Jeju-do: part one

The last weekend in September/first weekend in October was Chuseok.  Chuseok is the harvest holiday, and one of the two biggest holidays in Korea, along with Lunar New Year.  We had Monday-Wednesday off, so we went to Jeju-do.  Jeju-do is an island off the south coast of Korea.  Jeju-do was formed when a volcano erupted about two million years ago.  We had to book our tickets six months ago, because Korea is a small country with a large population, and Chuseok is a big holiday.

We flew out Saturday night, and stayed at a hotel in Jeju city the first night.  The hotel was surprisingly nice, for only $45.  Very clean, a computer with internet in our room, big screen TV, bathrobes, a water cooler.  Then the next morning we needed to get to the rental car place, which is at the airport.  We asked the guy to call us a taxi, and he offered to drive us himself.  He gave us some seongpyeon to eat while we waited for some other guests who were coming in the car as well.  Seongpyeon is a traditional Korean dessert.  Here's the Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songpyeon  That explains well what it is.  The texture is really chewy, like...half-cooked bread dough.  And they fill it with this sweet bean paste, which Koreans love to hide in things that look delicious from the outside.  Kids love seongpyeon, it's the one thing they talk about when I ask about Chuseok, and we made it in kindergarten a couple weeks ago.  I understand that different cultures have different tastes and food preferences, but I don't buy that those kids wouldn't drop seongpyeon for a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie, if given the chance.  Anyway, where was I....

So we got a ride to the car rental place, and picked up our car.  The plan was to drive around the island, camp Sunday and Monday night, then head back to Jeju city, and fly out Wednesday morning.  The whole trip went incredibly smoothly.  We were expecting traveling during Chuseok to be chaotic, but it wasn't a problem.  And there were a lot of tourists on Jeju, but it wasn't overwhelming.  The coast of Jeju is really beautiful.  Big rocky cliffs and crashing waves.

Temple on a mountain overlooking the ocean

View from the temple

Yongmeori coast walk.  These women gather seafood and sell it, raw, right there. 

The first day we did a walk along Yongmeori coast.  It was really beautiful, and the rock formations were interesting.  Because the whole island was created by a volcano, the rocks there are really cool.  Koreans tend to be pretty safety-obsessed.  When we go hiking, if there is a tiny stream, with water no deeper than your knees, swimming is forbidden and they have a life ring there in case someone falls in.  Most hikes enforce cut-off times for when you can start, and some will screen your footwear to make sure it's appropriate.  We get frustrated sometimes because we think we should be able to make our own safety choices.  But the Yongmeori coast walk, where they actually probably should have had some precautions in place, had nothing.  There were waves crashing on the rocks, and no life rings, no chains to hold onto.  It was very odd.  

Then we saw a beautiful waterfall. 

Then we saw these crazy hexagonal rocks.  This kind of lava just forms like that when it cools and hardens.  Like rock candy.  There's a more scientific explanation, but I don't really care enough to learn it.   

There are palm trees on Jeju-do!  It really is a beautiful tropical island. 

And one more waterfall before we head to camp:

That night at camp we made friends with a family of a dad and four sons who were camped next to us.  People always try to make friends with us.  Koreans are very friendly (once you get out of the city) and I think are curious about foreigners, because there aren't very many foreigners in Korea.  Also, I think that they are much more likely to approach a couple than a group of people, or a single-sex pair.  I think they feel more comfortable talking to us.  This time, it was funny because first the dad came over with his youngest son, and the two of them barely spoke English at all.  The dad managed to be very charming, though.  Then after a few minutes he called the other sons over, and they came bearing snacks and the ability to speak English.  We had a fire going, so we gave the boys sticks to poke the fire with, and talked to them for a while.  

This post is longer than I was expecting and I only got through one day.  I'll do the rest of the trip in another post. 

My birthday

Sunday, September 23rd was my birthday.  We decided to celebrate on Saturday.  Brady and I went to a Korean Folk Village near us.  We had been meaning to go for a while, but the summer was so hot we didn't want to stand around outside all day.  It was a beautiful fall day when we went.  The village is created to mimic what life was like for Koreans hundreds of years ago.  

