Day 232

Day 232 - 24.06.10

Last day on Jeju-do.

So there were three demi-gods and they came out of the ground

Wah! I got my first fangirling session by Korean High School girls today! They're so adorable, I wish I had more than a few pieces of salmiakki with me so that I could have given them some. As I have my flight soon, I decided that today I would just plop down somewhere and read for a bit and there is no better location than the local arboretum. Apparently the arboretum is a popular place to take high school students out for a field day because there were bus loads and bus loads of them. The craze seemed to die down after about an hour so if you're going to go there on a week-day, I would suggest going at 11am or so and not before unless you like crowds. I'm quite used by now to random peeps just waving and saying hello to me but these high school girls actually wanted to take photos with me. A guy I met on the first day did say that he had been asked to take photos with people but at the time he was wearing on of them "all for the reds" football jerseys. So if you see some random girl with a yellow "procrastinators: leaders of tomorrow" and blond-ish hair appearing on cyworlds and me2days (Korean equivalents to blogger and twitter... of sorts), that will most likely be me. In any case, yesterday I went to do some more of the stuff that Korean people like to do on Jeju. There is this shrine, the Samseonghyeol shine, which is made up of three holes in the ground... and demi-gods apparently somehow got out of those holes and ruled over Jeju. The problem with this shrine is that it's basically only targetting Koreans because everything is in Korean... even in the exposition hall, which is a shame because I find Korean folklore fascinating. Anywho, it's a great green area in the middle of the city. It costs about 1500won to get in. ( the actual holes of those demi-gods and other stuff related to the shrine )

How dare you come into my territory?

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. ( how to nicely say 'do not touch this' ) 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. ( more buildings with stories and a ticket office )