Geoje Island

Geoje Island is the second largest island in Korea. It's second to Jeju Island and is on the south-eastern shore of Korea. It's about a 3.5 hour drive from Gwangju to our destination in Geoje.

On our drive to Geoje Island, we stopped in Tongyeong. We went on the largest cable car ride in Korea. It was a 10 minute cable ride up the mountain. Then we hiked around for about an hour. It was a lot of fun seeing some of the Korean signs and just watching the Korean people. It's funny how we're the same but those little quirks amuse you so much. ;-) The place that we hiked around was called Hallyeo National Marine Park. It was beautiful and I highly recommend it. You can see many islands including one of Japan's islands. So, litterally, they can see Japan from their backyards!

Then we entered the city and drove past the famous turtle ship replica in Tongyeong Port. It's a beautiful ship and is in the traditional asian ship style. Across the port is Dongpirang Village. It's an area of the town that a bunch of art students painted. The walls, houses, signs, and some of the sidewalks are all painted with different pictures as you hike up to the top of the hill. It was a lot of fun. Everyone was having fun taking pictures with the pictures on the wall. It was all beautiful artwork and it can't help but lift your spirit. I feel that, living in that neighborhood would make you constantly happy. When you reach the top  you're greeted by a beautiful view of the harbor and a fresh sea breeze. We also were lucky, because across the harbor there was a concert going on so it gave an extra festive feel to it. Being the crazy foreigners that we are, we decided to start dancing in the street. We were up on the peak and a buch of passerbys decided to stop and watch the crazy dancing foreigners. It felt like I was putting on a performance. As, dusk approached we decided to head out to our pension and eat dinner because we were all starving at this point.

We stayed in a beautiful, expensive pension. It had two bedrooms with the softest beds, which is very rare for Korea. Korea has the hardest beds I've even slept on! It's equivalent to sleeping on the floor! So, we were very happy with the beds. It also had a kitchen, big flatscreen TV, couch and a private balcony with it's own grill. It was absolutly beautiful.

We busted out the chips and salsa to eat while we grilled our samgyupsal and cooked our rice. We decided to start a squat club. This is because all the ajummas, older women, squat on the side of the street selling their home grown produce. Erin, just recently got engaged to a Korean man and will be staying in Korea. I hope to follow her example. So, we decided that we need to have a squat club to sell our produce together. So, in order to not embarrass ourselves when it comes to squatting time we started our squat training. It's difficult to squat that long!!!

So, eventually the meat and rice are ready and we enjoy dinner. We had samgyupsal, rice, salad, and some strawberries for dessert. Of course, with samgyupsal your also have to partake in a little soju. We had our nice Korean meal and headed inside for a few drinking games. We played a little image game, santa-maria, baskin robins 31, 3-6-9, dalgi, and the flick the soju cap game. Once we wore ourselves out on the Korean games we switched to a modified version of the game of spoons. We called it chopsticks because we used chopsticks. There were 5 girls and one boy playing at this point and it was intense! We had bloody cuts on our hands from nails, broken chopsticks, and elbows in the guts. It was so much fun! Then, it was time to pass out!

In the morning, I was woken up at 9am by Wesley and Jane, two of the Koreans. I don't know why they like to wake up so early! Us foreigners weren't too happy about that. But we got free breakfast from the pension. They had hardboiled eggs, sausage, toast, cereal, orange juice, and milk. This was the most western style breakfast I've ever had here. Usually it kimchi and rice!

The only downer of the trip is that it rained the next day. And I'm not talking just a drizzle either. It poured and was unbelievably windy. So, we decided not to take a ferrry and go around Geoje Island. It would have been miserable. Instead, we decided to head back to Gwangju. However, and hour into our trip back, Wesley, our driver, found out that he left his clothes with his credit cards in the pension. So, we had to drive all the way back and get them. It was terrible because Erin and I get very carsick. So, he prolonged our suffering by two hours!

To make matters worse, by the time we got home it was a beautiful day and would have been perfect for an island tour. But, we'll have to make a second trip to make sure we see everything.