Chasing a Parade!

Our friend called us on Wednesday night at 7:55 PM to tell us that they saw a parade for Buddha's birthday being set up in the next town over and it started at 8:00 PM - he sent us a video of the parade, and when we saw it, we looked at each other and decided to head over there as quickly as we could! We jumped in the car and headed over to Gohyeon which is about 15 minutes away. 

When we got there, we were driving around and didn't see any signs of excitement and certainly no parade floats, so we continued to drive around for a little bit and spotted several police officers holding lighted batons to control traffic. We decided to park the car and go and ask the police officers if the parade would go by here. We asked one of the officers and he just smiled and nodded...we didn't think he had any idea what we were talking about so we showed him the video on Ryan's phone and he shook his head a bit more vigorously. As we stood there, several families came by as well, so we thought for sure this was a good spot. Sure enough...in about 20 minutes, we heard drums and singing as the parade came our way!! It was really fun! 

Korean ladies drumming kicked off the parade! 

Most of the floats were on the back of trucks depicting Buddha or flowers in very colorful lights

Buddhist monks carrying lanterns - one of them kept waving to us :)

Buddha riding the dragon!

More fire! This was one of our favorite floats! 

Ryan enjoying all of the floats! 

There were elephant sound effects with this float - it was awesome! 

Buddha riding another fire breathing dragon! 

Ryan acting like a fire breathing dragon :) 

Not sure what these ladies were going for...it looks like they are trying to look like an ostrich?

We still aren't sure why the parade was on Wednesday (May 23rd) when the holiday for his birthday is this coming Monday (May 28th) - hopefully we'll see some more festivities over the weekend! This certainly was one of our favorite cultural moments so far! 

First Tastes of Korea

When we first got to our apartment, one of our good friends had left us a fruit platter and I was surprised to find that tomatoes were included in there...they definitely took the definition of "fruit" literally! They also left us a pound of strawberries, too, and they were the most delicious strawberries I have ever had! So far, I've found their fresh fruit and vegetables really great! I've learned that they do not import any fruit and vegetables, so they grow everything seasonally here or in greenhouses which makes them much more expensive. We've found that our grocery bill has increased significantly! We've had fun trying some of the new things that we find in the grocery store, though.

We've been trying a lot of the restaurants in town as well. One of the places that we tried recently is called "Michael Jackson's" - at this restaurant, they give you a pile of uncooked ribs and you cook them yourself on the grill at your table. To facilitate the quick satisfaction of hot ribs, they give you a white glove to wear so that you can pick them up hot off the grill...Michael Jackson's is not the actual restaurant name, but it was nicknamed this by the expats because of the single white glove. So...funnily enough, they added pictures of Michael Jackson to the front of their restaurant so that the expats knew where to go. The ribs were great! :)

 Ryan and I with our "Michael Jackson's" grill gloves! 

Ribs on the grill! They're spicy but the secret is to eat the coleslaw that comes with it and plenty of beer! :)

We took a trip to one of the big stores in the next town over called Home Plus. They have several stories of shopping - groceries, clothes, shoes, electronics, etc. They also have a big food court! This is one of the menus for one of the restaurants...they have a model of each of the dishes and then you let the cashier know which one you want and then wait until your number shows up on the screen in front of the food court stand to get your food. 

We decided to go with the pizza option instead of the choices in the picture...we wanted to see if Korea can make a good pizza or not and surprisingly, it was pretty good! It had corn on there and the sauce was a little sweeter which was unexpected but it definitely hit the spot that day! 

One of the funniest finds was...Dunkin Donuts?! We couldn't find one the 4 years that we lived in Houston but yet we find one in our first few days in Korea?! Haha...too funny. It was a great reminder of New England! Ryan was pumped as you can see in the picture! :)

 Afterwards, we did our grocery shopping and got a lot of the things that we needed. I tried to check the receipt to see how much some of the items cost, but quickly realized I would not be able to for a little while...at least until I learn the language!

For our anniversary, we decided to go out to dinner (celebrating 2 years of marital bliss!) and be adventurous. So, we headed into town and picked a restaurant as we were walking by - the woman did not speak any English and they did not have a menu with pictures, but we decided to try it anyway. We discovered that she did know one word: "pork" - so guess what we had? Yes, we had pork and then pointed to a couple of other items on the menu which turned out to be noodle soup and then plenty of side dishes. It was a lot of fun! 

I'll be sure and post plenty more pictures of the fun foods that we have been trying! We've also checked out the open air market - I'll bring my camera next time and blog about it because it's a completely new experience and very interesting! 

Exploring the island!

We have now been in Korea for a few weeks and another blog post is way overdue! We have been really enjoying our time here in Korea. For the most part, we have been lucky enough to have really good weather which means we can spend a lot of time outside! One of our favorite things to do here so far is to hike some of the different paths - it's such a welcome change from the flatness of Houston! One weekend, we hiked with our friends up to one of the smoke stacks that was used to warn the other Koreans if the Japanese invaded. The hike was great - it started out with steep steps and continued to go up a ways - we are certainly getting in better shape!

This is the sign at the base of the trail; the pebbles wearing pink & blue outfits are the mascots of Gejoe

They had some really pretty flowers up at the top! 

