Sunday, September 4, 2011

Summer Vacation Pt 2: Day 2-3 Yeosu 여수


Sunday-Monday


We got up (completely not) early in our little hotel in Jeonju and took a taxi to the train station.  We were thinking about spending a little more time there in the old village because we really didn't see as much as we wanted to, but we decided to go ahead and get to the next place, which, thankfully, we could get to by train (the only way to travel.)



The taxi gave us our last little tour of the city (including the hidden and expansive hotel district) and we went in to buy our tickets.

We were still just a little sleepy on the train ride to Yeosu.  I think it took about an hour or so to get there, more or less, but we napped on and off in the sunshine.  Yeosu is connected to the rest of the peninsula of Korea by a little strip of land, but is otherwise an island (not really, but it feels like it) and it has a lot of little islands off of it's coast.  We weren't completely sure what we wanted to do here, but Albert and Anriette had a basic plan.

We got off of the train and immediately started looking lost (the best way to get around) found a map or two after a while and realized instantly that we needed some food, and fast.

There were four basic stages of existence for us while we were on vacation:  very hungry, very tired, very hot, or waiting for a bus/taxi/train/etc.  All of these life stages were, of course, very happy stages, but also with the other things factored in.  This particular stage was very hungry, so we walked over the bus stop to grab some sort of bus.

I'm not really sure why we chose this approach, more than once, to get around.  I'm sure we will use it again, because, more often than not, we have good luck, but this was not really one of those times.  We had this innate sense that we should be going in the opposite direction of where the bus chose to go and very soon (after passing precious little interesting or usable things in town) the bus pulled into it's end-of-the-line depot and we were just farther down the mountain than we intended to be.  So, we started walking back up to where we came from and decided that maybe a taxi would be a better plan.

Yeosu is where they are planning on having the 2012 World Expo, so there were plenty of promotional signs and everything for that (I wonder if we'll still be there then. . .?)  They are working on completely transforming the city and it looks like it's really going to be something by the time it gets started.

We finally found a cab and asked him to take us to the police station because that was near something that we wanted to see and we thought maybe there would be some restaurants there.  Of course he was a little puzzled by this and eventually we just showed him the map and he took us to the actual site we wanted to see.

We got out of the cab (it was a mission to find one, let me tell you!) at the site of the biggest one story wooden building in Korea, looked at it for a second and then realized that if we didn't eat something really soon we were going to eat each other, or perhaps the cab driver, so we decided to come back after feeding.

We found a place that looked a lot like the old downtown part of Ulsan which was very encouraging because the old downtown in Ulsan has basically nothing but stationary stores, clothing shops and restaurants.  We walked and walked and walked and walked and found not a one, not a single one!  We were really starting to look rather delicious to each other and each of us were trying to figure out the pros and cons of choosing who to devour when around the corner, completely hidden away, but still shining like an angel of fried goodness stood a Lotteria (which is kind of like McDonald's.)  So we rushed inside, ordered some food, and ate it with gusto.

After eating we started looking around for some Tylenol.  There are two serious problems about having a headache in Korea.  The first one is that, back home you can buy about a million extra strength Tylenol (or excedrine, or aspirin, or ibuprofen, or blah blah blah) for a couple of bucks from anywhere that sells anything at all.  In Korea, you must ask for it at a pharmacy, it's still a couple of bucks but you can only get Tylenol and you can only get ten.  The second problem is that back home, like I said, you can get it from anywhere that sells anything at any time.  In Korea, pharmacies are not open on the weekend (at least, they weren't for a long time) and are CERTAINLY never open on Sundays.  But we had headaches and we had them bad.  And would you believe it, we found a pharmacy and it really looked like it was open, so we ran across the street to see and it was!  So we each bought a box for the road had a little celebration.

We went back to the biggest wooden one-story building in Korea and looked around for a while.  It was pretty cool.  It had a beautiful view of the ocean.

But there's more pictures of that in the slideshow :-)  We tried to find a way to get to the bridge that you see in the background, because there were some other things over there that we wanted to see.  There was randomly a LOT of traffic on the bridge, so cabs didn't want to go there, but we found one to take us pretty close and then we just got out and walked across the bridge.  It was a little gloomy outside, but that was alright because it kept us from getting too, too hot, and we were, remember, carrying everything in the world with us at the time.

While we were on the bridge, Anriette and I looked down into the water while Albert was taking pictures.  We saw a little fishing boat coming our way getting ready to go under the bridge.  He was a long way down but we could see a man hanging out of the door, so I waved to him just for fun, not thinking he would see me.  But he did and he waved back, so we laughed and waved some more.  Then he put both arms over his head and touched the top of his head to make a heart with his arms, a pretty common gesture over here, but funny every time, so we laughed a lot and then went on our way.

