The Jones' Korean Adventure

This past weekend we decided to get away from Osan, and headed south-east with Saralyn. Our bus ride was definitely not the most comfortable we've had. The bus company must have over-booked, and we were some of the unfortunate ones who stood the whole way. It was bizarre...imagine Greyhound back home over-booking and making people stand the couple hours to their destination...pretty funny, eh! There must have been 20 different safety laws that we broke as we crowded the aisles (I ended up just sitting down in the aisle and falling asleep with my head drooping down).

We spent Saturday in Cheongju, and were able to see a cool tomb museum, and a fortress. We decided to hike the fortress wall (about 4.2 km of up and down hiking), and by the time we were almost back to the start, we were starving! Fortunately, we stumbled across a random little outdoor restaurant, and knew it had to be good because of all the people sitting at the little umbrella'd tables. We sat down, viewed the menu, and placed our orders. Sam decided to go out on a limb, and order something random. We thought we recognized the word "potato", and figured he was getting some kind of potato soup. Saralyn's bean paste stew came, as did my kimchi stew with rice, but Sam was still waiting. After a bit, our waitress came and placed a plate of fried eggs by Sam, and we just figured that it was another one of the free side dishes that come with every meal. Nope - that was Sam's meal! It was hilarious...a starving guy orders a little plate of eggs (I have no idea where we got the word potato from!). Here's the kicker...my stew bowl was huge, so I was full and offered it to Sam to finish off. He accepted, I slid the bowl over, he took his first bite, and then a fly flew into the stew and died amidst the kimchi. It was like everything was trying to keep Sam from eating his fill :0) Don't worry, though, back in town we found a Baskin Robbins, and Sam made up for it by ordering TWO scoops :0)

That night we took a bus over to Songnisan ("san" means "mountain", so "Songni" is the mountain name...a little Korean lesson). There is a little town at the bottom of the hill, and as soon as we got off the bus a man approached us, wanting us to stay in his guest house...he offered us a price of $10 each, so we couldn't refuse that!

We got good sleep that night, and were up early the next day to start our hike. There is usually a Buddhist temple at the bottom of each mountain here, so we headed there first to check out the buildings. Very pretty place...check out the pictures below. There was a giant Buddha statue, and a beautiful wooden pagoda (pretty rare around here), plus the usual drums, stone carvings, etc. We looked around for awhile and then started up the mountain. It was a great hike...pretty intense with lots of stairs! Unfortunately, it was really cloudy and misty at the top, so we didn't get the greatest view, but the experience itself was worth the hike. We had brought great snacks with us...nuts, dried persimon, pretzels, chocolate...so we were well fed on our trip.

After we got back down, we caught a bus into Daejun and had a nice soak in the local sauna...a great chance to clean up too before the bus ride home. Oh, and we were able to get seats on the bus ride home, so it was a lot more relaxing! Here are some pictures: