A Trip to Rural Korea!

On Thursday it was National Independence Day in Korea, which is one of two national holidays celebrating Korea's resistance against Japan. So luckily we had both Thursday and Friday as holiday! We decided to go and explore a large national park called Jirisan which is about 2.5 hours away on the train. The park is connected to a small village called Ssanggyesa which is not much more than a small roundabout of restaurants and little hotels called Minbaks. This was the first time where we really felt like we were in a completely foreign place and we were going to have to depend on our limited korean speaking and reading skills and A LOT of miming! Our first port of call was to find somewhere to sleep for the night. It had been advised to us in Lonely Planet that there were various small minbaks in the town. The first one we came across looked like something from a murder horror film so we moved swiftly on. We found a small restaurant advertising rooms in the back of the restaurant so we wandered in using our best Korean.... "Minbak??", and we were shown to a small but clean room which seemed perfect for one night. The room was very Korean in that there wasn't actually a bed! In Korean houses the heating is in the floor so that's the warmest place! Therefore, lots of Koreans simply put mats and duvets on the floor instead of having a bed! It was a new experience for us but it was actually quite comfortable!

It's custom in Korea to remove your shoes when you enter a house or restaurant and wear slippers when you're inside. So when we entered the minbak we took off our walking boots but didn't have any slippers so we wandered around in our socks which the Korean family found very funny! One of the Korean ladies went and got us some slippers which fitted Nina fine, but did not accomodate Ed's size 11 feet. So Ed was made to shuffle around like a Geisha in these tiny little slippers! After finding our place to stay we walked up to Ssanggyesa temple which we both agreed was the most beautiful temple we've visited so far. The weather was warm and the sun was just going down so the whole place had a really calm atmosphere. Here are some photos of the temple:

After the temple, we decided to visit the Korean Green Tea culture centre! The main museum was closed because it was a holiday but two smiley Korean ladies were in the gift shop so we thought we'd pop in. They prepared some tea for us and we ended up sitting with them for about 45 minutes having a sort of conversation about the weather, Korea, England and University with us not speaking Korean and them not speaking English!
For dinner, we thought we would try the restaurant in front of our minbak. We had a slight problem in that we weren't gonna be able to read the menu very well, and even if we could we probably weren't going to know what the dish was! We made a plan....... in the back of the Lonely Planet guide were 'dinner phrases' so we were going to point to the sentence saying 'Can you recommend something to eat?' therefore we could avoid just randomly pointing at something in the menu! However, the plan backfired when the woman didn't have her glasses so couldn't read our Lonely Planet translation! Luckily, we spotted Bibimbap on the menu which is a traditional rice dish so we managed to order without looking completely useless!

The following morning we got up early so that we could set off on a hike with lots of time to spare. Unfortunately, unlike the nice warm weather of the day before, it was pouring with rain! We put on our cags in bags and started our route. Our goal was to reach a waterfall called Buril Pokpo. The route was good fun, being completely deserted and in a large forest. It was kinda fun to pretend like we were in Lost. We were absolutely soaked in the rain, Ed commented that Nina's hair looked like corn rows.

After about an hour and halfs walk we reached the waterfall. To both our suprise the waterfall was partially frozen! It looked more like an icy rock and we concluded that waterfalls are a lot better when there is water, and it's falling.

On the way back we came across a camp area with park benches so we had a short tea break of biscuits to keep our energies up. Nina's wet corn row hair was starting to make her cold and she noticed that there was a plug socket in the camp so she plugged in her hair dryer and gave her hair a quick blast!

Once we were back in Ssanggyesa we bought bus tickets from a fish restaurant on the side of the road and hopped on the first bus of four back to Jinyeong!!!

Little Updates....

Well we've been here for just over 3 months now and we still haven't shown you any photos of where we work! So we took our camera into school before class today and took a few snaps of the classrooms and staff room.  It's a hagwon which is a private english school academy with 4 classrooms and an IT room. It's only been open for about 1 year and a half so it's smart and new! Here are some pictures:

Last weekend we decided to venture in to Busan. We had heard that Busan had the largest department store in the world so we decided to take a look!! It was 14 floors high and included a spa, cinema, permanent ice rink and hundreds of different shops. We were amused to watch both adults and children fill the ice in their pink and yellow helmets while we ate lunch. We also stumbled across a foreign food shop which had some things we hadn't seen for months! However, even the most basic English supply like Yorkshire Gold teabags was being sold as a luxury item for almost £10. We had a longful look at the mature cheddar and all the tea and moved on. After a long look around the department store, we wandered down the road to Busan's most popular beach: Haeundae. Although it gets over 1 million visitors in summer, the cold January weather meant that it was largely dominated by hungry seagulls. The naive people who chose to feed them were hounded by packs of them. One defiant man had managed to somehow catch one and he stood on the beach showing it off to onlookers. Here are some pics:

One more thing, the other day we bought a hell of a lot of baked goods from our local supermarket, it being our traditional cake sunday and all. Because we bought so many, we were given a special bag to carry them home in and it made us chuckle:

Making Gangjeong and Trip to Gyeongju!