On the other end of the bridge they had a harbor, and in the harbor they had a lot of little tour and mini cruise ships.  Among these boats were a couple of replica old turtle war ships that were pretty cool, so instead of just waiting for some bus to show up and take us somewhere, we ran down to explore the boats a  little more closely.

Turned out, this was one you could actually tour, so we paid our dollar and we got on the boat.  It was set up with a bunch of creepy mannequins.  The top deck was set up like they were in the middle of battle.  In the bottom deck they were in the process of eating, sleeping, playing games, making food, and dying (randomly enough.)  We were there for a while and eventually got a little too creeped out and went back to the fresh air.

There was a little island nearby that Albert wanted to go to that had a lovely little beach for camping.  We eventually made it there after walking around a lot, getting on and off of different buses, and finally got to the little island with the little beach and it was really lovely.  :-)

There were tents set up all over so we decided that it would be a good night for camping-we were carrying around the tent and poles and everything. We picked a spot, bought a couple of mats to put on the roots and rocks and everything, and set up our tent.  It was a neat place, it had a really cool vibe, people camping and singing and cooking and playing soccer, shooting off fireworks etc.  The strangest thing happened, we got hungry AGAIN!  There were a couple of restaurants in this little part of the island, and we went to all of them but all of them either didn't really sell food as much as they sold the materials for you to make it yourself, or they were out of everything except what would make our hair catch on fire.  We walked around for a while, wondering how fantastic it was to be able to walk around and feel completely safe, even though we were so out of our element.  On the other side of a rather huge tent village there was a little diner in the middle of a field (reminded me of something you would see in like a 1920's town in a town a highway bi-passed, one of those "Last Chance" diners. . .so obviously, I was very curious about it.)  We had tried everywhere else so we settled on this place finally, chose something off of the menu and sat on the plastic lawn furniture outside and waited to see what we were going to get.

Here's a video!


It was fried chicken.  Awesome  :-)

We went down to the water for a little bit, then walked around some more and finally went to bed.  The ground was really, really bad, and Albert and I didn't sleep the whole night.  Anriette is a wonder, man, she can sleep like a little kid after a field day no matter where she is.  So, Albert and I are getting cranky and then, suddenly, it starts to rain.  So, we grab our shoes and everything and put them inside the already pretty cramped tent, and got even more cranky.  Then it started to leak and flood.  So, we got up and ran off to the bathroom.  It was around 5am, so it was time to get ready to leave anyway, right?  We changed clothes, packed up all of our now wet stuff and went off to the one bus stop on the whole mountain.

And we sat there.  And sat there.  And sat there.  It was raining and we were a little cranky and we waited and waited.

Maybe 45 minutes later or something there was still no bus but miraculously a taxi showed up!  So, we literally jumped in front of it, threw all our stuff it, and headed back off to the main land to find a motel or somewhere to let all of our stuff dry.

I made my friends ask the cab driver to take us to Lotte Mart before falling asleep in the back seat because I'm really stupid sometimes and on this particular occasion I had forgotten to take all of the movies off of my camera memory card so after about 20 or so pictures my first day it was full.  On my camera  I can't access the movies to delete them, so I needed a new memory card.  I looked everywhere for one, but I knew that they would have one at LotteMart and we had seen one the day before so we headed there.  LotteMart is like Walmart, except for one very important difference: it's not 24 hours.  It opens at 10 or something obscene like that, and it was still VERY early.  So, we got out of the cab into the pouring rain (with no umbrellas, because we are really smart like that) and marched down the sidewalk in search of a.) a hotel b.) a convenience store or c.) something to eat.

We walked up the street from LotteMart, our already wet stuff getting even wetter, and after a little while found the massive hotel district of this part of the island.  Awesome.  So, we sloshed into the lobby of the first hotel to try to find a room.
Last time I talked about the first kind of common hotel/motel where it belongs to someone who basically just lives there behind the counter and you just wake them up in order to get or give your key.  There's another kind of very common hotel, we learned that morning, the hotel that is literally abandoned in the morning/early afternoon, where you just leave your key in the window and there isn't a soul ANYWHERE to be found, no matter how many times you ring the bell.  I don't know exactly how many hotels we went to before we found some signs of life but I know it was at least five or six.  We also stopped at a convenience store to get some umbrellas and snacks.  Finally we found one, and they thought we were really crazy asking for a hotel at 8am but they didn't know the night that we had.  It was a nice room, too, VIP room, very clean, big, and dry and even had a computer with internet access.  So, we took showers, laid out or hung up all of our wet stuff and fell asleep for a few hours.

It was still raining when we woke up but I still dragged my friends back to Lotte Mart (which was within rainy walking distance) to get a memory card and some lunch.  Lotte Mart always has a big food court, so we knew we could find something that would appeal to us.  So, off we went.
LotteMart always, also, has a pharmacy (always, except for this one and poor Anriette was coming down with a cold) and as we looked everywhere for it we found something a little random:

Just a random bird sitting outside of a little shop inside of LotteMart. ..
We found a memory card, we found hats and little bags, and everything that we needed, so it was time to eat.  And eat we did.

