Yay! My last post went through. I was using a computer in the library, and my time ran out right when I was pushing the "publish post" button, so the computer logged out right then. I was worried it didn't get posted.

Anyway, I thought I would talk about my Korea trip from April-May, since I am trying to finish up things I need to do today.


Thursday, April 29

I left at about 5am in the morning on Thursday, April 29. I looked up plane fares to Korea, but it was pretty expensive, and the trains to the airport I wanted to go to were infrequent, so I would've had to leave early. I ended up figuring out that taking the train and a hydrofoil from Western Japan would be the cheapest way of getting there. So I got up before the crack of dawn and took the first train to Shin-Osaka. From there I transferred to a shinkansen (bullet train) and took it west to Fukuoka. I had a tight window once I got to Fukuoka because I was supposed to check in to the boat by 11. I missed the bus barely, so I took a cab to the port terminal instead. The boat was completely full, and it was suprisingly small. The seats felt like bus chairs, and had about as much legroom. Luckily, the sailing was quite smooth, though.

The man next to me was from Korea, and he struck up conversation with me when he saw I had a guidebook to Korea. His English was great and he was really nice. He recommended some foods for me to eat and looked at my itinerary to see if it sounded okay. It took a little under 3 hours to make the trip to Busan, the second largest city in Korea, and its largest eastern port. We went through one of the least friendly immigration areas I have been to. The officials didn't say anything friendly at all. Then I filled out a customs card since I had some jelly I wanted them to look at and approve, because they said no fruits or vegetables were allowed in the country. However, the man just took my card, looked at it, and waved me through despite having checked yes for having an item that should be checked. Oh well.

The Korean man I met on the train was really nice and he was waiting for me outside customs. He offered me a ride in a taxi to the train station if I wanted to go there. I didn't really know where I wanted to go, so I declined. He was nice to wait, though. He did ask someone where the nearest subway station was for me. He gave me his business card and said to call his mobile phone if I had any problems. He was really nice.

I decided to go to Busan at the end of my trip, since I had to go back via the port, too. So I headed for the bus station to Gyeongju, my first destination. The bus station was far out of town, and I had to ride the subway for about 20 stops to get there.

Busan is a difficult city to get around in, because it is stretched between mountains and coastline. There are only two subway lines, and they only intersect at one station, because there is no other way to build a subway there. It still makes getting around quite difficult, though.

Eventually I got off the subway to find that there was no bus station at the stop. My book was several years out of date, and apparently they tore down the bus station and put a shopping center there instead. Anyway, I checked out some nearby hotels to see if I could at least stay where I had gotten myself to. However, they all seemed to be closed, and I realized they were all probably love hotels, where you rent rooms by the hour. Oops. Luckily for me, I had stopped at the port tourist office and picked up some flyers from guesthouses for when I came back. So I took the subway another 30 stops to one of the guesthouses, and found a bed there for about 15 dollars.

The place was called the Guesthouse 4U, and it was quite new and nice. There were three other guests there, all of them Japanese. Their names were Kana, Juri, and Sekiguchi. They were really nice and adopted me for the evening. Two of them had been to Korea before and could speak a little Korean. They all spoke English well, so we alternated between Japanese and English. We went to a nearby kalbi restaurant, a kind of barbecue. You cook your own meat at a grill in the center of the table. These sorts of places exist in Japan all over the place, but the Korean style is sooooo much better. In Japan you pretty much get lots of meat and some rice. In Korea, they give you lots of side dishes, meat, soup, rice, and lettuce. You are supposed to wrap the cooked meat in the lettuce and add side dishes and sauces before wrapping it up and eating it. It is very delicious. We ate like kings, with more and more food being brought out. In the end, it cost me 10 dollars. I couldn't believe how cheap it was.

One thing I liked about Korean eating is that the food has much more flavor than in Japan. Japanese people don't like spicy foods, but Koreans love them. Whenever you order anything in Korea, they also always give you lots of side dishes included in the price. Kimchee is a requirement as a side. It is spicy, marinated cabbages, especially prepared over time. Koreans also use metal chopsticks and spoons for every meal, which is much nicer than using disposable wooden chopsticks all the time, like in Japan.

Once we got back from dinner, we met another three or four people who moved into the guesthouse while the four of us were out. They were all Japanese, which wasn't that surprising since it was Golden Week, the biggest travel time of the year for Japanese people. They were all independent travellers, which was surprising. Most Japanese people travel with big tours, but they were all travelling alone, so they were quite cool in my mind. They were surprised I could speak Japanese, and so I told them I was actually Japanese, but they didn't believe me. I was declared an honorary Japanese person, however. We were close to a beach, so we all walked the kilometer or so to the beach.

