Namhae Weekender Trip and Buddha's Birthday: Part 2

Alright, I promised the Temple visit and the rice terraces were coming up next so here we are. I felt surprisingly well rested when I woke up Sunday morning and definitely ready for walking around and looking at some beautiful scenery. First we visited Geumsan Boriam Temple which is high in the mountains of Namhae island. To me it seemed like the classic mountain temple people associate with China or really any Asian country, although of course the architecture and scenery are quite different depending where you are. 

The walk to get up to the temple was a long one, since there were so many people visiting it for Buddha's birthday weekend there were tons of cars. Our driver finally gave up driving us all the way to the top and dropped us off a little further from the shuttle maybe 1 km or so, it wasn't a long walk up or anything. Once you got the the main parking area you have to take a shuttle to the trail and walk the rest of the way. This didn't take long, not even an hour. We walked the rest of the way up to the temple. By this time it was getting hot so it was a little tiring and it was all up hill.. 

The temple was nestled into the mountain side with amazing views going all the way out to the ocean. You could see rolling hills, then after that, islands as far as the eye could see. It was a perfect, clear day for a good view of the island as well. You could also see one of the islands many small towns spread out in the bay below. The temple was really busy with people coming to pray. There was a constantly line into the temples of people praying as well as outside in front of the main large buddha statue. 

The atmosphere was nice though. Korean's tend to behave more touristy than western's do in their own country. Korea is so much small too, so it's easier to travel around to different cities. We also tried sticking a coin to the rocks. Apparently you were supposed to lick a coin then hold it to the rock while saying a pray, if the coin stuck to the rock then your prayer would be answered, but if it fell off then you were out of luck. My friend had no luck the first time we attempted it, but later I found a larger rock with a bumper surface. The trick is to stick the coin along a little ridge on the rock's side so it balances there and doesn't fall off. It worked well so lucky me my pray was answered, although I have to wonder if the work is still there... 

The temple was pretty similar to most temples I've seen now, you can see all the photos of it in my Namhae album. After the temple we went back down the mountain and caught the shuttle back. We had to wait for a bit for everyone to get down, but then finally we were off to the rice terraces. They were beautiful. It was a whole area, right by the ocean, with old terrace's going right down to the sea. It took us awhile to get down to the bottom. We ended up stopping for lunch, twice. 

There were restaurants dotted along the path down. The first place we tried looked promising, it was busy and had the cold noodles we'd been craving (or at least I had been). We grabbed a table and set about translating the menu (it wasn't in English). There were a few things we could read, but most of it were words we didn't know. My friend went over and grabbed us some water, then went to the counter to order. She came back a couple minutes later looking confused. The owner had ignored her. She tried to order in Korean and he had just moved onto the next person. Confused, she let them go ahead of her and then finally came back to the table when she heard he speaking about her in Korean (although she couldn't understand everything he said). 

Shortly after this happened, as we discussed what to do, another girl from our tour bus came over wondering if the owner had served us. We said that he hadn't and she said her friends and her had experienced similar discrimination. After a second attempt to order food we finally left, leaving our used water glasses and water jug on the table. Unfortunately this is a thing that happens in Korea to foreigners from time to time. This is the first time I experienced direct discrimination of this kind from an establishment in Korea. It is not the norm, usually people are friendly and helpful, usually they want you to eat in their restaurant and help you order and often they will give you service (pronounced more like serbisue) which means they give you free stuff such as a free drink or side dish or extra portion (this is a really common practice in Korea. It's just to show they appreciate your business and hope you return). It also seemed really strange to mean that they wouldn't serve foreigners in what was clearly a popular tourist destination. That has to be a huge loss for their business especially consider a foreign patron or even a Korean one could see that behaviour and go online and complain about it (like me!). 

