The Great Korean Road Trip 2012: Part 1

Hi everyone. I'm proud to announce my return to blogging...at least for a while. I'm currently jobless and living in Korea, at least until my university job starts at the end of February. Because of this, I plan to work through some of my back-logged blogs and get them up.

This post is the start of my road trip that I took over the Chinese New Year vacation, which gave us Monday and Tuesday of last week off. The Friday that the road trip was starting was also my move out date from my apartment, so it also marked the date that I became homeless and jobless. Homeless, except for my girlfriend's apartment which is currently vacant while she visits her family in China. Anyway, on Friday I moved all of my stuff out of my apartment, loaded it into the car, loaded it into my girlfriend's apartment, dropped the dog off at the vet, prepared some documents for my new job, sent them, and I was ready to go.

We set out with no real itinerary. All we had before leaving was an idea to search for some of the excitement and uniqueness to be found in the hidden corners of Korea. See, all cities of Korea are basically the same. It's high-rise apartments surrounded by the same convenience stores, shops, and restaurants everywhere. My goal was to see if there is anything different out there.

It began on Friday night at around 10:00, when my friend Nick Slater arrived in Seosan, my city. He brought with him a present, a tool we could find valuable later on down the road:

The Road Toilet

I'll kill the suspense now, and say that none of us used one in the car. It was a nice thought, though. Once Slater arrived, we jumped in my sleek Kia Carens liquid propane gas running micro-van and went to pick up my other friend, Timmy. He lives in a small neighboring town called Daesan. I didn't realized it, but it's about 25 minutes away going North on our local peninsula. So we had to backtrack after picking him up, and finally headed South.

The highway we took, interchange 15 took us to the Southwest corner of Korea, and we arrived in Mokpo at 3:00 a.m. Mokpo is a prominent seaport in Korea. They offer ferries going to many of the small islands off the coast, so it seemed like a promising destination:

Road Trip Map

After arriving in an area with a few convenience stores and motels, we settled in at a 7-11 for a few beers. We drank outside the store in freezing temperatures, and a 40 something Korean man stopped by. He joined us for a few drinks, speaking only Korean and eventually offering us processed cheese singles as a snack. We couldn't understand most of what he said. I tried to ask him what we could do to have fun in Mokpo in broken Korean, and as far as I could tell he said the best way is to drink with your friends. Mission accomplished?

We crashed in a charming love motel room. We were a few floors up, but luckily the room had the "simplicity descending life line". It looked to be slightly tangled and out of order, but I'm sure it would work in a fire related emergency.

"simplicity descending life line"

That wasn't even the best, or funniest part of the room. When one goes to the use the bathroom sink to brush one's teeth, there is a tendency to get one's feet soaked. Why? Some genious plumber didn't quite connect the drain pipe, or line them up for that matter:

nice plumbing

We fell asleep quickly, and didn't wake up until 1:30 the next day, Saturday. Since all of the ferries leave earlier than that, we were forced to get a quick lunch and then look around for other tourist attractions.

There was a nice group of museum type buildings built along a highway on the coast. We stopped by the Mokpo Natural History Museum because of some nice animal statues:

Mokpo Natural History Museum

There were actually some pretty cool fake animals out on the lawn. I liked this 'artsy' photo I took from inside a fake dinosaur skeleton's mouth:

Mokpo Dinosaur Mouth

Looking at the signs, there were many hilarious misspellings, which I love so much. There was one where the museum was called the "Nateral History Museum," and my favorite:

"Where is the lacal history building?"

Here is me next to one of my favorites, the Gorilla:

And the three of us riding a tiger, as photographed by a nice Korean man who had his kids with him at the Museum:

Since the Natural History Museum cost money, we stopped across the street at the Mokpo Maritime Museum. This one had some nice boats out on the front lawn. There was a really great shrimping boat, and a few boats used by people to sneak into Korea. The people smuggling boat from China was all decrepit, but the one from Vietnam was in top shape:

Vietnamese People Smuggling Boat

We also checked out the children's exhibit, where you can drive boat simulators and make nice pictures of fish. Another exibit we saw was about a shipwreck that happened near Mokpo.

Satisfied with the boating exhibits, we set out on the road again towards Busan. We took smaller highways for a while. While being much slower, they do offer advantages such as ladies selling strawberries on the side of the road:

Road Side Strawberry Lady

I actually found the idea of her job to be quite terrifying. There were all of these stands by the side of the highway, but not really adequate room to slow down and stop. People are whizzing by the whole time at around 60 mph. Fortunately, the strawberries were amazing.

More next time from Busan!