Fun and fishies in Jeju do

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Hello again!  This is a very time consuming exercise.  So, we arrived in Jeju do with our pizza box, as you will see in some pictures.  All we wanted was to get rid of it at that point!  Upon arrival, we decided to do it up right, and went straight to tourist information.  Ryan, bless his heart, asked the woman what area is the best for young people to go to at night, and asked which scuba places had english service.  That's right, we went scuba diving!

Our first day in Jeju was pretty low key, because the weather wasn't great.  To be honest, I can't even remember what exactly we did do.  Oh I remember, we went to Nore bong!   We went downtown, and shopped around, and checked out the scene so that we would know where to go that night.  We ate dinner at a Korean restaurant, which had no english or pictures or anything, so Ryan asked some girls at the table next to ours for advice on what we should order.  We ended up with the hottest thing I've ever managed to eat.  IT was good, but it was so spicy we had to rinse it in rice before eating a piece!  But it was good.  Afterwards we wandered around, and ended up finding a foreigner bar, after meeting a Korean-Canadian who directed us there.  We ended up meeting

you can't do it all, but you sure can try!

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We went home fairly early so that we could get up early the next day to travel to the other side of the Island where the scuba shop that we set up our lesson and dive with would be.  Fortunately, we met a friendly, drunk American girl the night before who instructed us where to get a taxi that would give us a flat rate to get to the other side of the island.

The next day, we got up as intended, and had our fingers crossed for a nice day, which it was.  We met up with our Scuba guide (whose english wasn't that great, and who really wasn't that good of an instructor because of it), and had a bit of a crash course in scuba.  Then, we got on our wetsuits and set off for the harbour, where we were taken by boat to a beautiful little island with some of the most interesting rock formations I had seen.

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Scuba was lots of fun, though I had a few mishaps getting started.  It was really neat to see some of the fish we'd seen in the aquarium the day before in their natural habitat.  I was almost as enthralled by all the different plant life, with fluorescent yellow and purple and orange and green.  IT was great.  The water could have been warmer, of course, but we were alright.

After scuba we went for Galbie, which Ryan turned out to like quite a lot.  Of course, Galbie is delicious, and who wouldn't like it?  Other than people who don't eat meat of course.  After lunch, we set off for a temple that we had read about in our guide.

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The temple was increadible!  IT was the nicest temple that I had seen since arriving.  IT had a view of the yellow sea, (or was it the chinese sea... don't know), and was utterly stunning.  Also, this temple reportedly had the largest Budda in Korea.  I don't know.  He didn't seem THAT big...  Well maybe.  We spent a lot of time there, and actually entered the temple, which isn't something I normally do.  Usually I feel like its wrong to use other people's faith for tourism.  But I wanted to see, and so did Ryan.

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That night, we went back to Jeju city from Sweogipo city, where we were during the day, and went for my first Indian food since leaving Canada.  The night before, we had seen the Indian restaurant but decided against it, because we figured that it would be Korean Indian food, and not proper Indian food.  But then, at the foreigner bar, the proprieter told us that the chef had just been brought in from India a few weeks prior, and that the food is great.  I was very happy.  On this trip I managed to have Mexican food, and Indian food, two things I greatly miss!

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So then, we looked for a place to go dancing, but it was a Thursday night, and really nobody was dancing.  We found a fun restaurant where we could get soju, and drank and talked about the history of sexual repression.  Its actually very interesting in Korea, because its such a repressive country in that respect.  But then, not too long ago, Canada was as well.  The thing I enjoyed most about this conversation was that we could say whatever we wanted, and virtually no one around us could evesdrop and think we were rude, or wrong, or crazy, because nobody understood us.  How great.  Its so freeing to be able to say whatever you want (but be careful in bigger cities!  more people speak english there).

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From there, we went back to the foreigner bar, and ended up meeting some Western guys, and we sat with them and chatted about many things, particularly politics.  We ended up going with two of them to another bar after the foreigner bar closed and drinking and talking until 6:00am.  They were a little annoying in the end, but they were also a little drunk.  Unfortunately staying up so late wrote off our next day, and our hopes of going horseback riding.  Alas.  Oh well, you can't do it all, but you sure can try!