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| With Jungmun Beach and the sea in the background | | |
Hey all,
Here's what you've all been waiting for...the vacation blog! And what a vacation it was! Although, the vacation didn't start off quite on the right foot. The gang, which consisted of Dave, Peter (Dave's high school buddy, lives in Munsan (Paju)), Judy (from Hwajeong, near Ilsan, where Dave lives), and myself, all met up in Suwon last Monday to begin our many hours of travel. We had arranged to take a bus from Suwon to Mokpo on the southwest coast, where we were taking the ferry to Jeju-do on Tuesday afternoon. I was put in charge of purchasing our bus tickets. I was pretty certain that I had bought tickets for Monday night, but I didn't double-check to make sure the date on our tickets was correct. As it turns out, I had actually been given tickets for Tuesday evening, but fortunately, Judy and Peter are both Korean-Americans who are able to speak pretty good Korean and we were able to get the tickets I had purchased fully refunded and exchanged for tickets on Monday night. We even ended up saving 8,000 won (Huzzah!) that was promptly placed in the party fund. We arrived in Mokpo a little after midnight and eventually met up with the rest of our traveling party, Veronica, who lives in Daegu (south central South Korea), and Torsten, an exchange student from Germany, who is connected through Veronica. We were all pretty beat from traveling and made our way to a 찜질방 (jjimjilbang, Korean bathhouse, but if you've been reading this blog for a while you should know what that is). Soon enough we were asleep and it was Tuesday. After leaving the .찜질방, we headed towards the ferry terminal with plenty of time to spare. While we were waiting, I ran into a familiar face. Dan, the teacher I replaced at my school, is back in Korea, teaching at a private school in Apgujeong, a very nice area in southeast Seoul. We grabbed some snacks and we were ready to go on the 5 hour ferry from Mokpo to Jeju. Here's a view from the ferry of us leaving Mokpo:
We got into Jeju around 7:30 p.m. and made our way from the ferry terminal in Jeju City to our motel/hotel/Holiday Inn in Seogwipo, about 45 minutes away. The Galaxy hotel was a pretty sweet find (thanks Lonely Planet!). For the 6 of us, we had two rooms of 3 people and it only cost 40,000 won for 4 nights, so a little less than $10 a night, ummmm....YEAH! After dropping our stuff off, we entered full on vacation mode, which we wouldn't leave until touching back down in Incheon on Sunday morning. Dinner on the first night was a delicious assortment of 휘 (raw fish) that looked like this:
After dinner, we went to explore the Seogwipo nightlife, which was plentiful. The next day, we woke up a little later than we had wanted to, but the forecast had called for rain. Much to our surprise, the rain had passed and the sun was out. We decided that Wednesday was going to be our day for hiking Hallasan. Unfortunately, the trail to the top closes at 12:30 so we didn't make it all the way to the top, but we hiked 7.3 km of the 9.3 km up the Seongpanak trail and it was pretty great. Very scenic (obviously) and even though it was a cooler day, I was still dripping with sweat. Here's a view from the shelter at the top of our hike, where 람연 (ramyeon a.k.a ramen) is your prize for reaching that point.
By the time we reached the bottom, it started to drizzle and we were ready to make some moves back to the hotel to change for the rest of the evening. For dinner we went to a restaurant that specialized in 오겹살 (literally five-layered meat, but it's a Jeju specialty, from the black pigs that only live there). It was good, but i prefer the more traditional 삼겹살 (three-layered pork). Wednesday night Nate and Kimball (Alex) got in to Jeju and joined us for dinner. It turns out that they were staying at the same hotel that Dave and I stayed at last May when we were in Jeju for the frisbee tournament, which is only a 15-20 minute walk away from us, so that was really nice.
Thursday we finally made our way to the beach, Jungmun Beach, to be exact. Dave and Peter's high school friends, Danny and Dana (who I've also become friends with), were staying at the Hyatt hotel right off the beach and they met us out on the beach. Going to the beach in September in Korea is pretty funny because even though it was 30 celsius, there is a sign on the beach that says the beach is closed. That didn't stop us foreign folk from going in for a dip. Sometime in the afternoon we decided that we were ready for lunch and conveniently enough, Danny had driven his motorcycle down from the mainland to sell to another foreign teacher who lives in Seogwipo, Jack Daniels (yes, that really is his name), who would become our unofficial tour guide for the rest of the trip. Jack told us that horse meat is somewhat available on Jeju and seeing that a few of us are pretty adventurous eaters, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to try something new. Man oh man, horse meat is pretty delicious. You have to eat it raw or rare because the meat is so muscular that it gets very tough to chew if it cooks any longer. Here is a picture of how some of our meat was prepared:
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| Barbaro? Scott Brosius? Mr. Ed? |
The long and the short of it is that horse meat is pretty delicious, albeit a more expensive meal. Definitely not something I could eat once a week, but every now and then it's worth it. After our late lunch we headed back to the beach to watch the sunset on our very intense Euchre games. Eventually we were ready to eat again and after cleaning up for the evening, Jack took us to a awesome chicken shack restaurant. The chicken wings came in two spices, spicy or regular. A sidenote about Mr. Jack Daniels, the man loves his spices. He brought back 14 bottles of Sriracha (only the best hot sauce ever) back from the U.S. and brought a bottle to dinner. These wings brought some tears and packed plenty of punch in the flavor. From dinner we retreated back to Jack's rooftop for an evening of games and drinks. Once it got too cold outside we went down to Jack's apartment, where he pulled out some wicked hot sauce. The instructions tell you to mix in one teaspoon for every gallon of sauce you have. Here's the warning label:
Needless to say that after seeing this warning label, I was inclined to try it once. It was a slow burn, moving its way from your tongue, down your esophagus before finally reaching your stomach. I don't think any amount of rice and frozen yogurt smoothies could have helped Papa with this heat, but thankfully he wasn't anywhere near this spice. At some point during the evening Jack informed us that he has been spearfishing around Jeju a fair amount and offered to take us out on Friday. I don't know if any of us actually thought this was going to happen Thursday evening, but these things somehow have a way of working themselves out and our plans materialized on Friday.
