Summer is the time for Vacation!!!

Our First Korean Vacation

Lisa and I finally had our first vacation.  We had a great and relaxing time.  One of the high points was that Lisa’s parents came to visit us for a week.  It was very nice to see some familiar faces somewhere other than a computer screen.  We traveled all over the country with them.

We started in Cheonan (Where we live).  There are not many tourist attractions in Cheonan, so we got to show Lisa’s parents our daily lives (Where we teach, the grocery store, the open market, etc…).  We forget how different it is here.  The street views are littered with advertisements, the skyline is hazy from smog, and buildings are built so tight and so high that you have to wait until noon to see the sun (Maybe that last part is an exaggeration).  Lisa and I have gotten use to people staring at us, but we recognized it all over again with the gazes Lisa’s parents got from Koreans.  Foreigners are just too rare here in Cheonan.

The first actual destination we went to was Busan, a beach city on the southern shores of Korea.  Lisa and I had never been to Busan, but we thought we would opt for a hotel instead of a hostel.  We were surprised to find a hotel that cost about the same price as a hostel, so we jumped at it.  Little did we know you get what you pay for.  We were shown to our room and the attendant (who was asleep on the couch when we arrived) showed us how to turn on the lights with our key.  When he turned on the light it revealed someone’s clothes on the bed and a definitely used room.  After picking our jaws up off the floor and a nice one-sided conversation with the attendant we got a new room.  The new room was just like the pictures on the website.  We had one remote control which controlled the lights, air conditioning, TV, and the miniature disco light over the bed.  The high point of the room was a black light over the bed, so we could be sure it was clean.  Our room was also equipped with a state of the art VCR.  The attendant let us know that we could choose a video from the hallway VHS shelf and watch whatever we wanted.  We later found out that the VHS collection isn’t the most appropriate selection of videos, I am sure you can figure out what I am talking about. This place is definitely not a family friendly hotel.  I could probably go on for another three pages about the hotel we stayed in, but I will leave the rest to your imagination. 

We spent the first day on the beach.  I started out by lathering on 30 SPF sun block and then running into the ocean to play in the three to four foot swells being caused by a storm further off the beach.  The water was a little chilly at first, but when the sun peaked it was nice.  For the majority of the day we just sat on the beach and played in the sand or read a book.  It was great.  I dug a beach chair out of sand and formed it to fit my body perfectly.  It made for the perfect lounger.  It wasn’t long before I was thoroughly cooked on both sides.  My wife suffered the same fate.  It seemed my 30 SPF was not water proof.  Lisa’s parents got pretty burnt too.  The sun burn made for a rough night of sleep, but it started peeling three days later and the pain was gone.  It didn’t stop peeling for three weeks for me, if that speaks to the severity of the burn. 

We spent three days in Busan and visited a few tourist places like an aquarium and a Buddhist temple.  On a side note, I really dislike Buddhist temples.  They are cool architecturally, and sometimes the locations are great, but these are actual worship temples.  People are bowing and praying to these 20 foot statutes of Buddhist gods.  It is like something out of the Old Testament.  It is sad really. 

After leaving Busan we went to Seoul.  Lisa and I have been to Seoul a couple of times, so we really wanted to show her parents some of the high points that we had experienced.  We visited palaces and shopping strips that we enjoyed.  My favorite is Namdaemun Shopping center.  Street after street of vendors selling mostly knock off merchandise at dirt cheap prices.  Rarely do we buy anything from there, but it is fun to go and look and be shocked at how cheap everything is.  This time around I bought a backpack for $30 that I am still very happy with.  There was a Swiss Army store that caught our attention as well as plenty of purse shops, shoe shops, and the list goes on and on.  We were hoping to buy some gifts for people back home while we were there, but we couldn’t decide on one thing.  We also visited the “Shoe Marketplace” while in Seoul.  This marketplace is vendor after vendor of knock-off shoes.  You can get name brand shoes for $10-$20 … but the sole of the shoe may come off in a week.  The only problem with the shoe marketplace is I wear a size 12.  In Korea the biggest they carry for the most part is a size 10.  I did find one pair of sandals that I liked and bought them for $20. 

We stayed in Seoul a couple of days before it was time for Lisa’s parents to catch their flight back to America.  We had a good time with them, but Lisa and I were ready to go back home and relax.  On the last couple of days of our vacation we had to pack up our things and get ready to move to our new apartment.  It wasn’t until we had to go back to school that we could relax from all the moving around and traveling.  Vacation is nice, but we are ready for the day to day to start again.

Lisa will put pictures of our vacation up when ever she finishes editing them.

David