After the disappointing experience at the first restaurant we went across the path to a different restaurant who I'm happy to say were more than happy to serve us and a bunch of other foreigners who were already eating there. The place was much better and well I can't say if the food was better than the first place (since I never ate any of there food) I like to think that it was better. I ended up ordering bibimbap which just means 'mixed rice' it is a dish pretty much synonymous with South Korea. Usually bibimbap has a variety of vegetables, rice and a sauce, sometimes some meat as well. The one I got at this restaurant was nothing like that. It had four kinds of seaweed in the bowl and the rice was on the side. In the centre of the seaweed was some soft, creamy, orangy-yellow stuff. I had never seen anything like it. Great, mystery seafood. I do admit, it looked pretty intimidating and perhaps at another time in my life, when I was less hungry and hadn't been exposed to many strange new things over the matter of months I may have not ate it, or picked at it delicately. 

This was not that time. I was starving by this point, having barely eaten anything since that morning (okay, maybe starving is too strong, but you get the idea) so I dumped the rice in and gave it a good mix around and dove right in. It was pretty tasty, generally I like seaweed, given the taste isn't too strong and fishy (but honestly, I've mostly gotten past that) and the texture isn't too strange (mostly gotten past that too) this was neither and the mushy, creamy sea creature in the middle seemed to make a nice, mild, sauce for the bibimbap. It was pretty tasty after all. I felt fairly proud I'd conquered such unusually dish and enjoyed it too. 

A couple weeks later I was sitting at a bar with a group of Korean's and foreigners, we were talking about strange foods or something and I told them about my bibimbap on Namhae. I described the mystery seafood in the middle and immediately they knew what it was. At first it was fish eggs and I said, no it was that, I've had those lots of times, they're not like this. Then one of the them said it was a sea egg which just confused me... what exactly was a sea egg? By this point, I started to get an inkling of where they were going. I thought about it for a half a second, remembering the soft orangey-yellow colour and the creamy texture... I'd seen that before somewhere on Tv... yes... on a japanese cooking show. Sea urchin! I exclaimed, they looked confused but we managed to translate it and it was indeed sea urchin. It was one of those things I could see older and less adventurous family members cringing in shock at and I do admit the first time I heard Sea Urchin was a popular delicacy I was surprised and kinda grossed out. 

The sea urchin I had was definitely not gross, nor was it surprising to find in a coast town in a country where they aren't afraid to use every bit of everything edible, something in North America we don't tend to do. 

After this adventure we headed back to our beach and the camp site to relax on the beach. There is another cool feature of Korea society that came in handy for us. We kinda forgot about getting dinner and it was getting kinda late. I Korea you can do this magical thing were you can order take out the beach. It was very nifty. We had  Korean girl with our group so she called them just and ordered us a bunch of Chinese food and then we waited and they brought us delicious foods, right to our spot on the beach. A guy showed up on a scooter, with his giant carry case on the back and brought us dinner. Magic, now that is something I could get used to. 

The next day, and our last day on Namhae, we spent the day at the beach exclusively. It was beautiful and warm and sunny. There was one thing that was less beautiful though, the beach covered in garbage from the previous nights festivities. Not from us, I hope. I know I had been very care to gather up all my garbage before I headed back to my hostel. No, there were tons of people on the beach and people had had fires the night before so of course we'd spent some time hanging out and drinking around the bonfires, it's like a beach tradition or something (at least in north america it is). So we spent our first hours on the beach cleaning up garbage. 

After cleaning I was hungry and went and got food with another girl in our group. After we ate it was time to go kayaking, paddling boarding, snorkling or whatever else our hearts desired. I ended up going kayaking with Julianne until we saw the banana boat go by, which was basically a long banana shaped blowup tube being pulled behind a seado. Well we decided we had to try that. We got back in just as another group was about to go out, but what was this? They happened to need two more people before they could go? Perfect! It was really awesome and fast and there was lots of leaning involved so we didn't capsize. 

After that, snorkelling, then packing up the rest of the camping gear and finally we headed back to the bus and rode back to Changwon and Busan. It was a really great, early summer weekend trip. I would definitely do it again in a heart beat. I do hope to go back to Namhae for another weekend trip. It is definitely one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen and I loved the atmosphere of the group. 

