Woo, waking up at 5:45 and watching the sun rise on the beach is incredible. Good times. Of course, now that I'm writing this I sort of wish I stayed asleep a little longer. Why? The town is pretty dead in the morning. Everyone sleeps in here, since everyone works late. Chuseok has already begun over here as well so everyone seems to be pretty merry. Today me and Amy are spending the day by ourselves while Markus teaches back in Masan.
View from the hotel room, writing some blog posts!
They had a sex toy vending machine on the stairs... pretty funny
Right after we woke up we decided to go out and walk the beach, there were many very cool sculptures in the area. Sadly, I already started to regret the whole waking up early decision and started to feel very sleep deprived. A white chocolate mocha (from a starbucks, they're everywhere here) and a double shot later, I started to feel quite a bit better.
Cool head sculptures on the beach..
Each one had a different theme.. I bet you can't guess this guy
Rather than hail a cab, we decided we'd walk to our first destination, the art museum. I mean, it can't be that far right? It's oh so close on the map! We had no idea the magnitude of the size of this city. So we basically walked about the 4th of the way and then headed back to our base at the beach. Then when we got back we realized the art museum was actually closed because of the holiday. Luckily Amy wasn't distressed and too high on the foreign travel to really mind. Instead we decided to go to the giant Korean war memorial. Shortly afterwards we hired a cab.
Another classic Korean site we saw along the way, free outside gyms.
I figure this is a good time to talk about the whole cab/car system here. Back in the states, I considered them a medium of transport for the lethargic, wealthy or drunk folk, but here, they are a lifeline. Pretty much as cheap as can be at about 12000 won for going across town (~10 dollars). Unfortunately, you need a picture or some korean words ahead of time to avoid a very lengthy charades process, but luckily Mark warned us of this before hand. As far as the average driver goes, everyone.. EVERYONE has a GPS. Why? Because the roads are clearly made by drunken Irishmen to quote our old muscle head governor. There are no signs, and intersections are like some spider's web where the spinner was a lab test subject on Meth. Everyone parks every which way, and people literally stop in the middle of the road, turn on their hazard lights, and run over to the nearest bush to take a leak. The driving is also crazy, and makes St Cloud drivers look a little more sane, although probably still more dense.
We arrived at the war memorial and were amazed at the monuments constructed to commemorate such a struggle. When one thinks of the cold war, they generally think of the past, but officially it is still going on every day, the Korean war never ended.
War is hell. I think this picture sums it up pretty nicely.
A picture of the main memorial, the inside part had a small shrine covered with tablets inscribed with the names of hose who died. It was also on a very tiny island in the middle.
Another memorial, with Amy at the center
Afterwards we headed back to the area around the bus terminal, so we could get an easy exit from the city. Being hungry again we decided to hit up the local pizza place, Mr. Pizza. Man, foreign pizza is so much more interesting than the basics america has to offer.
check it out! 4 types! It was good!Time to hit up the bus station.. and how much did an hour bus ride to Masan cost? <70 cents! Woot. Upon arrival, we still had some time to kill before walking around so we decided to check out the area around Masan. We didn't end up really finding anything interesting, but I got one of my first admirers. While we were talking a young girl just dead stopped in her tracks and pivoted around as we walked by. About 30 yards further I looked back and she was STILL staring at me and she waved, I waved back and I think I made her day. It was pretty funny. As a result of this we decided to have a minor competition as to who would get stared at more… Amy won.
Afterwards we hailed another taxi driver to get back into Mark's area, unfortunately the fellow wasn't too sure as to where our destination was, so we were quite worried for a bit… luckily I started to recognize the area and we were able to find Mark's place of work just in time to frighten his students with my height.
Afterwards we met up with Mark's friend Steven and decided to hit up a vietnamese restaurant, good stuff. We decided we'd drive out tonight to potentially avoid the chusung traffic, so we picked up Chris who was coming and along and headed out on a very very looong drive…. 6-7 hours.
It's fairly nuts when you think about the driving here, because the country is smaller than the size of Minnesota. However, it's so mountainous that something that could take about an hour and 30 minutes could take, well… 7 hours… needless to say by the time we arrived at a hotel (4-5am) we were really tired.
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