Our Future Plans and a Visit to the UN Memorial

Katie and I have decided to leave Korea at the end of our contracts in February. This may be a welcomed relief to our families (and students) but the time of worry is far from over as we will be travelling for four and a half months (137 days, to be exact) before we return. We have planned our trip roughly and we would like to share so you can come and meet us during our travels. I only really expect Dan to come visit as that is the sort of guy he is but please don’t hesitate to contact us if you fancy meeting up at any of our destinations.

The dates are saved on the map under the description if you follow the link and view the larger version. You can also see a simple table of information here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gY-OPJfcqQbIViODMcq3_TllEOGQBwjNwiVsMFsL3K4/edit
And there is a facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/272633589446339/.

View Proposed Travels in a larger map

Anyway before we go travelling we have about a million things to talk about so I would like to share what I got up to one day not so long ago.

I went to the only UN memorial cemetery in the world and I would like to say that it was an honour to see a memorial to all the brave servicemen of the 11 nations. The entrance to the memorial forces you to walk through a park with various pieces of “art” that these nations donated to the cemetery. I wonder if some nations just had some spare bricks and thought they could donate them in the form of a tower.

One country decided to donate the above statue, which obviously pays homage to the naked handstand regiment that lost so many lives during the torrid Korean War.

The first thing I noticed upon entering the cemetery was the pristine nature of the memorial. There isn’t much flat land in Busan that isn’t covered in horrible grey looking skyscrapers so I was shocked to find a huge space that was absolutely stunning inside. The main pathways were lined with trees and some had streams running alongside them as well, and both were beautiful to look at.

There are hundreds of graves in this beautiful park, that act as a sort of reality checker, serving as a reminder of the horrors that war creates in so many beautiful people’s lives and lands.

Full Screen the Panoramic

There were three other main memorials in the cemetery, one was a wall of the fallen and another was a building with a pretty design, while the last acted as a reminder of all the unknown soldiers who had died in the Korean War.

The memorial continued to surprise with a stunning lake surrounded by trees in an area that looked under construction.

I whole heartedly recommend the UN cemetery to everyone visiting Busan or living there as it is a spectacular sight, and acts as a constant reminder of how many people died to bring freedom to Korea and get people like me easy jobs, where I can save enough money to see the rest of the free world.

How to get there:

Get off at Kyungsung University Station (Subway Line 2). Have a look at this map to see how to walk there. It's fairly straight forward to get there and it's signposted in English (look at road signs). Or just get a cab, it's a 10-15 minute walk otherwise.

China-Korea-Tokyo Sobcoe Table

We have been busy updating the blog and coming up with a new feature for everyone to look at. We have attempted to compare China, Korea and Tokyo as holiday destinations for any prospective travellers out there. We have scored the places in a variety of categories from People to Food. The best way I could find of displaying our results is in the form of a google document. Red numbers get subtracted as they are negative attributes! Blue numbers get added as they are positive attributes.

So please have a look at the embedded spreadsheet to find out the winner.

EDIT: Updated Sobcoe Table to include all of Japan. Click here.


*SPOILER ALERT* Tokyo comes out on top. *SPOILER OVER*

Please tell us what you think of the comparison in the comments.

Tokyto-an-fro

So what else did we do in Tokyo besides celebrating false birthdays? Me, Katie and our tour guide Toshi went to Akihabara – the electronic district. We saw a huge queue to an arcade and decided to take a peak…

We then had a look in a temple...

Followed by a little trip to Takeshita street full of funky shops and the nearby bridge full of even funkier shoppers.

Cosplay

Toshi and I saw a Japanese garden while Katie looked at some dresses.

We then went and saw lots of fat men in nappies try to push each other out of a circle of sand – commonly known as Sumo.
Watch in HD!

There are a lot more videos on my youtube account.

If a night of watching fat men grapple with each other wasn’t homoerotic enough, we then stumbled across the most extravagant Hello Kitty store ever. It was fabulous!

We finished the night by going round a Ferris wheel and saw the city at night, (I didn't really see it because I was too distracted by the impending sense of doom that I always feel when I'm more than 2 meters off the ground. It was horrible) which was spectacular… or generic, as all major cities look the same at night. In fact I feel so strongly about this that I vow to never go up a tower or round a Ferris wheel again to see a major city at night. A side note but look at this photo taken by NASA of India at night during Diwali.

We’re gonna finish with a quick sprint of our last two days. We went to another temple, which was really beautiful.
Actually, in Japan they are called shrines, since they are more spiritual than religious, and I personally found them much more calming and contemplative than the Buddhist temples we've seen so far in Korea and China. There were lots of interesting things going on, including a big thing with smoke coming out, that people were patting all over their bodies to get rid of evil spirits.

Katie Got Her Fortune Told

Then we went to a cool market to look for goodies!!

Went to a park with a lake and saw an incredibly strange mime.

After, we had a look around the business area called Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi, and it was full of tall buildings.

And we finished in Shibuya to do some people watching…

I would like to finish by saying that you should not fly with a cold. I did and I lost hearing in my right ear for over 10 days. However during the flight, we did snap a few photos of clouds as it was a lovely clear day – helped me forget about my troublesome ear!
And the several free beers that I had helped me ignore Dave's moaning about his troublesome ear. So all in all a lovely time was had by all :)

Tokyoing

After I caught the blog squirts, I have encountered blog constipation and not because of lack of events or worthwhile stories. It’s due to me trying to focus on my future by looking for work, as well as (finally) starting my new sitcom, which I have been meaning to write for over two years. My bullshit and creative juices have been salivating like a rabid dog, just not all over this blog and your shiny reading glasses.