Don't worry, more adventures to come, next I'll probably write a little about MERS so you guys don't have to worry and I can tell you all what a strange experience it is. So until next time! 

Namhae Weekend Trip and Buddha's Birthday

This past weekend I went to an island in the south of Korea, a little west of my city Changwon. It is called Namhae and also known as Treasure Island. It is the second largest island in South Korea after Jeju Island. I went with my friends from a hagwon and we paid for an inclusive tour targeted towards young people with Enjoy Korea. We'd previously gone on trips with them and really enjoyed ourselves. It's just easier when you live in a country where your first language isn't their first language... planning certain kinds of trips can be a little bit more tricky than it is at home.

So our weekend started with a bus trip to Namhae, Changwon is only about 2 hours away so we didn't leave until 10:30 which suited me perfectly. Since our friends were camping they had a ton of gear. We arrived at the pension after 12 and set up everything, then it was off to find a convenience store, this is when I got my first view of the beach. Our pension was really close to the beach and when we walked down you could see tents set up everywhere. Campsites are different in Korea than in Canada. There was no space between the sites, everyone just set up their tents next to each other, it looked crowded.

The beach was long and sandy, I think the sand must've been brought in because none of the other beaches in this area had sand like that. It was beautifully soft and wide so their was lots of room to relax above the tide line. We were in kind of a bay so it almost felt like you were on a lake since it curved around on both sides then there were some little islands out in the middle. There were tons of other foreigners around because another tour group was also staying at that beach, that and it was a long weekend.

On our first day we were going to the beef and garlic festival, yes, that's right, a beef and garlic festival.. Korea has festivals for almost everything. When we were driving to our pension/campsite we passed the festival and were impressed with the amount of garlic we saw. I hadn't been paying as much attention to the scenery as I could've been, but my friend informed me she'd been seeing garlic since they arrived on the island and then I started to notice it too. Field after field of garlic and their stalks laid out to dry in the hot spring sun. I guess it is garlic harvesting season in Korea, what better time to attend a beef and garlic festival!

The festival had a lot of garlic, like everywhere. There were garlic sculptures, sacks of garlic, black garlic (I believe fermented garlic), garlic for sale, garlic blow ups floating in a lake across the street, two garlic statues, one giant one and another carved out of stone. They take their garlic very seriously here apparently. We also lots of evidence of beef, but I honestly think they just added the beef onto the title to make it sound more appeal. I mean, who doesn't want to go to a beef and garlic festival? Right? Just a garlic festival, well I'm not so sure. I mean, I'd go, but I can see how it sounds less appealing.

As we walked around we could smell delicious food cooking everywhere and started to get hungry. We'd been told by our tour group that their would be cooking demonstrations in the main tent and they would be handing out samples so we headed that way. On our way there we saw one of the sources of the delicious smell. An out door bbq place. They had flat topped grills set up under tents and people standing around grilling meat. I told my friends we had to try that... little did I know what was to come...

The next interesting thing we saw was a group of performers all wearing white and bright blue dressy/trendy clothing. They were playing the traditional style korean drums (a variety of them) but with a bit more upbeat song. A few of the guys were sporting dreads or short, tight curls so I don't think they were full Korea or they were visiting (it's extremely rare to see Korean's with dreads or anything of that kind). They also had Capoeira performers which is a style of martial arts they do in Brazil... it's usually done to music. The guys performing looked Japanese, which makes sense because there is a large Japanese population in Brazil. I guessed that some of the performers were perhaps visiting Korea or touring-- anyway, it was very strange to see a demonstration of Brazilian martial arts at a Korean garlic festival... but still cool nonetheless, plus the drummers were really good, like really really good. Everyone was swaying along.

After we saw them we finally reached the main tent were the food was cooking...When we walked in we saw there were tables everywhere with grills in the middle. People were running around putting coals in the fire as people arrived. There were tons of people sitting around eating. We saw to the left of the tent there were vendors selling beef and sides for bbq. A couple of people in our group went over to check out the prices. We sat and watched the cooking, debating whether to go stand in the sample line. Finally, after much debate about the cost and how much to pay we had to large packs of beef and two trays of side dishes, beers and a bottle of soju (the popular korean booze of choice).