Ryan with the smoke stack behind him

Cory, Rachel, me & Ryan at the top of the hike

Ryan & I with the smoke stack

Good view of the fabrication yard where we work

We spent the rest of the day driving around the island and exploring - these are some of the pictures from our afternoon! 

This woman is drying the little fishes that are caught locally 

Fishing boats on the coast of Geoje Island

 View of some of the islands off of the island that we live on - so beautiful!

Ryan made a friend while we were walking around!

We found our way to a nice beach as well!

We made it!

Wednesday, April 25th was the big day - our travel to South Korea on a ONE WAY ticket began...

We got to the airport early to make sure nothing could possibly go wrong and chilled out in the lounge at the airport...we were just so excited to start our trip! 

Our itinerary was to leave from Houston and head straight to Tokyo, Japan (approximately a 13 hour flight) with a 5 hour lay-over before getting on the final flight from Tokyo to Busan, South Korea. The funny thing about this trip is that Ryan and I have both taken the trip to Tokyo for various business trips many times over the past couple of years (6 times between the two of us) but we had never done this trip together which made it even more fun! It was great to cheers with our glasses of wine during "dinner" of wine and give each other movie reviews throughout the flight. :)




While in Tokyo, we had a lot of time to kill so we took a walk around the airport to get some exercise before our next flight, I finished the second book of the Hunger Games trilogy (thanks, Kim!), and we enjoyed some sushi snacks & drinks before heading to Ryan's favorite part of the Tokyo airport - the massage chairs. This is a bit of a tradition for Ryan anytime he flies through Tokyo, so we got some Japanese Yen and sat down to enjoy! This is how we spent the last 20 minutes of our time in Japan (literally...finished the massage right as they called for us to board the plane to Busan).

We landed in Busan, South Korea around 9:30 PM and it was surprisingly seamless to grab all of our bags, load them on a cart and find our driver to take us to our new apartment. Once we were in the car, it was about an hour drive over a long bridge to get to Geoje island. Once we got to our apartment (which is on the 14th story...we've never been in an apartment that is that high which is really cool!), we brought in all of our bags and someone gave us a quick tutorial on how to use our apartment - it's fairly high tech! We don't have any keys to get into the apartment, instead we have to enter a code on a key pad to get into the building and then to get into our apartment. All of the appliances are also in Korean, so they gave us a book that has all of the buttons translated for the dish washer, oven, washing machine, tv, lights, etc.

This is our living room (sweet view from the 14th floor!!)

Our kitchen!

Our dish washer...luckily I had the instructions because I definitely can't read this yet!

A couple of our friends had come to our apartment earlier that evening to drop off some goodies for us - freshly baked banana bread, baked ziti, coffee - it made us feel very welcome and already start to feel at home...it was wonderful! (Thanks Sam and Mika!) By this point in time, we were totally exhausted so we munched on some food, drank some water and headed to bed.

We were up bright and early the next morning (jet lag has been a bit of a struggle, haha) - hence the sun rise picture of the view from our apartment. We unpacked everything, talked to our families, and then some of our friends (thank you again, Mika!) were gracious enough to take us shopping to get some essentials at the "Home Plus" store - it's similar to a Target/Walmart so we were able to get set up. They told us that we will have to buy fresh produce every few days because things don't last very long, so we'll have to make more frequent trips to the grocery store but I think that's all part of the experience. :)

Afterwards, we went exploring in the city and found the grocery stores (thanks to our tour guide, Rachel) and some other fun stores, including the open air market. I'll have to add some pictures of that in a later post. We also started to get our bearings of how to get around in Okpo which was really helpful. The weather was perfect, so spending the day walking around was great! That evening, we went to dinner at the foreigners club for fish & chip night which was really fun - I never thought that my first meal in Korea would be a British classic, haha, but I think the expat community is a big part of this experience so it was great to meet some new people.

On Saturday, our friends Mika and Sam picked me up to head back to Busan to go to Costco - it was huge and I was able to get some things that we needed. The drive to and from Busan is just beautiful with all of the islands and the water! We also went to their favorite noodle restaurant, too, which was delicious! The jet lag was certainly setting in, though, so our afternoon was a complete with a perfectly wonderful nap! That evening, we went out for Korean BBQ and had an awesome time!

We were definitely feeling the jet lag today, so we had a lazy Sunday morning, but we spent the afternoon hiking Mt. Guksabong. The trail head starts right behind our apartment, so it's really convenient and it was a fantastic hike! Parts of the trail are really steep and I was struggling for parts of it, haha. We went with our friends, Cory and Rachel, who have brought their 2 dogs with them. Their dogs elicit the most interesting responses from the Koreans - they are terrified of these two dogs! Some of the women would squeal, many of them would get off the trail and hide until we passed. I never expected that but it certainly made the hike even more interesting. The other interesting part of this hike is that at various points on the trail, there is exercise equipment for you to use and all of the Koreans get to the top and start doing their additional exercises, including weighted hoola hoops - too funny! I, on the other hand, was tuckered out from the hike so maybe as I get more fit, I will have some energy to work out more, haha. We got to the top and the view was a bit hazy, but it was still really nice! We can't wait to hike more often during our time here in Korea.