first customers to ever notice these photos," he said. He sat down to tell us about them. He and Erma's mother chatted for a while about local history and his own history.

If you are a big-city person, Gyeongju isn't the place for you. But if you think you weren't meant for the modern era, consider opening a restaurant here and discovering a small circle of like-minded Bohemians.

Does this video convey how scary the streets are here?

I keep trying to take video to illustrate how terrifying the traffic and driving culture is in Gyeongju. But nothing seems to accurately convey the feeling of actually being here. The video below is the best I've gotten so far.

It also has the advantage of including a fruit truck. These trucks are pretty common in the city; they drive around, parking at busy intersections or in front of wholesalers. They have loud recorded looped messages advertising their wares. (I use fruit truck in a generic sense; produce is by far the most common item sold off trucks in this way, but it is not the only one.)

There are a few things to note in this video. First is the lack of sidewalks; there are only narrow strips at the side of the road, marked off by a yellow line. Even this narrow walkway is frequently blocked by obstacles, forcing pedestrians to walk into the street with alarming frequency. (Korean pedestrians are completely unconcerned about this, as far as I can tell.)

Second is the completely unregulated intersection. Notice the way cars just slide into it, barely slowing down. There are some large mirrors mounted on poles so you can see traffic coming from the sides, but the visibility is still really poor. Cyclists glide into this intersection as recklessly as cars do.

Third is the cyclist, a topic I wrote on in the previous post.

To view higher-quality video on Vimeo, click me and enter password "korea".

The video was filmed along the route I walk with Tek every morning to take him to school. I no longer find that a heart-stopping experience, which just goes to show that a person can get used to just about anything.

Bicycles in Gyeongju

Gyeongju is a bike city. By that I don't mean that it is particularly friendly to bicycles. In fact, I'd be terrified to ride a bicycle here. But it seems that just about everyone rides a bicycle as a matter of course. It's a ubiquitous and unremarkable form of transportation.

In my American experience, people who ride bicycles are "marked" in some way. They do it for fitness, or recreation, or to make a point about the environment or about urban planning. It's hard to be a regular bike commuter in the US (which I am) without feeling like you're a bit iconoclastic. Certainly others will see you that way.

Not that there isn't recreational biking in Gyeongju. But that's mainly for tourists. Around the Bomun Lake resort area there are lots of bicycle rental shops. Korean and foreign tourists are among their patrons.

But it doesn't take long to realize that the vast majority of Gyeongju residents aren't biking for their health or for sport. Remember this picture of the riverside from an earlier post?

There is a dedicated pedestrian lane, in-line skate line, and bicycle lane. This is on a warm weekend afternoon in April. Where is everybody? (Answer: hiking.)

If you want to find all the cyclists, just walk on the city streets. Young and old, male and female, rain or shine, all on bikes.

First a whole lot of pictures (all taken on a two-block stretch near where we live), then some more commentary. You might notice some familiar faces on the margins of some of the pictures.

I find this intersection terrifying, whether I'm walking or driving. I would not want to bike through it.

A few things to notice:

• No helmets. Never seen one.
• Quite elderly, even frail people ride bikes.
• This may resemble Holland in its flatness (ignoring the mountains ringing the city) and in the ordinariness of bicycle commuting, but it is certainly not Holland in terms of bicycle infrastructure. There is nothing in the way of protected or dedicated lanes or signals. Cyclists are pretty much always weaving in and out of traffic.
• The masks are an ordinary thing in Korea (this has nothing to do with MERS). People wear them to keep out dust, as a courtesy if they have a cold, or if for whatever reason they are worried about getting sick. At all times of year it's normal to see people in face masks around the city.
• Notice how many women are wearing enormous visors? This is what a lot of women, especially middle-aged women, wear for sun protection. (When hiking too.) Erma has been considering getting a visor on this trip, now that she too is an "ajumma".
• The bikes are simple and practical, not built for speed or style. They are sturdy and most have baskets.