They have performances throughout the day, so we saw a traditional farmer's dance, and a very old man on a tightrope.  Both performances were very impressive, and exceeded our expectations. 

After the folk village we went to Songtan.  Songtan is the town the U.S. military base is located in.  There are a lot of restaurants with international food there, and more interesting bars than we're used to.  We went to a bar that had a porch outside and drank martinis.  I like martinis, but haven't had one since we've been in Korea.  We started talking to the people at the table next to us.  They are from South Africa, and working here as English teachers as well.  The two guys told us that their first language is a click language.  I think that's what they spoke at home, but they must have learned English very early on as well.  That was the first time I've met someone who speaks a click language, as far as I know.  

After martinis we tried to go to a Thai restaurant we had heard about, but it was out of business, so we got burritos.  The next day our co-worker, Pamela, was having a birthday brunch, because her birthday is a week before mine.  So we went to that, and there were a lot of people there.  It was nice.  And that's the story of my birthday.  

Rafting and Deokjeok-do

August 15th was Korean independence day, and we had no school, so Brady and I, along with our friends Enda, Una, and Tara went rafting.  We went back to the place Brady and I had gone at the end of July.  We drove up Tuesday night and camped near the rafting place.  It was raining pretty steadily, but Brady and I have a tarp so we set up a shelter where people could hang out without getting wet.  On Wednesday we headed to the rafting place around noon.  It only takes two hours to get down the river, so we started in the early afternoon.  It was the same route that we did last time, but much, much rainier.  It was pretty warm out, but I still got a little cold after a while.  I couldn't believe how heavily it was raining.  When we were done they let us take hot showers, then we got some lunch and headed home.

Last weekend we went to an island called Deokjeok-do.  "Do" means island in Korean, so if it's at the end of the name of a place you know it's an island.  Deokjeokdo is about 50km off the west coast.  We had to leave early Saturday morning to catch the 8:30am ferry.  We went with Brady's college friend Stefan, who lives in Seoul, and his co-worker Tyler.  The island is fairly big, but not many people live there and it's not very built-up.  We were able to camp right near the beach, in some trees, and there didn't seem to be anyone else camping around.  When we arrived it was starting to get windy and rainy, and the sky looked ominous.  Again, we had the tarp so we set up a shelter and had lunch under it.

  Then the weather got a bit clearer and we went for a hike.

The hike took a couple hours, and was nice.  There was a big group of Koreans at the top having a picnic.  They have elaborate picnics.  They'll bring stoves, even just on a day trip, and cook a bunch of food, drink some makgeolli, really go all out.  And they always want to share.  That's one of my favorite parts about Korea, is how people always want to share their food and drink and snacks with you.  These people gave us each a shot of this stuff they called wine, but it tasted more like brandy, and ddeok.  Ddeok is...it's hard to explain.  It's a dessert, and it's sort of chewy pasta stuff made of rice, filled with something sweet or nuts.  I think it's gross, but I nibbled on it to be polite.



After the hike the weather was really nice, so we hung out on the beach for a few hours....

And watched this guy ride his bike into the ocean...

Then we made dinner on the beach. 

Today, August 28th, school was canceled because there's a typhoon coming through.  I asked several people if school in Korea ever gets canceled, and they said never.  It was supposed to be the worst in Suwon around 3-4, but it's 4:40 right now and it's been really mild.  I'm disappointed because I like big storms, but I'm really happy we got a surprise day off from school. 

Seoraksan

The last weekend in July was our summer vacation, which meant two days off work, for a four-day weekend.  We went to Inje to go rafting on Saturday, in the Naerincheon River.  Rafting in Korea is pretty mild compared to what we've done in the past (mostly what Brady's done, really.)  It's illegal to go rafting if the difficulty level gets too high, so we were in about 2+ rapids.  It was still really fun, it's just nice to be out on the river.  They gave us an English-speaking guide, and it turns out he's worked as a rafting guide in Idaho, and is going to college in Colorado.  He just finished up his first year there.  He's big into white water kayaking, so he and Brady were able to talk about all the rivers and rapids they both know in Colorado.