Anyway, today we’re writing about Tokyo as we visited in September for three nights and had a whale of a time . Not a blue, sad whale struggling with weight problems, but more like the sort of fun a sprightly sperm whale might have swimming around. In fact, I shouldn’t really use the idiom “whale of a time” because if there is one animal that truly despises spending time in Japanese waters due to fear of death, it is the whale.

When we arrived, I had arranged to meet an old school friend called Toshi who was from Tokyo and was generous enough to pick us up from the airport, drive us to our hostel and show us around the city. Toshi, you were a wonderful tour guide and I certainly learned a lot, especially when you were talking about Japanese history on the ride from the airport about, and I’m sure Katie’s dreams were full of tales of emperors and whatnot (she slept – the two hour flight took a lot out of her). Thank you so much Toshi, as I said, I will happily return the favour in Korea or if you visit me when I’m back in London.

The reunions were only just beginning though as we met up with Lau and Dan, who we know from London. Dan, as you might remember, recently visited us in Korea for about 2 weeks when we went to Seoul and that art exhibition. Lau is an old school friend of mine who does not like to get naked as much as Dan. However, Dan was not topless when we met up, but if the night went where I hoped, it would not stay like that for long.

All five of us went to Shibuya crossing – that famous zigzag one where it is incredibly busy and great for a photo.

After dinner (to be spoken about in a future blog by Katie) we went for drinks. It started with an eerie walk through a scary corridor full of various screaming zombies to get us started – quite weird for a bar. Dan and Lau decided to tell them it was my birthday, which it wasn’t, and it meant that I got some special treatment.

Due to it being my birthday, we went to a private room with no air conditioning and suddenly the lie was not paying off as we dripped in sweat while deciding what to order. The bar certainly had a theme, which is best explained in photos.

Our drinks selection.

Lau doing his own Chemistry

This bar excited the chemist inside me and I enjoyed mixing A+B+C = D+R+U+N+K. They even had little 80-90% alcohol pills that you swallowed. My lecturers and teachers would be so proud…

Dan Not Naked

Unfortunately Dan and Lau were flying home the next morning so it really was a brief encounter at the end of their two week holiday.

So that’s the first day and night covered of Tokyo and the next blog will cover the remainder of the trip (including some cultural stuff). But thanks Dan and Lau for coming to see me on my imaginary birthday, I had a wonderful time and the imaginary cake was awesome.

Festival Frenzy

Food, flowers, booze, mountains, rivers, music, nature – it seems to me that every weekend Busan hosts a different festival to celebrate…well pretty much anything you can think of. We’ve experienced quite a few since moving to Korea and this blog will give you some idea as to what they were all about.

First up we have the Suyeong Flower Festival. This was a very simple festival held in a small park by the river Suyeong. There wasn’t much going on in the way of entertainment while we were there but we did get some lovely photos of the arrangements that had been created in the grounds so here are my favourites: 

A couple of weeks later we attended a Makeolli Festival. For those of you who don’t know, Makeolli (with a variety of different Romanised spellings) is a traditional Korean drink made from rice. It’s usually around 8% and has a pleasant, but quite yeasty taste. It also comes in many flavours, of which mango is obviously the best. Anyway, it took quite a while to get to the festival site and I have to say it wasn’t that great – hardly any free samples and again, not much going on. However, we did eat some scrummy pajeon (a Korean spring onion pancake which I have learnt to make) and had a rather bizarre experience involving some traditional dancers and drummers. We had only been on the festival site for about 2 minutes when we were surrounded by about 15 people playing very loud instruments, wearing strange costumes and dancing round the two of us while 150 Koreans pointed and laughed at us silly foreigners. 

We danced with them while they circled around us and the whole thing went on for over 4 minutes before they let us go! I know it was this long because Dave made a video of most of it, which we will upload in a later blog.

After we got bored of the festival we moved on to a different part of the city, famous for housing a big university and thus lots of places to drink and party. There was a connected event going on here – a makeolli street party. We were given lots of free cups of makeolli, served out of a petrol canister, and we danced the night away under the stars to live music including, amazingly, some drum’n’bass!

The final festival in this post is perhaps best explained with pictures so I will keep the words to a minimum. It was the Haeundae Sand Festival – a festival of sand, held on Haeundae beach. Nuff said.

Great start - no sand in sight but clearly
I had to include this epic robo-pic!

There was loads of sand art moulded onto the sides of
big humps of...sand. It was pretty sandy.

Some was kind of odd...

...some didn't make much sense...

...Gulliver was there...

...and so were the ghostbusters!

This is my best impression of a mermaid.
You can't see in the picture but I have fins and a tail, honest!

Awesome dragon and Asian man dude.

Antz?

There was a Fairytale theme going on...

...hence Tom Thumb.

There were a couple of big ones that had been painted.

Sadly these guys got a bit lost since the Yellow Brick Road
kind of blended into the sand.

We have loads more pictures but I had to be discerning and just choose my faves. Anyway, it was dead good!

I'm sure one day we will catch up with the blogs but we're off to China in a couple of days and have had quite a few adventures the last couple of weeks with my family so it'll be a while until we're up to date, sorry!