The National Cemetery

Yesterday, Sunday, Charis, Ronald, and I went to the National Cemetery. This was after I went to Insadong and bought mom 100 lanterns. I lugged them around for the rest of the day...anyways, the cemetery was nice. It would be a nice place to go hang out at or have a picnic. If I lived closer, I totally would go there. It has grass and it sorta just seems like a park. There are a ton of gravestones though, but they are separated in a different section. After the cemetery we went to Gangnam and at at Taco Rico, a really good Mexican restaurant. The chef is Mexican and doesn't speak Korean or too much English. It was so nice to have guacamole and corn tortillas...I got the flautas -- so yummy! It was pretty cheap too.

Did I ever mention that they have ashtrays in the bathroom stalls? I don't know if I did, but it's gross.

Vietnam visa

Went to the Vietnam Embassy yesterday to get our visas for our trip. So funny...it was like a tiny, pre-fab home with about a billion people waiting. We walked right in, filled out the forms, and Ronald is going to go pick them up tomorrow, with 84,000...each! I hope really he meant total, because that's expensive for a one month, one entry visa. Oh well, I guess we'll just see.

No students showed up today for my last class...had time to correct essays!

Jeju, day 6 (Monday)

On Monday at 7:18 we took a cab to the airport because bus 100 didn't go there. Bus 100 was the bus we took the first day from the airport to this stop, so we don't know why it doesn't go there. Bus 300 goes to the airport, but we didn't have time to wait for the next one, so we just hopped in a taxi.

We got there at 7:25, so we checked in and had until about 8:20 (our plane left at 8:40). We got breakfast at Dunkin' Donuts -- I got a bagel and Ronald got a donut and we both got some coffee. The whiskey in the duty free was too expensive so we got on the plane and arrived safely in Seoul at 9:45.

We raced to the metro, hopped on, waited till our stop, ran out, I took a speed shower and headed to work. Long day.

Jeju, day 5 (Sunday)

 On Sunday we got up, and at about 9:25 went to the GS to heat up pizza, buy some water, and get directions to Moseulpo port. We walked there pretty fast because we knew that the boat left at 10:00. We got there just before ten and were told the boat had already left. So we walked to where there was another boat and asked if it was going to Marado. It was, but we didn't have tickets. So we got in the police's car because they wanted to drive us to the ticket booth. It was 15,500 for the Marado Express ferry + park fee.

The ferry left at 10 and we got there 25 minutes later. We ended up renting a golf cart for 30,000, a total ripoff. We were looking for the "park", and the drivers didn't understand us. There was, however, one woman who communicated to us that it would be 30 to have our own until noon, so we decided to just do that.

The "park" turned out to be the entire island. We saw the lighthouse first with little lighthouse replicas from all over the world  in front of it. Then we saw the chocolate museum (the museum was closed, maybe because of the rain?) but left pretty quickly and found the snail building, got sort of lost between the locals' houses, found the road again, and found a buddhist temple. There was a monk in there leading prayer that could be heard on the street through the speakers. There were people praying inside and in the hut to the left there was a man doing I think calligraphy on some tiles. 

We ended up circling the island three times, not understanding we'd already made it the whole way. We passed the southernmost point two times before realizing what it was. We took pictures there and then caught an earlier ferry back to Jeju Island at 12:32, to be exact. We arrived at 13:00. 

10 minutes later, we caught a bus. At 14:15 we were in Jeju-si. We checked into the Olympia Hotel (we paid 20,000, the normal standard room rate, for a 30,000 special room -- no idea why we got that discount), right across from the bus terminal. We then decided to walk around a bit to try to find a place to eat, but we had no luck, so we hopped in a cab at 15:50 and got to Loveland at 16:11. We got sandwiches and coffee there and then paid our 7,700 to get into Loveland. 

When we got back to the hotel we decided to go out for some beer and dinner. We found the restaurant Cobaco. It was super yummy! I got sushi (a california roll) for 6,000 and Ronald got a curry dongass and noodles for 8,000. After we started looking for a bar but decided to just buy some beer and soju and go back to the room -- we had to get up early to go to the airport!