The beach was really fake-looking, with fake, light-filled green and yellow palm trees dotting the nearby road. There were also about a million neon lights (what is it about Koreans and Japanese and neon lights?) lighting up stores and restaurants near the beach. It was a bit too bright for my tastes. There were several touts selling fireworks and roses to people on the beach with annoying persistency. We walked down the beach for a bit and got some ice cream at Baskin Robbins before coming back. We talked a lot about travelling and experiences abroad. When we got back to the guesthouse, we took pictures and said our goodbyes.


Friday, April 30

The next morning a group of us went to the subway together and then split up. Most of them were going to the train station, but I went to the new bus station instead (over 30 stops again). I got to the bus station and bought a ticket for Gyeongju, about 2-3 hours away. I thought the bus was leaving later than it really was since I couldn't read the ticket well, and I almost missed it. The driver seemed to be waiting for me, because we left as soon as I got there. The bus was surprisingly comfortable, with nice seats that reclined really far. I think I was the only non-Korean on the bus. One thing which I noticed while on the bus was that Koreans drive on the right side of the road, like Americans. I was so used to the left side in Japan that I forgot that most countries drive on the right side. It gave me a bit of a shock on the roads.

Once we got to Gyeongju, I found a large, older hostel near the bus station, the Hanjin Hostel. It was in the guidebook as being popular, and it was. I was early enough that I got a room with a private bathroom quite easily. It was cheap, but not that clean or particularly great. I rented a bike for the rest of the day and biked all around the city. Gyeongju is very biker-friendly, so it was the best way to get around. I went a series of giant burial mounds in the middle of the town. Gyeongju was the capitol city of one of the three founding kingdoms of modern Korea, the Silla Kingdom, so they had all the king's burial mounds still. Most of the palaces and other buildings were destroyed in war though. Maps of the old city, from the 700s, show a large, well-planned city with square blocks and other modern planning features. Apparently the city used to have 900,000 people in ancient times, but now I doubt there are more than 100,000.

In the city's giant burial ground parks, there were about a million school groups of all ages out on field trips. The elementary kids were very cute, because they had matching colorful uniforms of yellow, blue, purple, etc. They all wanted to practice their English, and they were not as shy as Japanese kids. I had many conversations with elementary and junior high school students.

After the park, I went to the museum of archaeology. It was okay, but not that great, and it was packed with people. Then I went to a nearby ancient garden where a lady gave me a mini-tour in English. I also ran into two university students, one of whom could speak English, who wanted to take a picture with me. Then they told me some about Gyeongju. They were nice, but communication was a little difficult. I left them and went inside one of the burial mounds.

I noticed a lot of people running up and down some of the burial mounds. I was surprised it was permitted, but I did it too. It was a lot of fun. It made me think that Korean people are less bound by rules than Japanese people, but that is just an observation. I just couldn't imagine it happening in Japan.

That night I met some more people at the hostel, which became quite full. I went to dinner with one guy, Aurel, a Swiss. He was really nice and we went to a nearby noodle restaurant. We ate a huge bowl of noodles, and it cost about two dollars total. It was ridiculously cheap. After dinner, I just went to bed. The coolest thing about the hostel is that the floors were heated at nice, and it was a little chilly. This is common in Korean hotels and houses, because the winters can be quite severe. Even the old palaces had heated floors.


Saturday, May 1

Aurel had biked to a nearby mountain temple the day before, and he said the temple was great. But he recommended taking the bus since it was a long bike ride uphill the whole way. I caught the bus up there, and was pleased with the decision since I passed a dozen people pushing bikes up the steep hills on the way. The temple was pretty, and very colorful. Temples in Japan are normally only one or two colors, but temples in Korea are rainbows by comparison. After seeing Bulguksa Temple, I decided to hike up the rest of the mountain to a famous Buddha statue at the top. It was a good hike, and it took me over an hour. There were lots of chipmunks, and some cool squirrels with pointy ears.

Luckily, there was a stand selling ice cream and water at the top, so I got some there. It was a short hike from the top to the statue, which was large, but also behind security glass. It was nowhere near as large as the one in Nara, which is huge. At the statue, I ran in to a group of five guys that were staying at my hostel. They were Europeans doing a language/internship program in Japan. Their names were Matias, Marchon, Kati, Ken, and Doi-san, a Japanese friend. Matias was from Spain, so we talked some in Spanish. I hiked down the mountain by myself, but found them at the bottom waiting for the bus back to the city. So I decided to hang out with them some more for lunch. We wandered through a marketplace in Gyeongju and we found a small place to eat. We had bibimba, rice with tons of vegetables. It is really good, and they gave us tons of food. In the end, it was about three dollars, or something ridiculously cheap. I didn't even need dinner because of all the food I ate.