In a way, it seems a bit funny to point out how "amazing" it is that all kinds of people ride bikes here. Erma said to me, "It's like saying 'Look at how many different kinds of people drive cars in America. Young, middle aged, even seniors!"

Modified bicycles are not uncommon. Here's an adult bike with "training wheels", though whether it's because the rider has become too old to balance well, or whether it's because she never learned to ride a two-wheeler, is not clear.

Here is one of the bicycle racks in our apartment complex. Just about everybody seems to own a bike.

There aren't a lot of bicycle racks around town, but neither are they rare. Most are non-descript, but these swoopy colorful ones struck Erma's eye on a walk a few weeks ago:

How do Koreans pronounced "iPhone 6"?

A normal person might attempt to answer this question by asking some Korean people. But we can take a less direct and more nerdy approach and try to puzzle it out.

First, some necessary background. (Stick with it, there's a payoff at the end.)

There are two sets of numbers in regular use in Korean. One set is the native Korean numbers that have been in the language for thousands of years. The native numbers from one to ten are:

1. hana
2. dul
3. set
4. net
5. daseot
6. yeoseot
7. ilgop
8. yeodeol
9. ahop
10. yeol

The other set is the so-called Sino-Korean numbers, which were borrowed from Chinese around 1500 years ago. They are:

1. il
2. i
3. sam
4. sa
5. o
6. yuk
7. chil
8. pal
9. gu
10. sip

Both are in common use, but usually only one set is used in a given context. For example, when telling time, the native Korean numbers are used for the hour and the Sino-Korean numbers are used for the minute. So "6:06" is:

yeoseot-si yuk-bun
'six-hour six-minute'

As in the example just given, whenever a Korean sees the written Arabic numeral "6", he or she will determine from context whether it represents native Korean yeoseot or Sino-Korean yuk.

6일 can only be yuk-il 'sixth day (of the month)'
6명 can only be yeoseot-myeong 'six people'

So that's the necessary background. Now we're ready to solve the mystery of "iPhone 6".

On a recent trip to Seoul, Erma and I noticed a billboard for the iPhone 6, visible from the train window just a few minutes outside of Seoul Station:

It's the square white billboard on the right. Click through to see a larger version of the picture. Or just look at the photo detail below.

Here's a close-up of the billboard, with the text transcribed in the caption to the photo:

"iPhone 6로 찍다"

The billboard says "Take photos with the iPhone 6". But how is that "6" pronounced? Erma and I wondered. Is it yeoseot or yuk? Neither of us are native speakers of Korean and we have no feel for what would be appropriate here.

But a moment's linguistic analysis yielded a surprising result: the answer is neither.

"iPhone 6" is followed by a Korean grammatical word, ro 로, which means 'with'. (Unlike English with, which as a preposition precedes a noun, this Korean word is a postposition which follows a noun.) The word ro is a bit like the English indefinite article a/an. The indefinite article has two forms: one precedes a consonant sound, and one precedes a vowel sound (e.g. a book, an apple). The Korean word also has two forms: ro follows a vowel and euro follows a consonant.

What this tells us is that "6" here represents a word that ends in a vowel. But neither yeoseot nor yuk ends in a vowel!

There's only one remaining possibility, and in Sherlockian fashion, we have no choice but to accept it. The word represented by "6" is the English word six.

"Oh-ho!" you say, Watson-like: "But six too ends in a consonant!"

"Quite so, my dear Mr. Watson. But you have overlooked one crucial fact. This is not the English word six as pronounced by Englishmen such as ourselves, but as pronounced in its borrowed form by people of Chosŏn."

That borrowed form is sikseu (pronounced something like sik-suh), which does indeed end in a vowel, and thus must be followed by ro, not euro.

So the answer to the question that forms the title of this post is: aipon sikeuseu. And we didn't have to ask any Koreans to figure it out!

Hiking culture in Korea

Hiking is the Korean national pastime. Korea is famously mountainous, and its people have a long-standing, intimate connection with mountains.

