For our Chuseok holiday (1 week break), we traveled around the Southern coast of mainland South Korea – our first visit to the mainland!
There’s no way I can share all the details. Our week was packed full of activities. We stayed one night in each place we visited, and had a whirlwind tour of historical Korea in museums, temples, a traditional folk village, and hiking in natural places.
We traveled slowly: we took a ferry away from and back to our island. On the way to the mainland we ferried from Jeju to Wando, on the far south-west tip of the mainland, on a 90-minute journey. On the mainland, we took busses between each city and bus/subway within the towns we stayed in. And we walked a lot. Two of the bigger cities (Daegu and Busan) had subway systems that we got good at navigating. In one week, I think we’re pretty much Korean public transit pros!
We traveled with minimal planning. We had an old Lonely Planet guidebook with suggestions of some places to stay, and sites worth seeing, and had a rough idea of what city we wanted to sleep in each night. We only booked one night ahead: our temple stay (more stories soon!). The rest of the week, we just winged it, arranging a bed for the night when we got into each town.
A quick picture of our fridge. We used dry-erase markers to map out the cities and bus routes, helping us figure out a general plan of when we’d go where.
Our adventures started almost immediately. When we landed in Wando, we planned to bus right away to our first stop, but found out that as of 2:30pm, there were no more buses until 9am the next day. So we decided to just skip the National Maritime Museum (which was supposed to have lots of neat items salvaged in shipwrecks from the 13-1600s. Our schedule was full enough, it was good we didn’t try to get another city in.
We stayed mostly in “love motels”. These used to be what you’d expect, and most still have rental options for 1-2 hours. But the ones with recommendations have been thoroughly cleaned up and offered an inexpensive night in a real bed (not just mats on the floor common in house-like accommodations) with clean en suite bathrooms, fridge, tv, A/C, filtered water, and a few snacks like cookies, coffee, tea and juices. Not bad! A few had some “suggestive” decorations, mood lighting, and welcome baggies too.
The one photo Patrick took of our accommodations: a Wii included in one of our motels. You can also see the fridge and a few of the breakfasty foods we brought with us – almond and peanut butter and some rice cakes (which we basically use like toast).
One of my favorite parts was the food. We ate so well. The food here is all so fresh – usually just some meat and vegetables with some combo of salt, sugar and hot chili paste/powder. Combine these into a soup, on top of rice, bbq-ed or stir-fried on the table in front of you, rolled in seaweed, or double-deep fried. That’s about it to the cuisine. Simple and delicious, so we haven’t found anything we don’t like. Of course, we don’t always know what we’re eating. Once we played charades to ask our waitress what the people next to us were eating and just ordered one of each of their entrees. Turned out to be fried rice with an egg and ketchup on one plate, and a big bowl of beef and veggie soup with plenty of side dishes. Delish. The back-up plan is to find a place with photos in the windows, which is pretty common, and just point. 🙂
This is really common – most Korean restaurants post pictures in their windows to give people a hint of what they serve. This one was particularly handy, because it included some Korean titles AND English with each picture!
This post is a lot of words and not many photos. Why?
Well, on the last day of our journey, I lost my camera. We’ve tried calling everywhere we went that day, but no one turned it in. I had most of the personal photos and video of our food, accommodations, and us. Sad! But Patrick is working on uploading a gallery of his photos from the big camera, so watch for those soon. In the meantime, I’ll write up a few of our favorite more specific stories and get those posted soon!
Thanks for reading. Miss you all, especially my friends who are struggling with flood recovery in the Boulder area. Our hearts are with you!