Waiting for a miracle in Jindo and good times with great friends and guns in Gwangju

Ahhhh....Monday morning. Monday mornings mean two things. One: I have the worst work day of the week ahead of me (6 classes) and two: I'm probably going to be telling everyone about how great of a weekend I just had.

On Friday night I hung out with Alice (the newbie from Toronto) and we bummed around the downtown core of Changwon, showed her all the usual sights...Yongji Lake, Sangnamdong, the Big Circle, etc (I have some pics I have to get off the camera, will post those later).

Then on Saturday morning bright and early I met up with Dawni and Michelle in Masan and headed to Gwangju. We took an express bus, which is a little more expensive (still not bad...3 hour bus ride for 18,000 won, or around $16), but it's way quicker (takes a little under 3 hours) than the normal buses and very, very comfortable (it's a tour bus that only has three seats per row and the seats are more like Lazyboys than anything you'd see on a bus).

Once in Gwangju, we met up with Kiran and Renee and took another bus to Jindo, our destination. The Gwangju bus terminal is probably the biggest bus terminal I've seen in Korea (has nearly 40 departure gates) and it has more shops, restaurants, etc than most airports I've been to (and I've been to my fair share). One massive store had everything from a Hello Kitty toaster to ridiculously cheap books in English. Despite my promise to myself that I would not buy books while I'm in Korea, just can't help myself. On Friday I picked up my childhood favourite, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe for about $5.50 and on Saturday I couldn't resist shelling out $3 for George Orwell's Animal Farm. (Interestingly enough, Animal Farm and The Little Prince are the two books I've seen in EVERY Korean book store). Not far behind are Obama books. Man, oh man, do they love their Obama books. What's also funny is that English books (even stuff like Penguin Classics) are much cheaper here than they are at home. I think I'm just going to start trading the books I don't like and I'll take home the ones I do like when I go home to visit.

Anyhoo...buying Animal Farm had the added bonus of being the perfect prop for the first picture of the trip:

Soon after, we boarded the bus to Jindo (another 2-3 hours) and headed off to the fabled Miracle Sea Parting of Jindo. (Even the road leading to the beach is called Miracle Sea Road or something). What's supposed to happen a few times a year (I've heard everything from once or twice a year to monthly) is that there is an extremely low tide which exposes a sandbar of sorts that connects Jindo Island to a smaller island about 3 km away, allowing people to be knee-deep in mud and walk to the other island, take pictures, and head back to Jindo. According to a tour company that caters to foreigners in Korea, Saturday was supposed to be one such day, and they loaded up 2 tour buses full of expectant foreigners and headed off. We found out about the tour and decided to do our own thing, but check out the parting as well.

There was only one problem. We got to the place where the sea is supposed to part, at the time the "miracle" was to take place and saw this:

Unless you were Jesus, walking to the island off in the distance was not going to happen. So, we decided to make the most of it and wander around the island. Even though it was grey and overcast out, the weather was pretty nice, low-20s with a light breeze, so at least we weren't sweating...we found a nice beach and nothing else, really. (Again, sorry, the pictures aren't the best...I just took the little G9 and everything was flat and grey...)

While the walk was nice, Jindo wasn't exactly a beehive of excitement. The most exciting thing was this: some dude collecting seaweed, I presume for his restaurant...

 It took us 15 minutes to track down a place where we could buy a pop and some crackers. So, after about 3.2 seconds of thinking it through (after waiting for the sea to part for hours), we decided to catch the bus back to Gwangju.

I won't bore you with the details of the bus trip back to Gwangju, but suffice it to say I'm sure most high schoolers act more mature on field trips than what I, Dawni and Michelle brought to the table that night. I'm not sure if it was the fact that we're all immature (okay, so those two are actually mature unless they're hanging around me), or we were just trying to make up for the lackluster Jindo experience, but we spent about half the bus trip being in tears and fighting for breath laughing our heads off. Also, Michelle made was making faces at me. She started it. I swear.

Once in Gwangju, we went in search of food and shelter. In true Korean fashion, both were great and cheap. I had bibimbap for 4,000 won ($3.50) and it filled me up. Dawni ordered sweet and sour pork and got a plate that was packed about 6 feet high and was 9 feet in diameter. It was ridiculous. Everyone was starving and she was sharing it and still they only got through half of it. That was 4,500 won. Gotta love Korea.

Then we found a really nice motel and got a couple of rooms...40,000 won a night. Dawni, Michelle and I shared a room for a whopping 13k won each (or about $11) and it was a great place! Again...gotta love Korea.

After a good night's sleep, I woke up first and decided to wander around Gwangju for a couple of hours. Gwangju is...well...interesting. It's not a bad city. It's certainly not an ugly city. I don't have anything against it...it just doesn't have a lot going FOR it either. It's very spread out and we couldn't really find a true interesting downtown, and it seems to be the same thing repeating ad nauseam. The people were nice, traffic was a little better than around my area and they had a MASSIVE Kia factory there, which was neat (well, really all you can see is miles and miles of walls surrounding it like it's a top secret fortress or something), but really, there wasn't much to see. They do have a soccer World Cup stadium there, which I was trying to find, but after hours of wandering and following the signs I still had who knows how much longer to go so I gave up. This failure may mean that my EU citizenship will be revoked.