When the weather is nice, Koreans go hiking. On summer weekend mornings, the Seoul subway cars are crowded with recreational hikers heading out to trails on the outskirts of the city. Here in Gyeongju, famous mountain trails attract locals and tourists alike.

There is also deeply embedded cultural knowledge that exercise is vital to the health of the elderly. Old people are constantly exercising. Whether they are using the adult exercise stations that are in public parks, or taking daily constitutionals, or hiking up mountains, it's not uncommon to see men and women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s engaged in vigorous outdoor activity.

An exercise station along the Gyeongju riverside.

Woman hula hooping (with GIANT hoop) at exercise station near top of Songhwa-san trail.

So it's not uncommon when out hiking to meet elderly people along the trail. Many are in excellent health, and (like Erma's parents) can move as quickly and surely up and down the trails as people half their age. Others are clearly weak and frail, and make themselves move by sheer force of will. I remember once a few months ago walking up a trail at Songhwasan and coming across an elderly woman leaning against a tree, resting. She was methodically pounding her arm and leg muscles with her fist, trying to beat out the aches and pains. "Ay," she moaned, "this is so hard!" But she knew she had to keep going, and later while we were resting and having a snack at a higher point on the mountain, she came into view, shuffling with dogged purpose.

****

Korea is a prosperous country. Koreans are also style-conscious, so it is perhaps no surprise that a good deal of their disposable income seems to go toward hiking gear. Even on easy, short, level hikes, many Koreans are dressed in outrageously fancy gear. They are covered head to toe against the sun, with elaborate hats, hiking poles, and fashionable outdoor wear in an array of shiny bright colors. Here are a few surreptitious photos we've managed to take of hikers decked out in typical fashion.

This is by no means an original observation. The NPR reporter stationed in South Korea recently tweeted about it.

ICYMI, Koreans are super hard core about hiking GEAR. They all look like this when they go for even short hikes: pic.twitter.com/9jO6Il9mAu

— Elise Hu (일리스 후) (@elisewho) June 15, 2015

And these hiking outfits aren't just worn for hiking; they have become fashionable in and of themselves, so you see them worn as leisure and travel wear as well. Perhaps one could draw an analogy with yoga pants in the US: specialized exercise gear that crosses over into everyday fashion wear.


Koreans are also meticulous about keeping their clothing (and the inside of their cars) clean. At the bottom of the main Namsan trail there is a small compressed-air station that hikers use to blow all the dirt and dust off their clothes and shoes at the end of hike. If an amenity like this isn't available, Koreans will use compressed air (for filling tires) at a gas station.

This video shows some hikers cleaning up at Namsan. I was goggle-eyed when I first saw this: there is something almost surreal about it, at least from my blinkered American perspective. (As always, it's better to bypass the terrible video quality on Blogger and click through to the Vimeo version.)

To view higher-quality video on Vimeo, click me and enter password "korea".

Paying bills by bank machine

Back in February I wrote a post on how easy it is to transfer money to another person's bank account. It turns out it's also really convenient to pay bills at specialized bank machines.

There seem to actually be an enormous number of ways to pay a bill. Here is the latest electric bill for the studio apartment that Erma and I rent as an office.

Two things to note. On the middle right, there is a red box within which are account numbers at all the major banks in Korea. You can transfer money to any one of these accounts to pay your bill. Presumably this is something you would arrange in person at a bank or on line. The account transfer method by ATM shown in my earlier post wouldn't work, because there is no way to provide the billing account number.

The bottom third of the bill is the detachable section that you would send in if paying your bill by mail. It also has a 2D scannable code on the lower right.

It's that 2D code that is read by the specialized ATM machines used for paying bills.

Here's the opening screen of the ATM. (It looks weird because I've stitched together two separate photographs.)

We were initially baffled by this screen. None of the options seemed to obviously fit our bill. Several of them are for paying local taxes. One, on the upper right, if for "apartment management fees".

