Just another weekend of beautiful beaches, good times with awesome friends and new places to explore!

Well, it's Monday morning again, and yet again I have a fun weekend behind me! 

Hmm...where do I start? On Friday night I met up with a few people (Dawni, Michelle, Hayley, Peter and Mark) and we headed into Masan for some food and I got to try a new dish...bibim mandu...bunch of raw veggies (carrots, cucumber, some sort of sprouts, sprouts, seaweed) that you wrap in hot dumplings:

It was delicious, but apparently I was eating it all wrong, because the waitress came up to me two or three times to correct my technique...I think she just kept making it worse, but everyone got a good laugh out of it when the poor girl finally came up with a set of salad tongs to make my life easier.

Then we went to a cool little pub where you bought your drink from what looked like a cold beer and wine store back home then you took it to your table and drank it with friends...wicked atmosphere and the 6 of us got along really well...drinks were cheap too, I had my usual...Chilsing Cider (which is a non-alcoholic drink like 7-Up or Sprite back home)...they also had some wicked decorations...a Heineken bottle in a glass bottle with electricity buzzing through it:

On Saturday, Mark and I headed into Tongyeong, a beautiful coastal city about an hour or so away. I don't have all my pictures edited/hosted yet, so I'll just post a few and keep posting them as I edit them through the week...(also, keep checking the Flickr in case I upload stuff I don't post on here).

First we went to a beautiful beach/walkway and hung around there for an hour or so:

The weather was perfect and it was so calm and peaceful there...played around with the 50 1.8 a little too (and made poor Mark wait about 10 minutes by the time I got this shot haha...was waiting for the perfect wave to come along)...again, pretty impressed with the little 50...this was taken at f2.2

I really liked this building (it's a resort), and I liked the angle of this picture, but the colours just sucked no matter what I did in post-processing. So, I decided to go overboard and give it a 1970s greeting card kind of look...what do you think?

Then we went into town and walked along the water there and Mark took me to a neat little street where the sidewalk snakes in between buildings and the backs of buildings are covered in murals, many of them by famous Korean artists. (I have some pics of those too, but I haven't gotten around to getting them up yet). Then we headed to a popular spot to watch the sunset, which was pretty spectacular...I have a ton of sunset pics, I'll post some more later, but here are some...you're supposed to watch it from the top of a hill, but we took an abandoned (and closed, but hey...we can't read Korean warnings! ;)) trail and went right down to the sea...anyways...panorama from the trail (the little white dot is the moon haha):

And one of the sunset from the top:

After that, we came back home and made plans for Sunday.

Sunday, a bunch of us (Mark, Hayley, Peter, and Steven) headed to Geoje a coastal city directly to the south of us. Geoje is definitely one of my absolute favourite places in Korea so far! As soon as we got into town we hit up a little foreigner cafe and had breakfast...I had a pannini with loads of mozarella, mushrooms and tomatoes...it was the best food I've had in a while haha. I have missed huge amounts of molten cheese!

There were tons of foreigners everywhere. Geoje has a huge ship-building industry and that draws a lot of Europeans. 

Then we headed to the World Mart to check out what they had, and I bought their last can of Canada Dry! Mmmm...real Canada Dry. And then the highlight of the weekend: we hit up a gorgeous beach!

I was a little excited about the Canada Dry:

Group photo (thanks Hayley!) of us at the beach...from left to right: Mark, Dajong (sp?) the dog, Peter, me, Steven:

Panorama of the beach...probably my favourite photo of the weekend: 

Another one from the beach:

After the beach, we went back to Geoje and hit up the World Mart where I spent way too much money (about $85) mostly on ready-to-eat Indian food...it's all vegetarian and it'll add some healthy variety to my meals, so it should be nice. I also found some sunflower seeds and cassava chips which is pretty exciting :D Oh...and cheap cheese! Cheese here costs a fortune...as in 5-10 slices of mozarella will run you about $5-6. I found a big 2-pound brick of mozarella for about $10...really looking forward to that! Same with olives...a little jar is $5-6, I found a 2-pound jar for $5...definitely going to go back to that store. 

After that, we took the new bridge back to Busan (it's rumoured to be one of the longest in Asia) and the sights were stunning...beautiful place and tons of little villages and hamlets on tiny little bays all along the coast...I definitely want to go back there and maybe spend a weekend at a little motel in a quiet little fishing village. All in all, an excellent weekend with some wicked friends. I'm really happy I found this group, they're a ton of fun, have a great (or at least slightly twisted) sense of humour and they're all interested in exploring, so we get along smashingly well.

Hope everyone else has had a great weekend...talk to you guys soon!

T