Road Trip to Busan!

We recently got a GPS for Korea which translates into English - thank goodness because driving here is a crazy experience! I'll let Ryan write a post about that later because he graciously does most of the driving. We wanted to test it out so we went to Busan for a day trip last Sunday.

Luckily for us, they built a bridge within the last couple of years between Busan and Geoje Island, so it takes about an hour to get to Busan rather than the 4 hour drive around. The drive on the bridge is really beautiful - there are islands along the coast which make it a very scenic drive.

Several friends gave us some Korea travel guides and so we took it with us to Busan and planned to hit a few of the hot spots. The first stop was the Jagalchi Fish Market which is the largest fish market in Korea. We walked around the area and saw a lot of dried fishes hanging out to be sold, along with several of the little guppies that we saw the woman drying a couple of weeks ago when we were exploring the island!

Boxes of dried fishies 

We think those are dried frogs???

We continued walking and found the main fish market which is a multi-story building and is full of stalls with fish tanks/open baskets full of plenty of live fish! It is a unique cultural experience to walk around and see the tanks of fish jumping around, eels slithering on top of each other, and even some octopuses stuck to the sides.

Flounder splashing around - we had really never seen anything like this before!

Eels in a big tank

These guys were cutting up & gutting some fish for a customer!  They take freshness to a whole new level! 

This lady's stand had all kinds of interesting items - we didn't know what half of them were

See the octopuses stuck to the side?! The mollusks are stuck to the side there, too! She has her little scooper to get any of them out if someone wants to buy some of them to take home. Yikes!

We wanted to continue our cultural experience, so we walked upstairs which is where the "restaurants" are. There were many "restaurants" serving seafood, primarily sashimi. I call them "restaurants" because it was a raised platform with tables and then small open kitchens nearby where they were funneling the food from. It was certainly unlike any food court or restaurant that I had ever been to before and we were the only non-Korean people there. We got the sashimi plate and we tried the first fish - It was not what I was expecting...I can only describe the texture as gooey and I did like it very much. The second fish on the platter was okay...not as good as I was expecting, but we munched on that. The waitress kept telling us that soup came with the sashimi so a few moments later, a burner showed up on our table and then they brought out a big pan full of soup. We looked a bit closer and saw a fish head...yup, they had brought us fish head soup. It wasn't strictly fish heads - they had basically chopped up an entire fish and put it in the soup. Being the open minded type, we gave it a try. The fish had a lot of bones, making it super hard to eat, and the broth was very spicy. It was certainly an interesting experience, but it was not our favorite meal here yet.

The "restaurants" all looked like this - a raised platform and each person left their shoes by the side and sat on these mats; there were rows and rows of these which were all different "restaurants"  

The Sashimi - the one on the left was the gooey one that I wasn't a big fan of but the one of the right was okay

This is the fish head soup; unfortunately our fish head pictures came out blurry, but it's in there, I promise. You can also see some of the different kimchi side dishes on the side that they gave us 

Ryan enjoying our meal...his face says it all

This guy walked around with this over his shoulder and he had sweet rice cakes as desserts

Rows and rows of more dried fishes inside the market

Our final view of the market - a guy in a big truck dumping a fresh fish into a bucket - priceless! 

There were also some more fish markets outside of the main fish market building. These were a little more aligned with what we would expect for a fish market because the fish were cut up and on ice rather than swimming around still in tanks. 

Woman selling some of her fish outside - we think these may be a type of swordfish

Ryan at the outdoor fish market; there is a guy chopping fish under his umbrella right behind him. 

After that, we walked around some of the other markets and grabbed a smoothie. The main observation we had while walking around was just how many people there were! Every where we went, there were seas of people! We continued our walk through Yongdusan Park. We went to the top of Busan Tower and scoped out the view.

Ryan and I in front of one of the statues in Yongdusan Park

View of one of the largest ports in the world (Busan) from the top of the Busan Tower

Ryan at the top of the Busan Tower

Big Bell in the Park (we really like the Korean buildings - neat architecture and so colorful!)

The last place on our list for our trip was to go to a temple outside of the city. It is called Yonggungsa Temple and it is nicknamed the "Temple on the Sea." We drove out there and it was extremely crowded - it took us some time to find parking and then there was a 2 hour line to get into the temple. I should have guessed that I wasn't the only one who wanted to see this beautiful temple with all of the lanterns for Buddha's birthday! We didn't really have time to wait in such a long line because we had to head back home, but we couldn't see the temple from the outside. So...being the adventurous and determined couple that we are, we started hiking around to find another way to see the temple. We noticed that some Koreans jumped over a fence and were walking along a ledge. We followed suit and walked out along some of the rocks and there was the view that we were looking for!! The temple was filled with colorful lanterns and it looked incredible!

We thought this guy was quite intimidating! 

They had all 12 zodiac statues lining hte walk-way to get to the entrance of the temple area; Ryan is with the Goat! (Go WPI! ;) )  

Great picture of one of the Buddha statues! 

On the other side of those cliffs is the temple; we spent some time hiking around trying to get a good view....this was the first one that we got, but the temple was blocked. We persistently kept looking around until we found what we were looking for. :)

Ryan and I celebrating our find with the great view of the colorfully decorated temple behind us! 

Temple decorated with many colorful lanterns for Buddha's birthday! 

Buddha Statue 

The temple is right on the water...it's really neat! 

The 12 Zodiacs Lined Up

With the Tiger (Zodiac for our birth year!)

On the way out, there are several food and souvenir stalls - we saw some fresh dough cakes being made and they smelled awesome! A bag of 10 of them was only 2,000 Won (almost $2), so we grabbed a bag. They were awesome! They were cakey donut type of treats that had red bean paste in the middle. I'm not sure what they are called, but we will certainly be getting them again if we see them somewhere else.

All in all, we had a great day trip to Busan!

Accidental Summit

A couple of weekends ago, we met our friends Cory and Rachel out for a short day hike. We followed them to the start of the trail and headed up. The trail started at a temple...it is a more modern temple so it didn't have the ancient feel to it, but they had some neat statues and it was decorated for Buddha's birthday with colorful lanterns which was neat.

Buddhist Statue & Temple

We saw this little frog in the pond - we really haven't seen very many animals while we've been here so we excited to see this little guy! 

Colorful lanterns

They had a big bell at the temple - Ryan and I took turn ringing it...well, I pretended and Ryan actually rung it :) 

The hike was great! It was a trail through rocks/boulders and it was very steep! We didn't know where this trail would take us and we kept hiking until we got to the summit and realized that we had just hiked to the summit of one of the highest mountains in Geoje!

 There was a bamboo forrest in the middle of the hike...the funny thing was that the bamboo was only in this small area of the trail - we didn't see bamboo anywhere else

 Cory & Rachel with our trail guides - their dogs are quite the trail guides! 

We made it to the summit! 

View of Okpo

View from the other side

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!