road trip!!

on friday night, around 10pm, mine and jacki's friend joyoung called and asked if we wanted to get out of the city on saturday, do some sightseeing, hiking, and possibly a picnic. he had access to a car for the weekend, and wanted to do something nice for us before we leave korea. joyoung has been a great friend to us here in korea, he's our "brother." in korean culture, when you have a friend of the opposite gender, you refer to them as your big/little brother/sister, depending on your age. so at 10am saturday morning, joyoung picked us up and we were off to the northwest coast!

"i'm just a beginner!"

joyoung and jacki

"home of the whopper," joyoung pronounced it "hu-pper" (WHO-pper)

driving through jongno

me in the backseat..

top cloud

we stopped at a restroom that had a TINY bathroom stall, so tiny that we couldn't close the door..

driving through seoul, not on a bus, or in a taxi, is always fun because i haven't gotten a chance to do it often. it's just a different way to see the city, and also cool when we're driving across the city and i knew where i was, and how to get from here to there. joyoung told us he "has a license, but doesn't have much practice.." and whenever we'd shout at him to stop, or turn or whatnot, he'd say, "i'm a beginner!!" so needless to say, it was an interesting day!

after picking us up, we had to pick up joyoung's college friend, daeyoung (english name: dale),  grab some road trip snacks and then we were westbound.

doesn't he look delicious?

lunch.

once we finally made it to ganghwa, we stopped for lunch to enjoy what the area is famous for: eel. it was pretty similar to a traditional korean bbq meal--you grill the meat yourself and you get a variety of sides. to feed 4 people, we got 3 orders of eel. each order comes with about 5 inches of an eel tail, skin in cluded, and they throw it on the grill while it's still moving!

eel (장어 chang-aw)

our eel is on the grill, the three tails at the far end. this came with a variety of sides, probably the most i've ever seen. there was ginger, cucumbers, carrots, hot peppers, mushrooms, radishes, sweet potatoes, dried fruits and nuts, mini shrimp, onions, a creamy apple salad, broccoli, dried eel bones, a few varieties of kimchi and greens for wrapping.

the red sauce in the circular container next to the grill is a red pepper garlic sauce---SO delicious. great for all types of meats.

my first eel wrap. these particular green leafs are very special. they come from the east side of korea and each plant only produces three per year!

mmmm....soup. koreans eat soup with just about every meal.

after our amazing lunch, we were back in the car on our way to seokmo island. to get there, we had to drive our car onto a ferry, and enjoy a ferry ride for about 10 minutes.

on our way to seokmo island (seokmodo)

sambo ferry

our road trip vehicle..small enough that when our wonderful driver forgot to slow down or tell us he was about to go over a speed bump, jacki and i would hit our heads on the roof!

when we were back on land, our mission was to drive to bomunsa temple, a buddhist temple. on our drive there we saw a lot of south korean soldiers in look out posts, as we were very near to the north korean border. it's not as though we were knocking on their door, but we could see their mountains, and were very close the the red "do not cross" line on our map.

when we got to bomunsa we were greeting by a steep inclined walk (easily a 45 degree angle hill), and then just when it plateaued, we found ourselves at the base of a stair case that took roughly 15-20 minutes to climb. the view was definitely worth it though.

entrance to bomunsa

up we go, part 1.

jacki and joyoung

up we go, part 2.

view from the top.

people praying to the giant buddha at the top.

our climb..

we made it!

 back down the stairs...

it's said that 300 of buddhas disciples worshipped at this temple..

joyoung..."don't you want to take a picture of me?"

 back down the hill...

ajimas selling produce and assorted other things (ah-ji-ma=old lady)

ajima selling drying dried fish.

our last stop before heading home was a mud beach. we saw it driving in and it looks really bizarre, at first it was hard to tell it wasn't water because of how the sun reflected off of it. if we had more time, and weren't in joyoung's company car, we could of had a lot of fun playing at the mud beach..

mud beach

and then we sat in traffic for four hours to get home...