After everyone else was up, Kiran and Renee went off to the museums and my two special ladies and I hit the town. After walking around for an hour and finding nothing more exciting than a Michelin Man, we decided to start riding random buses hoping to bump into the more exciting parts of the city.

The cool thing is that our bus passes from home worked in Gwangju. In fact, I'm pretty sure our bus passes work everywhere except Seoul or something. This makes things pretty convenient and a little cheaper (using your bus pass gives you a bit of a discount on the fare). We rode one bus, got off in a place that looked interesting and were badly disappointed. Got on another bus. Rode that, got off in a neighbourhood that looked interesting and...were rewarded with a few neat things for a change. A little lake in the middle of the suburbs with a boardwalk around it...this was probably my favourite place in the city:

I love seeing nature left alone in the middle of the city (there were fish, frogs, birds, and all sorts of plants living happily here):

Just up the road from the lake...probably my favourite picture of the day...this is pretty typical of Korea...if it's got a motor it's good to go on the road (ATVs, scooters, tractors, you name it, they'll throw it on the road around here)...you see old farmers with these rickety tractors EVERYWHERE...also, note the sign above pointing to nothing. We decided that Gwangju's motto should be "The City of Perpetual Nothing". The sign seems to agree.

While in that neighbourhood, we popped into a few small shops and bought some silly things. Including my first ever toy gun. My parents are going to be very disappointed haha. I can see them shaking their heads right now. They are very pleasant, peace-loving people and as such, they never bought us any sort of weapons as toys. I think that's an excellent way to bring up a couple of boys, and I'm very happy about it. However, I am a guy, a guy who likes machines...whether it's an airplane or a camera, I think machines are cool. So, guns are kind of neat. Certainly NOT to hurt others (although on the bus ride back I was tempted...more on that later), but I've always wanted one to play around with guns...so I bought a little Airsoft gun for 8,000 won ($7) with a few hundred little plastic pellets. I played around with it last night and it's surprisingly fun shooting pop cans off the top of my TV! Today at work I'm going to print out some targets and hang them off my clothes drying rack for some fun tonight...yeah, I'm a gigantic geek.

After that, we boarded another bus and randomly got off where we saw a big crowd of people...turns out they were just getting ready to go to a baseball game...the highlight of that stop was some guy screaming his face off at one of the street vendors. Not sure what the argument was about, but it looked like he was losing it over nothing. Then another bus and back to the terminal where we got on our last bus (another one filled with huge recliners).

About 5-10 minutes into the trip, some dude in front of us got mad at us and told us to stop talking. It was ridiculous. We were speaking at a very respectful level. Just having a normal conversation. But, whatever...we decided to be nice and started speaking so quietly that even though the 3 of us sat right next to each other in the very last row, we couldn't hear EACH OTHER half the time. Then, about an hour later, some b!tch turned around and told us to be quiet all angrily. This (as well as the first one) was pure racism. I've read of a lot of other foreigners experiencing it, apparently some of the locals simply don't like hearing people talk in English. Or they just don't like white people talking, because from where she was sitting I don't think we would have been heard as much more than a low murmur. Other Koreans can scream on their cellphones on buses, play loud games on their phones, etc and that's fine. But not us. Honestly, we were talking at about 3 dB above whispering, trying to be quiet and respectful. Also, it was about 5:30 p.m. on a bus, which, to me, seems like an OK time for a couple of people to talk. No one says anything when two people have a screaming fight for 40 minutes in the middle of the city at 3 a.m., but if a couple of foreigners have a very, very civil and quiet conversation, they're up in arms about it. Not knowing how to say "go beep yourself you racist beep" in Korean, I let her know with the international hand gesture that she was out of line. This seemed to put her pea-sized mind at ease and she left us alone for the rest of the trip. Bit of a downer at the time, but we shrugged it off and had a great rest of the trip.

The bus was trying to avoid a traffic jam on the main highway and went on some back roads and we saw some of the most gorgeous scenery I've ever seen in Korea. Kilometres upon kilometres of mountain switchback roads with the occasional farm here and there, and lush, green forests everywhere. It was perfect. After that, we went back to Masan and got some Potato Tornadoes (I'll get a pic of it for you guys later...it's awesome, this guy cuts fresh potatoes into spirals, puts them on a skewer, deep fries them for a minute or two and rolls them in cheese...the whole thing costs about 90 cents and it's soooo delicious). Dawni also accidentally invited the guy to come vacation with us, which he was extremely excited about. Buying potatoes from him from now on is going to be an awkward affair, I think.

We finished the night by sipping some good iced tea and iced coffee on the upstairs patio of the Angel In Us coffee place in Masan and relaxing watching the traffic....not too bad of a weekend at all. The view from Angel In Us:

I hope everyone's had a great weekend and a Happy Father's Day over and above all to my amazing Dad (or Apu in Hungarian) and to all my friends who managed to somehow con a girl into bearing a child or five for them!! :)

T