One thing to note about Korean beef is it's a lot more expensive than I'm used too. You cannot but a steak for under $10 as you might in Canada, maybe with beef from outside Korea, but Korean beef, no. Actually you probably can't find the standard cuts of beef we're used to in the west that easily anyway.

Basically, this bbq experience taught me why it's more expensive: It's really really freaking* delicious. I don't know if we just got really fresh beef, or it was more high quality than usual or what, but I can honestly say I have never had beef that good in Korea before. I think my friends can attest to this. It was literally just a thinly cut steak of beef with nothing on it that we tossed on the grill (because that's how you do things in Korea) and it was super tender, juicy, the fat that marbled our cut basically melted away, but added really nice flavour. It didn't have an old beefy taste or anything, it was so good. I'm getting hungry thinking about it. We mostly just ate it on it's own or with a little salt, and of course with some grilled garlic. There were also lettuce leaves to wrap it in (standard for korean bbq) and some onions in soy sauce and something else which is also common at bbq.

The bbq set up was also really neat. There were tons of tables with the grills in the middle set up around the tent. It was the main tent so it was larger than the ones we'd seen previously. There were little stools to sit on and people would bring you charcol and you could grab the grill top yourself. It wasn't a restaurant at all, it was literally a place to buy meat, grill it yourself and eat. There were people giving away sauces and of course garlic to go with the meat in the centre of the tent.

Then there were some people cooking. They were two or three foreign guys from our Enjoy Korea group. They made some mexican style beef (I forgot the name, but it's a fairly popular one) and empanada's which were amazing. The line took a little long so during our second trip three of us went up and we kept trading places so one or two of us could go back to our table and grab a chuck of beef. After we finished the first to packs of beef we grabbed a third (it was that good, guys, really!)

After eating we wandered around the festival a little bit, taking some pictures with the giant garlic statues... yes that was also a thing. Some how we stumbled upon what looked like a drag show? It was a guy dressed up in makeup and women's clothing singing songs that had a traditional / old-timey vibe to them. There were a bunch of ajama's and ajashee's watching (elderly folk) and they seemed really into it. The singer invited us to sit and listen when my friend went up to get a photo. It was really fun and relaxing after being in the noisy tent, although we couldn't understand the words the music was good.

Next we went back to the main tent because they were release balloons with LED lights in them. Personally I'm not a fan of these balloon release that they like to do at Korean festivals (so far I've seen it happen twice) it really isn't good for the environment and my west coast heart goes against it, but it did come with the festival and as they when in Korea do as the Korean's do... well maybe not, but you get the idea.

The balloon release was fun, despite what my heart said about it. After we released the balloons they also let a giant floating lantern go. It was a little bit scary, it didn't get very high up because the lantern caught on fire and fell back into the crowd. Luckily it fell pretty slowly and everyone just moved out of the way. I do admit I'm a little afraid of fire and I may have rushed off to the side when it started to fall....

The last part of the evening was more dancing, the drummers from earlier in the afternoon played on stage and sang some popular songs. I was really surprised everyone was sitting down listen, but then they got the drummers out again and people began dancing. Especially the ajama's (older ladies) they really know how to party over here haha.

When we headed back to the bus everyone was still pretty pumped up from the music, dancing and drinking so we decide we needed some music for the way back to the beach. Our tour leader couldn't get the music to work so one of the guys from my group offered to sing. Apparently he'd either drank enough to have no qualms about it, or he wasn't the nervous type. Anyway he got up there and belted out some songs, he got everyone singing and by the time we got back to the hostel we had music playing and half the bus dancing. It was one of those random, crazy things that happen with these kinds of trips when you have a bunch of like-minded young people together.

The very last part of the night was spent on the beach, hunkering down with one last drink before we headed to bed.  The next day was going to be long with both a temple visit and walking around the rice terraces. So I'll save that day for post two because I just noticed how long this one's got. So Temple and Rice terraces coming soon! Promise.