Heart and SeoulAs all great things come to an end, it was time to move on from friends and the grand times had in Australia and on to new adventures. My next destination was particularly exciting for me because I had the chance to meet up with a family member I hadn’t seen in about a year and a half.
As luck would have it, my sister had to travel to South Korea for work, so I hoped on a plane to meet her. Landing in Busan, a city in the South of South Korea, I grabbed a bus to get to an even more southern island called Geoje. There I met up with my sister and lived the in the lap of luxury for the next several days in a very nice hotel. Seriously, I’d never been to a hotel where the housekeepers would fold and organize anything that was out of place for you. It was amazing to arrive back to the hotel to find literally every personal item organized, folded, hung, etc. Simply awesome, yet I started to try to make more of an effort to not leave anything around willy-nilly so they wouldn’t have to take extra time cleaning our room because my stuff was everywhere, lol! But I digress…
Honestly there wasn’t a lot to do necessarily in Geoje. It was obviously a modern city geared toward industry and business. Hence while it did have restaurants with every cuisine possible (Indian, Italian, Irish, American and Korean of course) as well as several National Parks to potentially explore, there wasn’t necessarily THAT much to do, had I been on my own.
Luckily however, I wasn’t on my own. In the company of my sister and her co-workers we had a grand time (once they were done with their work days) sampling cuisines from around the world, wandering through open street markets stuffed with every possible kind of sea creature known to man (and some perhaps not know, lol!) and then enjoying some drinks at a pub, laughing, playing darts and listening to my sisters Scottish coworker invent ways to remember how to say phrases in Korean. For example, if memory serves, if you were to say “come up and see me dah” quickly and without pronouncing each word exactly, that was “thank you” in Korean.
While my sister was at work, I spent my days either relaxing in the hotel, wandering aimlessly on foot exploring around town, or visiting shops. The most noticeably different style of the buildings and shops, if you will, from any other country that I’d been to so far was that none of the shops were single story. You constantly had to look up at least to the second floor to see what shops or restaurants were available. Most every building was at least two stories, and they just went higher up from there. Each level of the buildings had at least two or three businesses (restaurants, clothing shops, hair salons, etc) to explore, and in some buildings the stores (grocery) were located several stories BELOW ground! Of course I never felt like I was below ground at any point in shopping, but it was interesting taking the escalator down two flights to find the groceries.
I was in Geoje (I wish I could provide a phonetic way of saying this city name but each person seriously seemed to pronounce it differently and I never got a firm grasp on how exactly to pronounce it) for only a few days, essentially waiting for my sister to finish up the work she needed. But once her work was completed for good, she and I took off for the bustling and beautiful Seoul.
On to Heart and Seoul
Ramblintraveler 