That night, after rafting, we stayed in Inje, then left the next morning to go hiking in Seoraksan National Park.  It had been very hot, so I was a little bit worried about that, but we were in the shade almost the whole time.  There's a shuttle bus from the entrance of the park to a Buddhist temple about 7.5km in, but we decided to walk it instead of taking the bus. There's always a temple in these parks.  Temples in Korea are always in the most beautiful locations.  I know that there are temple stays available, where tourists can go and live like a monk for a couple days.  I've heard that it's not very fun.  You wake up super-early and meditate for hours and hours.  I think you have to go through a lot of boredom and impatience before you can find that peaceful and rewarding.  So we walked to the temple, filled our water bottles, built a rock pile, then continued up the mountain.  

The trail was really beautiful, and most of the way was along a little stream.  There were emerald pools of water every so often.  It was hot, and after seeing some Koreans go swimming we stopped to swim too.  Koreans swim fully clothed, so we did too.

Towards the end of the day we were mildly regretting not taking the shuttle bus at the beginning of the day, because in all we did around 20km, and the end was quite steep.  We had made a reservation for a hut right by the summit.  The day we made the reservation, two weeks in advance, we were on the website the minute it became available, and it's good, because the spaces sold out in under two minutes.  In a country of 50 million people, 120 beds in a shelter on a Sunday night sell out fast.  The hut was about a 20 minute walk to the summit, so our plan was to wake up early, go to the summit, and make coffee and watch the sun rise.  It would have been so nice and peaceful.

There were a lot of people on the trail, but no other foreigners.  Foreigners are rare, but I think this was the first time we didn't see any at all, besides us.  There was a father and daughter hiking together, and we kept seeing them, and passing them.  The daughter was probably 19 or 20.  She was so excited to see us, she'd smile and wave every time.  Finally, the next day, we stopped for a break at the same place as them, and she asked us where we were from.  We told her, then she said "let's take a picture!"  So her father took a picture of us with this girl.  Maybe she wanted proof that she'd met real Americans.

The night we stayed at the shelter, the wind was incredible.  It was howling so loud it woke me up a few times, and shaking the building.  There were a bunch of people who had hiked up there without reservations, hoping for a bed to open up, but when it didn't they had to sleep outside on these platforms.  They were rolled up in plastic wrap to shield from the rain, but they couldn't have gotten much sleep, if any.

The next morning we wanted to go to the summit to watch the sun rise, but the wind was still blowing harder than any wind I've ever experienced, and we were completely fogged in.  We snapped a few pictures at the summit, then headed down.  It was much steeper on the way down, and only 5 kilometers.  That night we stayed in Osaek, which is a town with a lot of hot springs.  Our hotel advertised itself as a hot springs hotel, which we thought meant there would be a sauna there.  It just meant that the water from the faucets was supposedly heated by hot springs, but it came out weak and tepid.  But we went to a hotel nearby that had a sauna and spent a couple hours there.  It was a nice town, and I think it really picks up in the peak tourist season.  There were a lot of restaurants and shops along a little stream that runs through the town, so we had dinner at one of them, then headed home the next day.

DMZ

Brady and I went to the DMZ on Saturday. The DMZ is the De-Militarized Zone, an area between North Korea and South Korea.  "De-militarized" is an ironic name for it, because it's the most heavily fortified border in the world.  I'm going to give a little Korean history now, because it makes the DMZ easier to understand:

Even the DMZ is a little cartoony. 

Military checkpoint on the bus.