The first time Erma and I wanted to pay a bill this way, the bank assistant came out and helped us do it. But we failed to pay attention to which button she selected. The next time we tried to pay, we just couldn't figure it out. So we took some pictures and brought them home to check against a dictionary and ask Erma's parents.

The button at the upper left says "jiro 지로". My on-line Korean-English dictionary translates as "electronic billing system, (Brit) giro". Turns out that according to this Wikipedia entry, giro is an electronic payment system primarily used in Europe, and the name derives from the Italian giro 'circulation of money'.

Anyway, it turns out that that button—"giro utility bill payment"—is the right one. Check out the video below to see how the payment process works. (Better yet, click through to the higher quality version on Vimeo.)

To view higher-quality video on Vimeo, click me and enter password "korea".

Thatched roofs

In the old days, the roofs of traditional Korean houses were thatched with straw. You don't see many thatched roofs these days, but we spotted one today downtown, tucked between some modern buildings.

Wings (x2)

You can never have two many blog posts on parking, right? Right?

Koreans like big cars. But they have small streets and small parking spaces. That's probably why just about every car sold in the country folds up its side view mirrors when you lock the car.

To view higher-quality video on Vimeo, click me and enter password "korea".

And here's a follow-up to my earlier parking post on foam door guards: I now suspect that the whimsical wing-shaped door guards come from the dealer on every cute KIA Morning sold. I've been noticing them around town almost exclusively on this model of car.

A KIA Morning with pink wing-shaped door guards. Notice the side view mirrors are folded up.

Incidentally, the Morning seems to be one of the few cars on the road that comes in actual colors, instead of the typical black, white, and silver.

Yogurt lady update

In an earlier post on Korean yogurt ladies, there were a lot of pictures of the specialized yogurt delivery carts in use around the city, like this one:

UPDATE (June 20): The section below has been rewritten because I've learned more about the branding on the cart.

I thought at first it belong to a rival brand, as it has a different logo: "hy", standing for Hanguk Yakureutu 한국야쿠르트 "Korea Yakult". But it turns out this is just new branding for the Korean subsidiary of Yakult.

It's super cool. I wonder if the old-style yogurt ladies are jealous.

UPDATE 2 (June 20): Some photos of the cart in motion, frantically snapped while chasing after it yet trying to avoid being noticed. I love the outfit-matching helmet.

The MERS outbreak

Life in Korea has taken a dramatic turn in the last few weeks, as there has been a major outbreak of the deadly disease Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in the country.

It's major in the sense that it's the largest outbreak that the world has seen outside of the Middle East. And it's of real concern because the disease has a high fatality rate and there is no cure or vaccine. But the absolute numbers are small. As I write, 126 people (in a country of 50 million) have been diagnosed with the disease, and 10 have died. Most (perhaps all) of the fatalities have been elderly people with compromised health; the latest was a 75-year-old man with terminal lung cancer.

My impression is that this has not been major news in the US, but it has generated high levels of panic here in Korea and also, notably, in neighboring China. Objectively it would seem that most of the panic is not justified, but there were some crucial missteps by the government early on that have eroded public trust. That trust wasn't very high to begin with because of the way the Sewol ferry tragedy played out last year.

It looks to me like, with a little luck and no further mistakes on the part of the authorities, the outbreak should come to a natural end pretty soon, but it's hard to say for sure.

The proximate impact has so far been minimal. I've read news stories saying that sales of face masks are up by some incredibly high percentage (was it 700%?) and that people are avoiding public transportation, but here in sleepy Gyeongju I've not noticed any change at all in public life. Restaurants are open and bustling, people walk the streets casually as before.

But there have been many significant ripple effects that are beginning to touch our lives, and are definitely affecting the lives of many Koreans. Large numbers of people (about 3,800) are under quarantine because of the possibility of exposure to the disease.* They remain under quarantine until they test negative for the virus or pass through the two-week incubation period without developing symptoms. Over 1,000 schools in the country are closed (pointlessly, it would seem). Conferences and excursions of all sorts are being canceled.

