I spent Thanksgiving Day hanging out and celebrating with friends. In the morning, I celebrated with my roommate Jennifer on her engagement. I knew for a few weeks that it was coming, so I was very excited for her when it actually happened. That afternoon, I had Thanksgiving dinner at the Hospitality House, which is a ministry to the military (though they welcome others too). I ate lots of yummy turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls, green bean casserole, and delicious pumpkin bread. It was a full American Thanksgiving meal, just on the other side of the world.
Friday morning I left for a two day trip with my roommates Kari and Jennifer, along with Jennifer's fiance Kyle. We traveled to Jeju-do, the largest island in Korea ("do" means island in Korean), and a very popular tourist destination. Jeju is known as the Hawaii of Korea, not so much for the temperature (though it is milder than the weather in Pyeongtaek), but for how the island was formed. Jeju was formed by volcanic eruptions from Mt. Hallasan, which just happens to be the tallest mountain in South Korea. The mountain stands in the center of the island, so we had a lot of fun getting different views as we drove around it. Anyway, the island today has a lot of volcanic rock and soil, making it very different from mainland Korea. It even has palm trees! The weather is a little milder than on the mainland, although we were pleasantly surprised by snow on the top of Hallasan. The flight from Seoul to Jeju is just about an hour, so it's a really short flight.
On our short flight to Jeju, we had a very Korean experience. I'm sitting there, just reading my book, when the flight attendants start talking in Korean over the loudspeaker. Now, since I don't speak Korean, I decided to ignore it. If there's really something I need to know, they will translate it into English. If not, I'll eventually figure it out when I need to respond. Then, all of a sudden, everyone starts raising their hand. Now this I notice. However, since I still don't speak Korean, I have no idea what's going on, until I hear the flight attendant say, "Kai, bai, bo!" Now, anyone who has lived in Korea for any length of time knows what kai, bai, bo means--rock, paper, scissors. That's right, the entire plane was playing rock, paper, scissors. Now I'm curious, but not because of the rock, paper, scissors game. You see, Koreans play rock, paper, scissors all the time. They play it when they're bored to pass the time. They play it to make decisions (like who is going first, etc.). My students play it to figure out who gets to clean up the lunch table. I was curious as to why these people were playing it. Was it a massively orchestrated game to keep the passengers from being bored during the flight? This was my first assumption, but it was wrong. Instead, they were playing kai, bai, bo to figure out who would win free tickets to Jeju. That's right: the entire plane played rock, paper, scissors to decide who won a set of free tickets to Jeju. Kari almost won, coming in 2nd place. (In case you were wondering how an entire plane full of people plays rock, paper, scissors at the same time, everyone initially plays against the flight attendant until it gets down to the last two people.)
Once we got to Jeju, we rented a car so we could have full access to all of our destinations. We started at the Manjanggul Cave. Manjanggul is the world's largest lava tube, or a cave created by the flow of lava. Visitors are only allowed in a 1 km section of the cave in order to preserve the entire lava tube system. However, the part we were able to explore was really cool. You could see the patterns of where the lava had flowed and cooled on the floor. You could see the flow lines on the walls of the cave that showed how high the lava once flowed. The cave also had a bunch of different lava formations, including lava shelves, lava columns, lava rafts, and lava toes. And yes, we had a lot of fun making fun of the names of the different formations.
After checking out the lava tube, we explored a hedge maze. After getting turned around a few times, we finally found our way out. It was a lot of fun! And, it was nice to be in a maze for once that was not made out of corn (blasphemous, I know). We also grabbed our chance to get our picture taken with the local Jeju celebrity, a little statue guy. They are found all over the island and are found on basically every product that comes out of Jeju.
Saturday contained even more adventures. We started by picking some of Jeju's famous oranges at our hotel. We stayed in a beautiful little, out of the way place that was surrounded by woods and farmland. The hotel even had a garden with an orange grove. Right now, the tangerines are in season, and we were able to pick as many as we wanted from the hotel's grove. They were delicious! Definitely some of the best I've ever had. After picking our oranges, we drove partway up Hallasan so that we could do some hiking. It wasn't far on our way up before we saw the snow. We went from picking oranges to seeing snow a half an hour later. Crazy! We hiked about 3.2 km in the snow before turning around and heading back down. We may also have had a snowball fight on the way down.
After our hike, we went to the Jeju Folk Village to see the different kinds of traditional housing on Jeju. They had samples of houses from different parts of Jeju, including the mountains, the farmlands, and fishing villages. It was really neat to see the different examples of how Koreans traditionally lived.
Our final stop in the Jeju sightseeing tour was the beach. Since the temperature was only in the 50s, we just walked around a bit, but it was still fun to do a little exploring of the coastline. Once again, the contrast between the snow and the orange and palm trees, all within just a few miles of each other, was amusing. But, that's just part of what made Jeju delightful.
I really enjoyed our trip to Jeju. Everyone agrees--Jeju is a wonderful place to visit, and we would love to go back sometime and explore even more, this time in the summer so that we could enjoy more of the benefits of the beach and the ocean.