• Up until 1910, Korea (the entire Korean peninsula) was run by the series of dynasties, the most recent of which was the Joseon Dynasty. 
• In 1910 Japan invaded and occupied Korea for the next 35 years.  During this time, no one was allowed to speak Korean, all Koreans were issued Japanese birth certificates with Japanese names, and the history books were re-written to get rid of any trace of Korean history. 
• When Japan lost WWII in 1945, they left Korea.  The Soviet Union and the United States agreed to split Korea, with the Soviets having control of the north and the U.S. controlling the south. 
• In 1950, the North invaded the South, in an effort to unify the countries.  It was a proxy war, with the Soviet Union propping up the North and the U.S. propping up the South.
• In 1953 a ceasefire was signed, although the war has never officially ended.  The ceasefire established the 38th parallel as the line between the two countries, and the DMZ was created.  
• After the end of the Korean War the Soviet Union continued to support North Korea, and things were okay for them until the Soviet Union fell in the 80s.  Since then things have become much worse for North Koreans.  Starvation is a huge problem, and they have no contact with the outside world at all.

So, for the tour that we went on we went to a few different locations along the border. We saw two tunnels that the South Koreans have discovered, out of four that they found in the 70s.  The North Koreans dug all these tunnels headed towards Seoul, with the goal of sneaking into South Korea and invading from here.  The North Koreans seem to have a desire to reunify the countries, but they would want the entire peninsula to be communist, and under the rule of Kim Jong-un.  But it's hard to tell what they really want. South Koreans, too, want to reunify, but that would put an enormous financial strain on their economy.  

This is the Bridge to Freedom, where POWs were released.  The ribbons are messages to family that is stuck on the other side of the border.  

Between the 1980s and 2000 there were some movements toward negotiation, reunification, and peace.  There were family meetings, where families that were divided between North and South Korea after the war could meet each other.  We saw some pictures of brothers who were seeing each other for the first time in fifty years.  It was pretty powerful.  Madeline Albright went to North Korea to have discussions, and there was a train built from South Korea to very close to North Korea.  They wanted to build a train line that would go through North Korea and hook up with the Trans Siberian railroad, so it would be possible to get from South Korea to Europe by train.  However, after George Bush came into office in 2000 and gave his Axis of Evil speech, we stopped speaking with North Korea, and there was no more progress made.  One of the stops on the tour was this abandoned train station.  You can get to there from other points in South Korea, but it doesn't go any further north, so now it serves as a tourist destination and a really nice bathroom. 

One of the more interesting parts of the day was meeting a North Korean defector.  He spent about 30 minutes answering our questions.  He was a military doctor in North Korea, and they sent him to Germany in 2010 (I'm not sure why.)  He was supposed to come back, but on his way home his train stopped in Moscow and he got out, found the United Nations office, and asked for amnesty.  He had planned it in advance, but didn't tell his family, so he left his wife and kids there.  We asked him what the hardest part about leaving was, and he said that now, in South Korea, he doesn't know anyone, doesn't have any family or feel like part of a community.  Plus he can't practice medicine, because they don't recognize the training and experience he got in North Korea.  In North Korea they are extremely isolated from the rest of the world.  There's no internet, so media from other countries at all.  They are told that their country is the best, most technologically-advanced country in the world.  He said that in school they learn normal things, but also spend a long time learning about Kim Jong Il, Kim Il Sun, and the other leaders of the country.  

We asked what the average North Koreans thinks/feels about the regime, and he said that about two-thirds used to support the regime, but now things are changing, and about two-thirds is against the regime.  Since things were relatively good for them up until the Soviet Union fell, and that was less than 25 years ago, people know that things have changed.  Even if they don't know exactly what's going on, they can be unsatisfied with the government that their standard of living has gone down so dramatically.

We asked how his reception in South Korea, by normal South Koreans, has been.  He said that they tend to think that he's lazy, because he lived in a communist country and so he didn't have to work as hard.  I've heard a lot of examples of South Koreans having negative attitudes about all foreigners.  I wish he had been more accepted in South Korea.  

Mudfest

Last weekend we went to the Boryeong Mud Festival.  Brady and I went with his friends Stefan and Nathan, both of whom he knows from West Virginia, and a couple of their friends.  The Mud Festival takes place at a beach that has mud that, supposedly, has healing properties.  Even when there's not a mudfest, there's a bath house there that uses the mud.  What it seems to turn into, however, is Daytona Spring Break '97.  A bunch of foreigners getting really drunk and making bad decisions (not us, we were pretty low-key.)  I tried to look up the official history of the Mud Festival, and this is what the website says: "Established the Foundation Act is an attempt to achieve viable and that some programs, such as payable holroseogi Boryeong Mud Festival was successful evaluation accepted."  So, there you go.  