First, Friday morning Dave and I woke up early to eat breakfast at the Hyatt with Danny and Dana who were leaving Jeju that afternoon. The breakfast was a definite upgrade from Dunkin' Donuts and afterwards it was nice to play some more Euchre and lounge around the pool for the better part of the morning. The rest of our group met up with us and we decided that we did want to go spearfishing, so the call was placed to Jack, who arranged pretty much everything for us. We met him at the dive shop down the street from his apartment, where we got outfitted with a wetsuit, snorkel, mask, flippers, watershoes, and our spear. Here's a pic of some of our tools:
The spear is assembled like a tent pole. There is a large elasticized rubber band on the end, then you connect the three poles and the last pole has a spear on its end. You shoot the spear like a slingshot, but you have to shoot it at a pretty close distance. To get to where we were going fishing, we took a boat about 10 minutes from Seogwipo to an island across the water from Jeju. It was a pretty awesome experience! I was having a little trouble with my breathing underwater and I kept on taking in a lot of seawater, so unfortunately, I wasn't able to catch anything, but as a group we caught 10 fish, which we cooked up that evening. Here's a pic of us leaving the island:
Our last night in Seogwipo was a blast. We all had one final hurrah and Saturday morning found us packing up and checking out of the Galaxy, headed towards Jeju City. Just outside of Jeju City is an art exhibtion that is pretty explicit in nature called Love Land. Due to the nature of this blog's audience I'm only including one picture from Love Land. The rest are up on Facebook, but a warning for all interested, a lot of the artwork is
Extremely Explicit, so don't say I didn't warn you. Anyways, a lot of the artwork looked pretty professional and most of it is. Here is one sculpture that was fascinating to look at:
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| Marilyn Monroe and an Eagle |
After Love Land, we headed back to Jeju City where we killed some time before we had to be at the ferry terminal for our ferry back to Incheon. We made a point to be near the front for boarding the ferry to pick out a choice spot to crash for the 13 hour journey. The rooms we paid for are
ondul style, which means no beds, everyone sleeps on the floor. Thankfully they provided foam brick pillows and blankets, but it was still not quite as comfortable as the bunks on the ferry to and from Japan. It turns out our room, C-9, was designated a foreigner room. We had a few Chinese groups, a lot of Westerners (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand) and then we had a group of Chinese Koreans, who did not look happy to be placed in our room. After everyone had settled down for a little bit, we headed upstairs for some snacks and fresh air. When we returned the Chinese Koreans were having a little picnic in their area, complete with kimchi, canned ham, and plenty of soju and maekju (beer). They started offering some to some foreigners around them and suddenly the air in the room got a little lighter and more jovial. Peter and Judy were doing their best to hide the fact that they spoke Korean, but eventually their cover was blown and everyone's night completely changed. C-9 became the party room, much to everyone's delight. Our party leader was a Chinese Korean ajummah who loved to dance and sing until she hit her wall. Needless to say we were happy to finally be back in Incheon on Sunday morning, but also thankful that the 13 hours went by much quicker than we thought they would. All in all it was an awesome vacation and I've already started some rough plans for winter vacation.
In other news, congrats to the Twins for clinching the division, but now it's time to start taking the last week of the season seriously, I'm still terrified of the Yankees in the playoffs. Congrats to the Vikes for win #1, time to get some chemistry during the bye week. I've reached January~February 1969 in the John Lennon book and things are starting to go sour for the Beatles. I've been re-listening to the Anthology CDs as the musical accompaniment to my reading. That's all from this end, the weather has started to turn to fall here, although not as much as at home it seems like.
What I'm listening to: "Come and Get It" by the Beatles, Anthology 3, CD 2
Links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYVfZSsZahY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk57K4OGrAg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkAu3ijigeA&feature=fvw
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