Jeju-do, Part 2

When we got back to the hostel on Saturday night, there was a note for us that Young-Gin had left there. Attached was a set of keys! We still don't know what happened on Saturday, but we were able to use the car on Sunday and Monday. That was really nice. On Sunday we headed down to the southern city of Jeju- Seogwipo. To get there we drove through some neat looking forests (voted the most beautiful stretch of road in Jejudo) and got a good view of Hallasan (Mt. Halla) and Seogwipo. First we went to a waterfall (another attraction that you have to pay to see), then got some mandu and kimbop for brunch. The kimbop house we stopped at was right by a local market, so we walked around that a bit afterwards to see what interesting things were being sold. The only thing we bought was a dragon fruit. It's a pretty strange looking fruit. It doesn't taste like much, but the skin is thick and bright magenta with green leaves sticking off of it. From there we sought out a beach. In an effort to avoid crowds, we went to a less touristy area. The beach we ended up at had a really pretty view in one direction and a big cement pier with ugly buildings in the other direction. But, we had it all to ourselves, so we couldn't complain. The sand there was dark and much more sticky then the stuff in Udo. We spent several hours just relaxing there. Then, we went in pursuit of a yellow submarine. We had seen pictures advertising submarine rides, and we really wanted to see it (we're always singing that song). We found the place, but we couldn't actually see the submarine. You have to take a ferry out to it, and we didn't really want to go on a submarine ride. Oh well. We took a video by a mural of it instead :). From there we headed inland to see a tea plantation. The O'Sulloc Tea Museum had a few displays of tea cups and the history of tea. Most of the explanations were only in Korean, however. They have a nice gift shop there where we bought some souvenirs and some green tea and green tea flavored ice cream. Green tea is used to flavor everything here in Korea--bread, cookies, ice cream.... strange. After our snack, we walked around the tea fields (great view of Hallasan). The sun was sinking, and we decided to drive to the sea to see the sunset. It looked a lot closer than it turned out to be. We ended up on a bunch of itty-bitty backroads (which were really cool, actually) and finally wound our way to the coast. The sun was just sinking behind the horizon when we got there. We literally just saw the last 1-2 minutes of it. The sky and the water still looked pretty, though. As it got dark, we made our way back to Jeju-si. On the way we surfed the radio stations. The variety of music on the couple English stations was amusing. In Jeju-si we met up with Young-Gin to treat him for dinner. We had a good time getting to know him and finding out all kinds of interesting things about Korean culture and Jejudo culture. He knows a lot about languages and a lot of other stuff as well. The restaurant he chose was a "California Roll" restaurant (Japanese-American). We ate some interesting things there, including salmon, eel, and caviar. After dinner we went for coffee and talked some more before going back to the hostel for the night.