There were a lot of events, like mud wrestling and mud sliding, but it was really crowded where those events were happening, so we just slathered ourselves in mud and hung out on the beach.  It started getting rainy and a little cold in the afternoon, so we went back to the hotel and cleaned up, and mostly hung out there for the evening.


One of the disappointing parts of the weekend was the behavior of some of our fellow Americans.  Brady and I live near the Osan Air Force base, so sometimes we see people from the base out.  The first ones we saw were on the train there, drinking heavily at 11am.  I don't care if people are drinking, but they became increasingly loud and obnoxious.  When we got off the train, they immediately took their shirts off and lit up cigarettes.  A Korean man told them, in perfect English "this is a no smoking area," and they responded "smoking area?  This is a smoking area?  You want a cigarette?"  Then started actually chanting "Team America."  And on the way back, we were standing on a crowded train platform and someone started setting off fireworks.  I couldn't tell who it was, but I would guess it was the Americans.  Most of the people I've met from the military base are very nice and respectful, but some of them must have missed whatever cultural sensitivity training the military provides, and it gives us all a bad name, and is really, really disappointing.  They could do so much good here, and put forth such a good impression of our country, but it just takes a couple of douchebags to ruin things.  Arrgh.  

Hakampo

Two weekends ago Brady and I went to Hakampo, which is a beach on the western side of Korea.  It was Brady's first weekend off after working three Saturdays in a row, so we wanted to do something fun outside.  We had heard that Anmyeondo is a nice island, so we called the tourist hotline to ask which beaches near there allowed camping.  They mentioned a few beaches, and Hakampo was the easiest to get to.  We took a bus there (we take buses everywhere, unless one of our friends with a car is going.)  It only took about 3 1/2 hours to get there.  You never know, with Korean beaches, how many people are going to be there.  In a country of 50 million people, things get crowded.  But there were hardly any people there.  When we first arrived it was low tide, and the water was really really far out.  And there are several small islands.  One of which you can walk to at low tide, but the bridge disappeared when the tide came in.  

We found a camp spot in the shade and put our stuff down, then went exploring around the beach.  There were a lot of people there digging for clams and mussels.  There were no other foreigners there, which makes me think that it's more of a locals beach, which is nice.  I don't know why, exactly, there were so few people there.  I guess others beaches, like Daejeon and Muuido are considered "the" beach to go to, and people don't branch out much.  Anyway, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves, so we lay down and promptly fell asleep and got sunburned.  We had sunscreen on, but the sun was much stronger than we were expecting.  When we woke up the tide was coming in, and another couple's stuff was about to be washed out to sea, so we pulled it up the beach.  They were off walking, I think.  The tide was coming in aggressively, and they were nowhere to be found, so we had to save their stuff again.  When they got back another Korean guy told them what had happened, and we were rewarded with two beers and a package of imitation crab meat.  Because that's the kind of thing they bring to snack on at the beach.

Later that evening we played cribbage, then cooked dinner on the beach.  We bought a small stove and pot here so we can cook when we camp.  We just made Ramen, and watched the sun set.  That evening we walked around the town.  It's a small town.  There were mostly hotels and vacation rentals, and a lot of families.  I liked it because Korea/Koreans can be very ostentatious, and this place was pretty mellow.  There were families setting off fireworks and flying lanterns by the beach.

The next day we hung out at the beach for a while.  It was misty in the morning, and some of the islands were obscured, which looked really pretty.  Then we packed up and headed to the bus stop.  There's no bus schedule, and buses aren't very frequent, but we found a picnic table in the shade near the bus stop and played cards there till the bus came.  It was a very relaxing, nice weekend, and we'll probably go back to Hakampo again.