Chinese food, Korean style.
So, reloaded up with supplies, we went back to the hotel to figure out what to do (thanks to Mr. Complimentary Internet!) and had high hopes for the rest of the rainy Monday.

Here's a video:


Even with all of our high hopes, and all of the interesting things to see there is Yeosu, we had a REALLY difficult time getting motivated thanks to the rain and the lack of sleep, and of course the movie channel and extra blankets.  We watched a popular Korean comedy/variety show for a while trying to figure out what we should do and ended up trying to figure out what we should do until it was time to go find some dinner.  It's amazing how many times in a day one can get hungry!

Anriette living it up in Yeosu.

It was still raining, but it was dark now.  We set out through the hotel district to find something that looked rather familiar.  One important fact to know about Yeosu is that there were no foreigners there, probably there hadn't been any foreigners there for years and years, because the looks that we got whenever we stepped foot anywhere wasn't just the normal "hey, look at those strange looking people!" they were more like "what in the name of all that is sacred are those things?"  which, to be honest, gets to you after a little while.  We walked around for a while looking for a sam geb sal place (slices of pork that you grill yourself) and we found a friendly looking one, we just had no idea how friendly they would be. . .

When we walked in they immediately gave us towels to dry off with and seated us, apologizing for not being able to speak English.  We ordered some food.

It was a husband and wife team that owned the restaurant and they were both as cute as could be.  They brought us a lot of free stuff and, even though we ordered it, he was positive that we didn't know how to cook or eat it so he did everything for us including putting it into our mouths.  :-)  Very cute couple.

After we finished eating they invited us to come back a couple of hours later to stay at their house for the night.  We told them we already had a hotel but they still invited us.  We decided to think about it and ended up going to a nori bang instead.

Funny story about the nori bang.  Of course, they had no idea that we go to one of these like every twenty minutes, but the first one we went into we asked them (in Korean) for a room to sing in and she just flat out said "no."  There wasn't a person in the place but she did not feel like having three crazy foreigners in her singing rooms, apparently.  Very unexpected.  So, we walked up the street a little more and found another one.  We walked in and asked again.  She looked at us like we actually had tentacles coming out of our ears and neon pink skin.  She asked us if we wanted a room, so we said yes, and she stared at us as if any minute we might explode.  She led us to a room and gave us an introduction to the ins and outs of the singing room, we told her we knew how to do it, but it was sweet of her to help us out.  She still stood by the door for a while until she heard the singing start then came in later to give us some water and check to make sure we knew how to do everything.

Fun.

Here's a video that showcases two very important things: Albert's singing ability and Anriette's creative mockery.  Oh, also that we spend too much time in places like this.  :-)

She made up an interpretive dance for the entire song.  Fantastic.  My friends are so wonderfully strange.

After staying in the singing room for a couple of hours we went back to the hotel to get some sleep hoping that we could get a semi-early start on the next day in Namhae.


Okay, and I am going to cheat a little bit and start on the 4th day because it just makes sense to do that, or something.  The next morning we got up and we got a taxi to take us to the ferry terminal.  We were all so geekishly excited to take a ferry (especially since it meant we didn't have to take a bus!) and we got to the terminal, bought our tickets, and walked around that part of town for a while until our ferry was scheduled to leave.

Still, remember, there are no foreigners there, nor have there been for a while.  This is the place that is going to have the 2012 World Expo, apparently, so they are going to get their fill of foreigners soon enough, but as it was then, we were more than an oddity.  If we sat down or stood in one place long enough we would draw a crowd.  Sometimes people would try to talk to us, but mostly they would just stand in front of us and stare. . .like we couldn't see them or something. . .Anyway, whenever anyone tried to talk to us it was mostly old men and they talked mostly to Anriette and I asking things like "How old are you?" or "Are you married" to which we came up with various responses with Albert and I being married and Anriette was our daughter, and then vice versa, and then we would just leave the area.  It was pretty around there, as we walked, and it was finally not raining!

Anriette and I taking a picture.

Albert taking a picture of Anriette and I taking a picture.

Picture of Albert after taking a picture of us taking a picture. :-)
Then we got on the ferry, chose our seats, and got ready for our journey across the sea.  And here's Anriette to tell you all about it.


We landed safely in Namhae after about 30 or 40 minutes, but that's a story for another day.  In the meantime, here's the slide show with all the silly pictures of our adventures in Yeosu:



Yeosu:  Hot Summer by f(x) and Sorry Sorry by Super Junior (best song ever ^^)




THANK YOU FOR READING!!!  :-)