The georgous Geoje island
Last weekend we did trip with Jin to possibly one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. The trip started by us leaving to Daegu where my bf friend, who we traveled with, lives at. Small fact about Daegu, it’s apparently the hottest city in Korea and I sure did feel it. Being outside literally feels like being in a sauna! And that is why our choice of meal was again cold noodles. I really love this dish, it’s so refreshing and just perfectly fits my taste.
After the meal we went for stroll around the campus area (because we stayed in the friends apartment, that was on the campus area, while he was at school) and visited arcade and PC room. I have also wanted to try strawberry bingsu so we headed to Seolbing to have it but they didn’t have it on the menu anymore and that was the case in every other place but Baskin Robins (shop taht sells ice cream), but well, having Baskin Robins bingsu was definitely a mistake because the ice was so poor quality, there was barely strawberries and juts strawberry ice cream. Those who haven’t tried bingsu should know that the quality of the shaved ice is so important, in Baskin Robins it was actually just shaved ice, with rather big clumps, when better places have, I believe, frozen milk that is shaved and it’s really like eating powder snow. Anyways, I have now find out that strawberry season is now off, so no strawberry bingsu for me.
After the friend got off the school we went to pub nearby and had some food and drinks and I can say for sure that peach soju is my favorite! Well, I actually just like anything peach flavored but aaanyways… The next day we woke up painfully early and headed to Geoje that is an island in the south part of Korea and where the friends girlfriend lives at. On the way we stopped on a rest stop for guys to have some breakfast and after that went out to see the view and just wow…
I don’t know if I have ever been on a rest stop with this beautiful view. It was way more beautiful in real life because you could see the sea shore, that was unfortunately not easy to capture with camera, so no picture of it. But let’s move on. We arrived to the Geoje island, picked up the girlfriend and headed to our first destination.
We picked really good time to visit the place from that point of view that there were not THAAT many people yet. Because when we were going to leave the place there was a ridiculously long line and I have no idea how all those people could have fitted there at all because the parking area was very limited.
The place we visited was called windy hills and it was so gorgeous. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t seen sea too many times in my life but I was so mesmerized by the clear, bright blue colored water.
As the place was called windy hills they obviously got to have windmill too!
Here’s us all. Also, from the hair you can notice that as the name says, it was windy, which was not bad thing at all though, because not surprisingly it was boiling hot that day as well. I actually got my first sunburns in Korea that day for not applying sunscreen on the neck. Well done me!
The pictures don’t really make justice how great the place actually was but I mean look at that…
The pictures above are from the shore/beach area that you could go if you stepped out from the main trail. Even though it looks really pretty, it was full of bugs. Like seriously a lot. Mostly just the one species that lived on the rocks though. It was quite funny when you moved there and you could see huge flock of the bugs just escaping all directions to find safe spot.
After spending enough time on the windy hills we headed to have some food. It wasn’t spaghetti, although it really looks like it on the picture but it was actually bean sprouts and some really odd fish in spicy sauce. It was good, but maybe slightly too spicy to have as main course and the fish…It really was odd. The texture wasn’t soft and easily crumbling like most fish but kind of chewy.
After the meal we headed to movie theater see Mission impossible. It wasn’t maybe the best decision to see a movie when you are exhausted from waking up really early and then spending the day in extreme heat, because right after first 30mins I started to doze off. Oh well, at least I know how the movie starts and ends.
Nothing too much to tell about the rest of the night, but I got to mention this meal. Because that innocent looking meat on the right, it was the spiciest thing I have had on the whole time in Korea. But the most evil thing was that it also tasted really good. So what I did was eat the spicy mean, suffer in pain while gulping down cold water (I know water doesn’t really help tho), eating some other foods, then thinking “Oh, the spiciness wasn’t that bad after all and it was quite tasty too. Let me have just a bit more..” and the same starts from the beginning.
Also, I would like to mention that we spent a night in a public sauna, jjimjilbang. How jjimjilbang works is that you first go to the bathing section (ofc women and men have their own ones) that has locker room to store your stuff and a bathroom with water pools of different temperatures as well as sauna I believe. After cleaning yourself up you go up to the common area wearing the clothes jjimjilbang gives to you. There you can visit rooms of different temperatures, use massaging chair or buy food and drinks. You can also sleep there which was the reason for us to go there. It was pretty uncomfortable tho, because you get only thin mattress and rock hard pillow to sleep with, I wouldn’t call it pillow at all though, just a block of some not-so-soft material. To add to all that it was freaking warm. Well luckily or not luckily, I can’t decide, I didn’t need to suffer for too long because again we left out really early.
The first destination of the day was mireuk mountain. We went up by cable car, which actually is the longest one in Korea. It was kiiiinda cool, but having a slight fear of heights, I couldn’t stop thinking what if it would drop or something as catastrophic would happen.
As you might guess, we made it up without dying, and from there we started the climbing. It had been made “easy” by having stairs to climb on, but due the heat it was far from easy. It could have been fine if there had been shadow but as you might believe, there are not too many trees on top of a mountain to give you shade.
The place itself was beautiful though. It was so green and the view was breath taking.
Unfortunately, it was pretty foggy (because of heat? or clouds?) so taking pictures was quite difficult.
There were also quite some butterflies and dragonflies. Luckily, Jin managed to capture couple focused pictures because most of what I took looked more like this:
God damn it camera, could you focus on what I want to capture at least once in a while???
This is a great start of my butterfly whisperer career though! As you can see, I didn’t choose butterfly life, the butterflies chose me.
Anyways, not too much to tell about the trip more than that we went up to the very top, enjoyed the view, melted in the heat and got back down. From there we moved to buy some honey bread, that is the specialty food of the area, and let me tell you, seeing a water dispenser and fan (in the store) have never before brought me such joy as it did after climbing the mountain.
The next place we visited was a hotel area where we rented two bikes and while Jins friend and his gf rode the bikes first, we went to the beach nearby and sat in the shadow of the trees. And I again I can’t stress how the camera can’t capture the beauty because it was so gorgeous. Also, it’s awesome to be outside when you have shadow and access to cold water.
The bugs in Korea tho! They are huuuge. I mean can you see that bug? It’s not like I zoomed in crazy much and that it’s actually tiny little insect but it was seriously the size of a thumb. Also, bees or hornets, whatever they are, look way bigger as well and as a person who is afraid of yellow and black colored bugs, I’m not too happy about that fact.
When our friends returned it was our turn to ride the bike on the road going along the seaside.
We passed an area of pensions and maan I would love to stay there.
We enjoyed our bike ride and the view, got eventually back. We originally had planned to visit an art village after that, but I was so exhausted due the heat that we skipped that, which I appreciate very much, I mean I even fell asleep on the car, and went straight to eating. I was still way too much out of this world when we started to eat so unfortunately no picture of our food. It was good though, we had squid and bean sprouts in spicy sauce and rice, some odd pizza that had basically no other topping than cheese and some spice, meat dumplings and cold acorn jelly soup (which was so so so good).
But yeah, that’s about it. I had great time and wish to visit the are again someday. From Sunday until today, Wednesday we have been just lazing around at home so nothing too much to write about that. So, I’ll update you about my life again next week!