White Christmas in Jeju

Well Brian and I are back from our Christmas adventure!

On Friday night we headed up Seoul to spend the night. Then, early Christmas day we made our way to Gimpo airport to meet up with the rest of our group from Adventure Korea. After our short 1 hour flight we landed in Jeju! You can imagine how surprised we were to see it was snowing when we landed!

 

Our first stop on our tour of the island was the trick art museum. It's pretty much a big museum with famous pictures and paintings/places that you can 'interact' with. You can pose with the pictures and it'll appear you're part of the picture. At first Brian and I both thought it was pretty lame, but then we started to get into it and it was pretty fun. 

From there we moved on to lunch, we had a dish that is famous in Jeju, black pork. The meat actually wasn't black at all, instead it's just called that because it comes from black pigs. Either way, it was delicious! 

After lunch and some fun in the snow, we headed off to our next stop, horseback riding. However, it wasn't anything like the horseback riding I've ever done. Pretty much you get put on this little pony which is lead up a hill, where they take a few tourist pictures of you on your horse, and then they smack the horses but and you run around a coral twice and then you're done. It was fun to get to run on the horse but nothing like that I expected...

 

From there we went and did a little hike up a crater. The island was created by volcanoes a long time ago, and therefore it has lots of cool mountains and other volcanoe type stuff. After a quick 30 min walk we were at the top. One site of the mountain looked over the city of Jeju and the coast, and the other looked into the big crater the volcano had formed. It was a great view!

Then it was time for our Christmas Dinner! We went back to our hotel and checked in and then made our way to the lodge where we would be having dinner. We got to have turkey! It was delicious! While we were missing other traditional Christmas dinner foods, such as mashed potatoes, the food was still delicious and we had a great time! 

 This was the view from our hotel room balcony

 the front of our hotel

 the lodge

we played a few games of Jenga

 The next morning the weather was pretty bad, it would go from blizzarding and complete whiteout to sunny and warm. We started our day off with a trip to see a Chinese acrobat and motorcycle show. We both had pretty low expectations going into it, especially after walking into the auditorium/arena. However, these people were AMAZING! They were disgustingly flexible and double jointed. They were flipping and throwing kids all over the place and balancing on top of each other and doing super crazy stuff. And then at the end they pull out one of those big motorbike metal balls. Well they had 7 motorcycles going around inside one of those spheres at the same time! It was crazy! Definitely blew our expectations out of the water and was also a highlight of the trip! 

Next, we headed off to the O'Sullock Tea Farm. This place is famous for their green tea. After we waited out the blizzard we got a chance to walk around the fields and also go inside and sample some tea. It was DELICIOUS!

Next we went to the coast and got a chance to walk along the coast as well as look at some of the caves along the ocean. The caves we saw were made by the Japanese during WWII to house their weapons. Koreans aren't too friendly towards the Japanese because of their history so the caves aren't a huge tourist attraction. 

Our last stop for the day was a type of botanical garden. They had some cool plants, some dying palm trees, and lots of ostriches, but what really saved the place was the caves. They had a few lavatube caves. It was really neat to walk through them. 

The next day we started out early and did a bit of a trail trek along the coast once again. The weather cooperated much better and I was even able to walk around in just a sweater at some points! It was beautiful to see the ocean and some of the volcanic rocks along the coast and the neat ways that they've formed. 

After a delicious lunch of Mackeral fish, we went to the Hallim Botanical Gardens. They were cool, but not an AMAZING must see... reminded me a lot of the botanical gardens at the Calgary zoo... However, I did manage to snap a few good 'grandma' pictures of the flowers...

Next, we headed to the famous loveland- a museum of sex and health. This place is very weird and awkward, I left there feeling very dirty and like I needed a shower... Needless to say, it would be quite inappropriate to post pictures from that place- but here are few just to give you a taste... 

We also made a quick stop at the Mysterious Ghost Road. This road is cool. While it looks like your going up hill you're actually traveling down hill. To test it our bus driver turned off the engine and put the bus in neutral, we rolled, at least what it looked like, up the hill! It was really neat!

The bus on the right is actually traveling DOWN hill...

From there it was off to the airport to catch our flight home! After some quick thinking from Brian and some help from our tour guide we were able to switch our flights so we would fly directly into our town, Cheongju, into Seoul, and it only cost us 1,000 won to change it (less than $1 CAD)! We ended up being home 3 hours earlier, we saved ourselves money, and the hassle of navigating through Seoul and the annoying 2 1/2 hour bus ride to Cheongju! 

Overall the trip was a GREAT success! We had lots of fun, met some new people, and got to see more of South Korea! We still have the rest of the week off, and we plan to do absolutely NOTHING! Today has already been a lazy day and it has felt wonderful! 

(P.S. if you want to see more pictures check out my facebook!)