FrugalMoon

Vacationland

Considering that it's been a week since our last post, it looks like we may have over promised a bit when we said we would be posting more from the road.  That said, the last week or so has been quite busy.

Our first stop after Gyeongju was Tongyeung, on the southeast coast.  A relatively small city of 100,000+ residents, Tongyeung is a port city.  The city's narrow streets are teeming with stalls selling all types of fish and sea creatures, including these beauties (not really sure what they are, but even Benny wasn't so sure that he would be willing to try these).

 

 
We happened to be in Tongyeung during a festival commemorating Korea's defeat of the Japanese navy by Admiral Yi Sun-sin and his forces in 1592.  For a relatively small city, this seemed to be one of the biggest events of the year, complete with fireworks, traditional Korean dance, parades, and a recreation of the battle in the city's harbor.  The day before the festivities we visited a shrine on an outlying island, built to commemorate Yi's victory.  Also on the itinerary was a spectacular cable car ride with not-so-spectacular views from the mountain destination (it was cloudy virtually our entire time in Tongyeung), and octopus -- lots, and lots of tasty octopus.

After Tongyeung we flew to the island of Jeju, Korea's largest island which is simultaneously described by the guidebooks as a hybrid of Hawaii and Disneyland.  Regardless of what descriptor is used, Jeju is definitely Korea's vacationland, full of honeymooners and families, as well as lots of tourists from China and Japan.  The Hawaii part, we suppose, comes from the numerous beaches and the island's volcanic origins.  The Disneyland part comes from the fact that the island is scattered with all sorts of kitschy tourist attractions, which we generally avoided.

The highlights from Jeju were our visits to the two large volcanic craters of Seongsan and Sangumburi, as well as the lava tubes at Manjanggul (the entire volcanic system on the island is extinct).  The system of lava tubes is very large, extending for several kilometers underground.  The one section that we were able to visit was approximately 1 km long.  Our first night in Jeju were spent on a beach not far from our guesthouse, where we watched locals launching fireworks into the night sky over crystal blue waters.  It was quite spectacular.

Because Jeju is quite large we rented a car, which was an ideal way to see the island, and allowed us pull over when we saw something especially beautiful.  Unfortunately, as throughout most of our trip in Korea, Jeju was cloudy for most of our time there, so we did not get to spend as much time at the beach as we would have liked.  That said, Jeju was much cooler than other parts of Korea (Seoul and Gyeongju in particular).

After Jeju, we spent two days in Busan, Korea's second largest city, from where we're writing this post.  With all our sightseeing in Jeju, we took our time in Busan to relax, simply strolling the city's streets, catching a movie/finding air conditioning ("Rise of the Planet of the Apes" gets 2 1/2 stars), and enjoying delicious street food, including the treat pictures below, which was some sort of pan fried rice treat full of seeds, nuts, and brown sugar, costing all of about $0.80.

Tomorrow our trip ends....sort of.  Technically, tomorrow our trip begins to end with a flight from Busan to Tokyo, where we'll have a 20 hour layover before catching our connecting flight to New York.  For those of you who have read our blog in the past, you know that we have a bit of a thing for Tokyo, so although our time there is short, we are going to make the most of it, stuffing our faces with ramen and visiting a shrine or two before heading to the airport to catch our connecting flight.  We've played around with the idea of doing a "20 Hours in Tokyo" series of posting, but we'll see how that goes.

Now you see it, now you don't

We've spent the last couple of days in Tongyeung, on Korea's southeast coast. It's definitely the most pleasant city that we have visited thus far, and it is within quick ferry access to several dozen small islands, one of which we visited yesterday. We also took a cable car to the top of a mountain where we had a spectacular view of the city (that is, at least when the fog cleared up for a few minutes). But more on Tongyeung and some pictures once we have access to a computer.

The specialty here is octopus -- in particular, spicy cold octopus served with a side of radish, and seaweed rolls filled with rice, all eaten with a toothpick. For $8 for 2 people, not a bad deal. Still, after eating octopus four times over the last two days, we are ready for something different. In a few hours, off to Jeju, Korea's largest island.

Now you see it....now you don't.

Let's go shopping

For the last few days we have been eating nothing but Korean food. Now, not that there's anything wrong with that, but we both though that we could use some home cooking. Benny, geekily toting his iPad around the local supermarket, took some pictures of what we found.

In our travels, we often like wandering through local supermarket aisles, even when we're not planning on buying anything, as it provides another different, and unique, perspective on the local culture. What you'll find below are pictures of the ubiquitous (and enormous) daikon radish; kimchi; some sort of multicolored sausages (as Anthony Bourdain likes to remind us, every culture has its own variation of meat in tube form); frozen octopus; and, from what we can gather, dinosaur bones.

Tomorrow, we take a morning bus to Tongyeung, a coastal town that is supposed to be quite nice.

A morning in Gyeongju

We are trying to do this from Benny's iPad, so apologies in advance if the formatting or spelling is off.

After a few days in Seoul, which, to be honest, we both found a bit overwhelming, we took a high speed train to Gyeongju, a smaller city in the southeast corner of South Korea that has one of the largest clusters of historical sites in the country. Overall, though it is still quite hot and muggy, the weather is much more pleasant. Our first evening here we visited a park filled with large hill mounds which are tombs from the Silla period. These mounds can be found all around the city's parks, which makes for an interesting landscape. Yesterday we spent the day touring a Buddhist temple sight from around 750AD, which was quite spectacular (we will post pics soon). Then we visited a small contemporary art museum that had some interesting and funny art by young Korean artists. Today we will visit some more of the ancient sites around town.

Although we haven't added any pictures to our albums, here are some from our guesthouse, Sa Rang Chae (www.kjstay.com). The buildings are clustered around a small courtyard, and are over 100 years old. The rooms are simple, with sleeping mats instead of western-style mattresses.

Why not South Korea?

Good morning from Seoul!  We arrived here a couple of days ago, but getting over the jet lag has been a bit of an uphill battle, as has the humidity, which is unlike either of us has ever experienced.

More than a few people, both back home and here, have asked us why we decided to come to South Korea, as opposed to other, supposedly more popular destinations for American travelers such as Thailand or China.  American tourists are not a common sight in these parts, and our sense is that we'll see fewer and fewer Americans the further we get from Seoul.

For those of you that have read our blog before, you'll know that one thing that gets us excited -- really excited -- is good food, and we both love Korean food.  So yeah, that was a major factor in our decision.  Using our interest in Korean food as a springboard for our research, we found that not only is there a lot to see in Korea, but the price is right: our lunch yesterday came out to less than $6 between the two of us for rice sticks (a chewy, thick noodle) in spicy sauce, tempura-style fried seafood, and fish cake soup.  Delicious.

The first thing that has struck us about this city is its sheer size.  It rivals Tokyo in terms of its magnitude (although it feels much more spread out).  The subway system is like that of London, and the trains themselves appear to us to be at least twice as long as New York's (which, in turn, have always seemed to us to be be much longer than back in Boston).  Second, as alluded to earlier, it is hot and humid, so any sightseeing involves numerous stops for iced coffee and air conditioning.

Instead of a few longer blog posts, we're going to try and put up more shorter entries.  In the meantime, here are some photos from our first couple of days (our apologies if some of the pictures are sideways -- we're having a bit of trouble on this Korean computer).