The sense of alarm in China appears to be especially high. Koreans are being asked not to enter China. Hundreds of thousands of tourists from China have canceled planned visits and tours to Korea. There are many direct flights from China to the tourist mecca Jeju Island, off the southern coast. Although not a single MERS case has been reported there, flights from China are so empty that some are being canceled because they literally have zero passengers.

As you might imagine, all this is not good for the economy.

To a large extent the panic is unwarranted, and is reminiscent of the kind of the irrational fears we saw last year in the US around ebola. MERS is actually extremely difficult to catch. It is not airborne, and is transmitted between humans only through intense, extended contact. Worldwide, it has mostly been contracted between family members or among patients and caregivers in hospitals. It doesn't appear that you can catch the disease in public. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes it this way:*

Person-to-person spread of MERS-CoV, usually after close contact, such as caring for or living with an infected person, has been well documented. Infected people have spread MERS-CoV to others in healthcare settings, such as hospitals. Researchers studying MERS have not seen any ongoing spreading of MERS-CoV in the community.

In fact, to date all confirmed cases of MERS infections in Korea have happened in hospitals.* It is purely a hospital-transmitted infection. Initially the government refused to say which hospitals were housing MERS patients, probably in order to avoid generating panic. Of course, as is usually the case with this sort of obfuscation, the effect was counter-productive, generating rumors and conspiracy theories. Eventually the government had to give in and make a full declaration of which hospitals have MERS patients. As it turns out, 58—nearly half—of all cases have originated at a single hospital, the prestigious Samsung Medical Center in southern Seoul.*

The outbreak has revealed both strengths and weaknesses of the country's medical system. The weaknesses are both procedural and cultural. In terms of procedure, the hospitals seem to have done a terrible job with basic hygiene and isolation of contagious patients. I don't know enough to say if the problem has to do with practices or technology, or a combination of both. But an equally significant problem is cultural. As The Economist put it:*

One contributing factor is that many South Koreans, like the first MERS patient, visit several hospitals to look for the best care. This can spread disease faster. Hospitals are sociable places where people share rooms with strangers, and where family and friends crowd around to take care of the sick.

There's more than meets the eye in that last sentence. In fact, nursing care of the comprehensive US type is not the norm in Korea, so patients often need family and friends to provide some of that basic care. Those people are not medical professionals and don't always follow best practices (like rigorous hand-washing).

As for strengths, it is presumably the overall quality of care that has created such a low death rate here. Prior to this outbreak, MERS had a shockingly high fatality rate of about 40%. Here it's been about 10%.

As we enter starting to feel affected more and more. Tek's daycare wasn't closed, but a number of his field trips were canceled. Today when I picked him up, the teacher who answered the door literally sprayed my whole body down with disinfectant before I was allowed to enter the building. Parents have been requested to report any visits to hospitals where MERS was contracted to the director of the daycare.

A major international conference that I was supposed to attend next week in Seoul was canceled, not because of any real danger to participants, but because so many attendees from China were pulling out that it was no longer practical to hold the conference.

I think I broke my toe last week. As the swelling has finally started to go down, I'm noticing the toe is misshapen. I should probably go to a hospital to get it splinted. But a hospital is the one place in this country that I'm afraid to go right now. (A lot of people are feeling the same, of course. Lucky for me I hardly have a life-threatening emergency. I would guess that the broader effect on public health of so many people avoiding hospitals is going to be significant.)

And then there are these two signs that just got posted on the door of the studio apartment building where Erma and I rent a room to serve as our office, next to the sign that went up in the winter requesting that residents keep the door closed so that stray cats don't go in.

Some information about MERS and a public service announcement about hand washing

And here's the sign that was posted by the front entrance of our apartment complex.

Dos and Don'ts for MERS. Two of the Don'ts aren't likely to come into play here, since they involve camels.

"Avoid intimate contact with camels." Check.
"Avoid drinking unpasteurized camel milk and uncooked camel meat." Check.

We are now 3 weeks into the outbreak. It's possible it will peak soon, but it's hard to say. In the meantime, things sure are weird around here.