They were waffling about what to do next, so I split off from them to go relax in the park and read a book. I didn't see them again on my trip, which was the case with most of the people I met. I had a snack for dinner and went to bed early because I had an early bus the next day.


Sunday, May 2

I woke up and realized I was completely backward in my bed. In my sleep I had turned myself around in the bed, and moved all the pillows around, too. It was very strange and disorienting. I didn't have long to think though, because I had to catch a bus at 7. I got to the station, bought my ticket, and it left. The tourist office woman said there was a 7:20 bus, too, but there wasn't really. If I had missed it, I would've had to wait until 9. I was glad I made it again. The woman at the office also implied it might be quite crowded on the bus, but there were only four people. Myself, and three British girls. We quickly struck up conversation, and I found out they were part of a dance troupe that just finished touring Japan. They were going to dance in Seoul next, but they had a week long break, so they were travelling around. They were going to the same place I was, Osaek, a small hot springs resort next to Seorak National Park.

As the bus went along, we picked up more and more people, then we would drop some off at other towns. It was going really slowly, though. We stopped at every little town on the way, and our destination was in the northeast corner of Korea, so we had a long way to go. Eventually the bus driver told us to get off, though it wasn't our stop, and put us on a non-stop bus to some northernly destination. It was just the four of us again, plus the crazy bus driver. This guy was an insane driver. He apparently was a Formula One racer before he became a bus driver. We made up loads of time from our previous slow bus, because we never stopped, except occassionally at traffic lights (only sometimes). If there was a slow car in front of us, he passed them. No-passing zone, no problem. Passing on a blind curve, no problem. A car in the other lane, no problem. He passed no matter what or where. The bus seemed equipped with only one pedal. We actually ran two cars off the road because we passed a truck while the cars were headed for us.

Eventually we were transferred to yet another bus which took us to our destination, Gangreung. From there we bought another ticket to Yangyang, another hour or two. Then in Yangyang we had to transfer to a local bus to Osaek. It was a real pain. In Yangyang we looked for food, but didn't find much (though we later discovered there was a bakery right next to the station the whole time, and a convenience store across the street). Luckily, I had some sandwich materials which I shared and we bought some fruit and chips. It was enough. We were harassed by the crazy men and women who worked at the Yangyang bus station, who insisted we sit on the bus so we didn't miss it, despite the fact that the bus wasn't going to leave for another hour. It worked out in the end though. We convinced them it would be okay to get off the hot bus and just watch it. No one spoke any English either, so it was a bit tricky at times.

During the long commute from Gyeongju to Osaek, we talked a lot, and I got to know them. Rachel was half-American and she was raised in West Virginia, so we talked about America a decent amount. She spent the second half of her life in the U.K. after her parents divorced. She had been a dancer for about 10 years, I think. Carrie was also an experienced dancer, but she was short and small, and I think she looked a lot younger than she probably was. Hannah was the baby of the dancing group. She was about 19 or so, and she was the youngest member in the whole company. She said everyone took care of her, though. Their show was called Nutcracker! I wanted to see it, but it was only playing after I left Seoul.

Eventually, at 5pm or something we made it to Osaek. They had reservations at a fancy hotel, and I was going to camp at the campsite, so I said I would come check on them later at the hotel. I headed to the campsite, and there were cars parked in it. I didn't understand what was happening, so I asked a nearby ranger, who told me that the campsite was closed because it was far too cold to let anyone sleep outside. No amount of explaining that I had been carrying a billion wool sweaters and fleeces, and a zero degree sleeping bag with me, would convince him. In the end, I had to check into a nearby small hotel. Luckily, it was off peak and they were desperate. The place I stayed in Gyeongju with a private bath and almost no furniture was $25. At the new hotel, I paid $20, and got a really clean room, nice bed, satellite TV, and a private bath. Oh, and they did my laundry for me and let me use the internet for free. Pretty nice. Apparently there was coffee for breakfast, but I didn't want it. They spoke a little English, so we were able to communicate okay.

I put down my stuff and had a walk to the nearby mineral water springs. One was closed, I don't know if it got contaminated or what. I found the second one, but only when a Korean woman showed it to me. It was tiny. The water was tasty, but really heavy in minerals. I couldn't drink much of the water. Afterwards, I hiked to two nearby waterfalls, 12 Falls, and Dragon Falls, which were nice.

After my hike, I showered and met the girls the hotel. Five of us went out to dinner. Another dancer, Phillip, came too. There were some other dancers at the hotel besides the girls, because they told their plan to other people.

We went to a restaurant where we had amazing grilled fish and tons of side dishes. It was delicious. Eventually we finished and I watched some bad movie in English and went to bed.