cerealjoe | How dare you come into my territory? (Reply)

Let me tell you something, after two days of barely seeing any non-Korean tourists, seeing about ten of them in a row at the airport was kind of a shock.

And you know what's the most adorable thing ever? How everyone seems to be buying all these "souvenirs", for their family and friends I suppose. Most of the time it's stuff you can buy anywhere but I guess it's not to come home empty handed. I'm quite happy that I din't have anything to buy till I leave Seoul... I'll do the usual, come to the airport with whatever money I have left and just get random stuff there. By "stuff" I mean "the weirdest snacks I can find".

After the shrine thing I headed next door to visit the Museum of Natural History (or something like that). I came to the gate, it was open and no one was in the ticket window. Being the awesome person I am, I went to find a guard (who was nicely sitting in the shade) and asked where I could get a ticket... he basically told me that it was free today. It turned out free because almost everything is under renovation and you can't even get inside any of the museum buildings. Ah well.

For this I need someone who understands Korean or Chinese, does it really say "toilet" or it something like "pig stall"? I did find the stone statues and an explanation about the way pigs were kept on Jeju but no exhibition of the traditional toilet of Jeju. I was rather disappointed... but I have a feeling there was a problem with the translation somewhere.

Technically you can still climb up there, it doesn't say anything about feet.

These statues are the mascots of the island, you'll find them everywhere! It's quite ridiculous really.

In the park, most rocks are labeled and reading those labels reminded me of the horror that was my senior year biology class.

Also, yesterday my plans to visit a rock garden/museum/thing were foiled when, after about half an hour of discussion, the taxi driver and I understood each other and it turned out that the garden is either closed or was moved to the other side of the island. I still don't know which one it was but either way it meant that I had more free time.

My second plan was to visit some of those lava caves. I tried figuring out which bus to take and after getting on the wrong one, I ended up before another "thing full of Korean folklore that's aimed only at Koreans" and decided that it was better than lava caves. BTW, have I already mentioned that dark places where there will probably be tons of people shouting and being all "wow!" is not fun. I remember going to some caves (they weren't lava caves though) in France, it's kind like fireworks for me, I don't get what the fuss is all about.

I ended up where the old Jeju province offices were and these days it's a mix of old and rebuilt buildings.

See that little pond? Apparently it was built by one guy who thought it would be a good idea to have water close by in case of fire. The guy who came afterwards hated frogs and hated the noise they made and therefore had the pond filled in... that gave a whole Korean expression which "like insert-name-of-the-dude's hate of frogs". I couldn't find when it's used though.

It's not the first time I see this, "A Ticket Office". I still don't understand what's the use of the extra "a" there but it always makes me wonder if they'd be able to sell me some random tickets and not just tickets to the place where I'm set to visit...

To be fully illustrative, most of the little houses were filled with fake people who were going about their daily duties. I do hope that all the food was also fake but seeing it always surrounded by plastic wrap gave me some doubts.

It's really the only thing besides the seashore promenade that's in the "city center".

As everywhere else there are statues just randomly scattered on the ground.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind living around here. No, actually maybe I would. From the explanations it seems that the houses were home to many, many people so basically you had no privacy and, as a girl, most likely you'd either be an entertainment girl or a tea maid or a simple female slave.

I have to give majors props to Jeju peeps who put bathrooms everywhere. They are public bathrooms everywhere! I doubt you'd have to walk more than a kilometer to find one and they all seem to be rather nice and clean.