P.S. Just to reiterate, we feel completely safe here.


*Sources and additional references:

CDC on MERS transmission: here
News article from Nature on why MERS doesn't spread easily: here
Recent statistics: here
The Economist on missteps in dealing with MERS in Korea: here
Problems at Samsung Medical Center: here

What happened to the piano store?

When we moved here in January, there was a piano store two storefronts away from Tek's daycare building. It's one of many sites within a few blocks of where we live that has gone under construction in the short time we've been here. It seems that the store has been converted to a combination living quarters and, bizarrely, branch office of the Korea JoongAng Daily newspaper.

It's been pretty interesting watching the construction methods (and the way it all spills out into the narrow street, blocking traffic and creating various safety hazards). Sadly, the nicely paved golmok 골목 (alley) running alongside the store and leading to our office suffered a bit as a result of the construction. The paving stones were pulled up to install underground pipes, and were reset quite poorly. (You can see video of how nice the alley used to look on this post.)

After gutting the inside and removing most of the outside walls, new walls were built of roughly set bricks (right) and then mudded over (left).

One reason they had to make new walls was that the old piano store had a giant doorway, large enough for pianos to fit through. They wanted a normal narrow doorway (center):

Note also the pile of dirt right in the middle of a narrow street.

Here's a mini excavator digging up the paving stones in our alley, next to the store (which is on the left in this photo). Note the old blue tile roof.

I don't know exactly what this layer is, or why it is scored in squares.

After that, styrofoam boards were glued and then screwed onto the building, and then painted over with bumpy fake stucco. By the way, that little door leads to a squat toilet accessible only from the outside. The door is raised because the bathroom floor is raised; that's typically done so that the toilet can be set into the floor.

This seemed really weird to me, but an architect reader of this blog pointed out that this is a known construction technique, also used in dry climates in the States like Southern California. ("Styrofoam under fake stucco is called Dryvit (manufacturer) or STO (manufacturer) or EIFS (exterior insulation and finish system).")

In this photo you can clearly see the styrofoam under the stucco finish:

Then they built this elaborate framework on the roof. At first I got excited, thinking that they were going to install solar panels.

But it turned out that they were just building a new roof atop the old one. Guess that's easier than repairing or replacing.

And here's the near-finished look of the new place.

The sign is up, and nice copper gutters and downspouts. And some steps and a ramp blocking the sidewalk.

Sign reads: 중앙일보 (JoongAng Daily)

This is apparently a neighborhood newspaper distribution center, and possibly a small office for accepting local ads.

KTX bathrooms

Generally, public bathrooms in large heavily trafficked areas of Korea are really really nice. I'm talking about places like highway rest stops, Seoul Metro stations, and the like. I've posted previously about nice bathrooms in the Seoul Metro, and more recently about female bathroom cleaners in men's public restrooms.

In that last post I mentioned that I'd never before seen a sign saying that men should not use the bathroom while it was being cleaned by a female employee. The sign was in the KTX (bullet train) station Dongdaegu.

Recently in our local KTX station, Singyeongju (i.e. "New" Gyeongju), I saw a more typical sign, warning about the presence of a female cleaner but not suggesting that anything should be done about it.

The men's bathroom at the Singyeongju station is really really nice. Take a look at this:

Those are urinals on the right; the stalls are on the left. Separating them is a natural wood partition with each section designed to look like old-fashioned Korean-style courtyard doorways. On the back wall is a photo of a traditional Korean village. Just visible on the left, decorating the walls and doors of the stalls, are pictures of iconic Gyeongju archeological treasures.

And check out this specialized stall. Remember, this is the men's room.

Agi-rang hamkke 아기랑함께 means "together with a baby"

If you really need to sit on a toilet and you've got an infant with you, you're pretty much out of luck in most public bathrooms. But not here.

Fold down the little seat, strap the kid in, and do your business while entertaining (or consoling) the little tyke. The inside walls are decorated with cartoony, kid-friendly images: balloons, flowers, etc.