Making Gangjeong

A couple of weeks ago, our co worker Iris invited us to a monthly korean culture event that she helps to organise. It's held in a temple just outside Busan and is a free event for foreigners to come a learn a bit more about Korea! This months event was making Gangjeong, in preparation for Lunar New Year. It's a small rice sweet which reminded us a little of a crunchy rice krispie cake. We got to chat to lots of different people, expats and Koreans which was really nice. We had a great chat with a Korean school principle who gave us solid advice on how to have a long and prosperous life. His advice consisted of only three things; 1) Don't live in high rise apartments (for fear of earthquakes) 2) Don't live near the sea (for fear of earthquakes causing tsunamis) 3) Don't be shocked when earthquakes or any other natural disaster occur (for fear of spurring on a heart attack). We thanked him for his advice, smiling and nodding as he spoke. At the end we were given a box of our Korean sweets to take home which were gobbled up within the following week. Here are some piccies;

 Iris, our co-worker, making Gangjeong.

 Nina receiving wisdom.

Gyeongju!

Being Lunar New Year, we had a 5 day holiday starting the 21st January which we were very happy about. We took advantage of the time off to take a trip to Gyeongju, about an hour and a half north of Busan. Gyeongju was the capital city of the Shilla dynasty that lasted almost a thousand years up until its collapse in the late 10th century, so there were a lot of historical tourist sites for us to visit. On saturday, we took a couple of trains and arrived in Gyeongju around 1pm. Thankfully, we had done a bit more research into our hostel and it turned out to be much better than the dodgy one in Seoul. We dropped off our bags and headed out to find some bikes to rent as we had heard that this was the best way to see Gyeongju. On the way, we stumbled across a pet store selling puppies and Nina was introduced to what she thought was her soulmate, a sausage dog whom she named Sir Cliff after another of her soulmates Cliff Richard. It was love at first sight and she didn't stop making whiny dog noises for about 30 minutes. Here he is (against Nina's wishes, we didn't buy him):

 

Shortly after this brief love affair, we found a bike rental shop. The owner spoke not a word of English and Ed had a very brief miming conversation with him trying to figure out what time he wanted the bikes returned. Very luckily, a Korean couple popped their heads around the door and the wife spoke very good english and was able to act as a translator for us. Once they'd gone, Ed and the shop owner tried to organise payment. The owner requested a passport but Ed didn't really wanna give him his passport for fear that he may never see it again. Ed offered him his provisional drivers license which he looked at, and rejected, so Ed as a last ditch attempt offered the man his out of date student ID card. This was recieved with a smile as he noted down the student number and happily prepared the bikes for us.

We set off on our bikes safe in the knowledge that if anything were to happen, the Leeds Univeristy Union would be on our case. We biked for around 4 hours stopping at all the major tourist sites around the city. Gyeongju is famous for its mound tombs which are more or less the Korean version of the Egyption pyramids. Kings and royals were buried with eloborate jewels and finery and we visited a fantastic museum which showed a lot of amazing artefacts recovered from the tombs, some of which were 1500 years old! Here are some pictures from our bike trip around Gyeongju:

For dinner we found a unique little restaurant which was a Japanese and Korean fusion. Worn out and hungry from our bike ride we ordered an absolute feast!

 

Day 2 we took a bus to visit Bulguksa Temple which is UNESCO world heritage site.  Wikipedia does not lie when it says it's " a masterpiece of the golden age of Buddhist art in the Silla kingdom." It was a huge temple complex that is popular with foreigners and koreans alike. Unfortunately a lot of the temple was destroyed by Japanese invasions, however it has been redeveloped and rebuilt in the exact likeness of how it used to be. It was extremely grand and you could imagine Korean royalty walking around the grounds. Once we had looked around the temple complex, we thought we'd take a nice stroll up to the Seokguram grotto, another world heritage site. We were assured that this was a leisurely walk but it turned out to be a pretty hefty hour long hike up a mountain. It was completely worth it at the top as the grotto housed an ancient statue of buddha built in 742! We weren't allowed to take photos inside the grotto so we have copied a photo from the internet for you to see. Here are the pics:

(Taken from internet.)

On Monday it was Lunar New Year's Day, and the city of Gyeongju was spookily quiet and absolutely nothing was open. We searched for somewhere to have some breakfast but the only place which provided us with some refuge from the very cold weather was a pair of golden arches. McDonald's didn't seem to be affected by the Korean festivities so we begrudgingly went inside ordering some chips and a Bulgogi burger- more for interest rather than hunger. We decided to visit a folk village just outside of Gyeongju. The site had old authentic Korean houses made with thatched roofs and was still inhabited by some Korean families. Although the weather was absolutely freezing we wondered around and took some pictures before heading back to the station to go home. Here are a few snaps from the village ;

HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR!

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