Monday was a travel day. For breakfast we had a Korean fusion stew (picture 1) cooked by our wonderful hosts. It had bulgogi and mushrooms and the broath was earthy and slightly sweet (likely from the bulgogi marinade). Hearty for breakfast, but good. Also accompanying breakfast was some local Jeju fruit - grapes and tangerines. My wife says the proper way to eat these grapes is to suck out the insides (which remarkably come out completely intact and entirely separate from the skin) and then spit out the seeds. I, however, just ate the whole grape and spit out the seeds. I think the skin has a lot of flavor anyway. My wife thought the hosts would see my empty bowl with only seeds left and wonder where the grape skins went =]. As we checked out of this airbnb, the hosts wanted to take a picture with us and took a few of us with their house as well. They were super super nice and we told them if they came to Boston they should definitely let us know. I would highly recommend this place to anyone traveling to Jeju. I took a panorama of their house when you're inside the gate (picture 3) - our separate apartment-type thing was behind me (you can kind of see the door on the left side) and their house is on the right side. They have a fridge and table and stuff in the little glass room in the middle - that's where we had our breakfast on Monday morning.
After checking out we drove towards the airport, stopping at this one church that was built in the past few years (2009 maybe?) and is built to resemble Noah's ark (picture 4). Very interesting feel to the church, I liked how the water surrounds it - there's even a kind of infinity pool effect at the front so when you're sitting in the sanctuary you could see out like there's water all around.
We stopped at a gas station right near the rental place, but the attendant kept saying no, LPG, and crossing her fingers like an 'X' when we pulled up, so my wife had to ask for further explanation and apparently the Sonata we were driving around in runs on liquid propane (which explains the gas tank that you can access from the trunk) so we had to find a special gas station that had this "LPG" stuff. Fortunately there was one only a few blocks away, so we filled up and took the rental car back. After we returned the rental car I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders =]. Although it was nice to be able to go where we wanted and not have to worry about how we were going to take our luggage on a bus, the stress of driving and worrying about someone else hitting the car and the hassle of dealing with insurance, etc, etc if that happened outweighed the pro's, so I was glad to be done with that. Although the international driver's license is valid for a whole year, so I guess I should travel to another country where we would need a car within the next year to get maximum value =].
We ate lunch at the airport at a Lotteria (picture 5), which seems kind of like a Burger King except Korean (although I don't know what the actual Burger Kings around here serve, so maybe that's a bad comparison - but it's definitely fast food). We got three burgers to try and some cheese sticks (picture 6, cheese sticks not shown). The bulgogi burger (with beef from Korea), while sounding like a really good idea, was the worst one in my opinion. My wife didn't seem to mind it. The pattie of bulgogi just seemed too sweet - I guess I like my burgers more on the savory side. The Lotz burger looked like a normal Big Mac except with only one pattie and too much lettuce. It had beef from Australia apparently (side note: my wife and I were discussing the fact just today that where ingredients for products come from is very important to people here - maybe more on that later). That burger tasted the closest to home and was pretty decent, except it was lukewarm. I'd imagine that it'd be pretty good if it were hot. The wild shrimp burger (picture 7) had actual whole little shrimp in the pattie and was the best of the three (it was also hot).
We then got on a domestic flight and flew to Busan (picture 8), which is a port city on the south-eastern edge of Korea. After checking in to our hotel we walked to the nearby beach and enjoyed walking in the surf for a while (picture 9).
We then went to the world's largest department store (picture 10), the Shinsegae in Busan. We marveled at the large number of floors housing a full spa, ice skating rink, restaurants, a grocery store, not to mention all the luxury goods and brands. At the ice skating rink there were a few young girls who looked like they were training with coaches in the center of the rink while a child in the outer area of the rink attempted to walk/skate around with an ingenious invention - it looked like an elderly person's walker except no wheels and the bottom was connected in an upside down U shape, like the top. This allows the person to have something that slides and stabilizes them while they try to skate. I wonder why we don't have anything like that in the States?
We thought the department store closed at 9 but apparently on Mondays they close at 8, so when we went to get food everything was closing or already closed, so we quickly bought some stuff that was being sold at a discount and ate dinner (picture 11 - ddukbokki and pan seared buns) and dessert (picture 12 - peach and melon bars, made from real fruit).
Picture 13 - also present in the basement of the department store was a Johnny Rockets! Who knew that brand had made it across the ocean?! And it looked like people even went there!
No comments:
Post a Comment