Journey to Korea - Day 8

Day 8 is Thursday, May 31.  We were all pretty much packed from the night before.  Today, we will ride the train Gunsan/Kunsan.  The "G" and "K" are often interchangeable in Korea, so Gunsan and Kunsan meant the same place.  We met for breakfast in the hotel.  Mistie and Gina had eaten the breakfast buffet in the hotel several times, but this is the first time we all eat together.  The breakfast buffet was amazing.  There were your standard breakfast foods such as eggs, bacon and cereal.  Then there was other food such as rice, bulgogi, and fish.  There was a chef who made omelets with chopsticks.  I ordered one.  I was amazed at how quickly and easily she made it.  It was a little runny and wet for my taste, but still I was amazed at her skills.

 
Have you ever seen such a buffet?  This is the food we ate.

 This was my food.  Rice with green vegetables, a little beef bulgogi and a roll.  It was sooooooo good!

 

After we finished breakfast, we checkout out of our hotel.  Let me just say the laundry service  at the hotel was very expensive.  By Monday, we all had laundry to do.  Most of us had only packed five to six days worth of clothes.  On Tuesday, my mother and I went ahead and laundered the clothes we wore on Monday.  You just put the laundry a plastic laundry sac on the bed, put the "laundry" tag on your doorknob and it's brought back by 7 p.m.  When I say expensive, I mean over $300 for laundry service for two days.  I was even prepared to do laundry at a laundry mat.  I brought trial size detergents.  Had I known it was so expensive I would have washed my stuff in the bathtub with my detergent. We all had to do the laundry the first time around, but I would have held off the second day.  So be aware!

The hotel men helped us get two taxis to take us to the Yongsan station.  We needed two taxis for all the luggage!  One of our taxi drivers was the same one who took us to the embassy the day before.  The train station was huge.  I think it had a shopping mall attached to it.  We didn't shop this time though.

We had to wait about 30 minutes for our train to depart.  It left at 10:25 a.m.  

 We had a fun time throwing Gina's huge suitcase on board!  I think she had everything plus except the bidet in there.  :)  The train was a lot like the subway.  It made stops every once in a while. It was roomy and comfortable.  It was a three and a half hour ride.  My mom and Gina slept on the way to Gunsan.  Mistie read her Kindle and I journaled.

 

You could see we were getting further and further away from the big city.  Tall buildings got smaller.  The apartment buildings started to spread out.  There were more trees.  And then the rice fields came.

 

It was pretty.  We arrived at Gunsan station about 1:45 p.m.  You could tell we were not in Seoul.  Remember, when we got off the subway in Seoul this is what it looked like:

 When we got off the train in Gunsan, this is what it looked like:

 There was no one around.  Quite a bit different.  It was a little odd.  We walked into the train station which was so much smaller than Yongsan Station, but just as nice and clean.

 I loved this.  The picture below shows three vending machines:  a soda machine (white), a snack food machine (yellow), and a book machine (blue).  How awesome is that?   I had no idea how it worked, but I thought it was extremely cool!

 

 

A lady who worked in the station helped us get a couple of taxis.  She told them we wanted to go to the Oscar Hotel.  It took us about 30 minutes to get the Oscar Hotel.  On the way there, I realized Gunsan is not just all rice fields.  It's actually a pretty big city.  Mistie said it's the fifth largest in South Korea.

We arrived at our hotel and my mom checked us in.  The hotel man was very nice.

 

This hotel is much different than the Hotel Seokyo.  Gina and I were staying in one room and my mom and Mistie were staying in the room beside us.  We used our cards to get into our hotel room and had to insert it into a card slot on the wall for the electricity to come on in the room.  The hotel room was similar because of the card slot and the doorbell.  However, it was different because it had an outer door, a small hallway, and then an inner door.  The small hallway is where you would take off your shoes and leave them.

Our hotel rooms were quite contemporary looking.  The beds were just as hard, but there were regular pillows (not feather pillows).  The large wooden slats on the wall by the window would slide in front of the window to make the room totally dark.

The bathroom was much bigger.  They provided toothbrushes, rubber bands, shampoo, hairspray, hair gel, soap, and cleaning cloths.  

 

The yellow sign was posted in our bathroom.  It says, "The Hotel OSCAR's bath bottom is a living rock what is good for healthy.   Please feel free to experience special rest via a native rock."  They meant the floor, but I'm not sure if they meant you can lay on it to rest.  They provided slippers in the bathroom for you to wear while you are in there.

Gina was excited because there was another bidet.  :)  This bidet had a heated seat.  It was a little strange at first to sit on a heated toilet, but you get used to it.

The bathtub was short.  Right in the middle of the wall along the bathtub is a window.  The other side of this window is the small hallway where you enter the room.  Who wants to take a bath  when anyone coming in or leaving can take a peek at you.  I think Gina took a bath one day, but at 4:45 a.m. when I was a sleep and she could be assured of a peaceful bath. 

The shower is just to the right of the bathtub.  It's just a walk-in stall.  There is no shower curtain or door.  You just walk on the other side of the wall of the bathtub and take the shower.  So what happens to all that water when you are taking a shower?  Well, there's a drain so apparently in my mom and Mistie's room it drained.  In our room, not so much.  Gina took a shower at 4:30 a.m.  Our shower did not drain properly.  She said her shower lasted only a few minutes, but there was water everywhere.  It even ran into toilet area.  She had to sop the water up with towels.  I think it took at least hours for the water to drain away completely.

At 3:30 p.m., we asked the hotel man for a recommendation on a restaurant.  The hotel only served breakfast and dinner, but they weren't open for dinner yet and we were hungry. He asked what we would like to eat.  We told him we would like beef.  Gunsan is a big fishing town, but no one wanted seafood.  He said there was a pork place but we'd have to take a taxi to it.  We really didn't want to get back in a vehicle.  He said there was a beef place nearby, but that it was expensive.  He said he'd point the way.

He walked outside the hotel with us and pointed in the general direction and started to give us directions.  Then he kept walking and walking.  The restaurant was just a couple of minutes walk from the hotel. However, the hotel man walked us all the way to the restaurant.  He walked us in and stayed with us as we were seated.   Then he he stayed with us and helped us order our food.  He told us which beef was spicy and which beef was not.  We ordered beef, rice and noodles.  Of course there were a lot of sides! 

You would think that I would have loved this side.  It was onions.  However, they were pickled onions.  Not my favorite.

One of the sides they brought out were these vegetable spring rolls.  There are not pictures of them because we gobbled them down as soon as they set them down.

These condiments came with meat.  They were to dip the beef into.  Mistie liked dipping the meat into the coarse salt. 

There was salad with pink dressing.  I am not sure what's at the bottom of the next picture with the red and green in it.  I think my mom tasted it, but we never found out what it was since we didn't have an interpretor.  I tried the green round thing.  It was kind of like a raw potato but it was pickled.

I even tried this crab thing.  I have to type fast because I don't even like looking at the picture.  When it came it was facing toward me and I had to turn it around toward Gina because the eyeballs were freaking me out.  The crab was alright.  Someone said it tasted like a crab/cheese thing.  It wasn't bad, but it wasn't delicious so I only had one bite, then I turned ti back around to Gina.

Everyone was happy to see the corn on the cob, but it was cold and a little rubbery.  The orange thing to the right in the back of the the picture was a pumpkin thing.  My mom really like it.

Gina liked the soup with huge brown squares of something in it.  She didn't eat the brown stuff, but she like the flavor of the soup.

We ordered noodles and this is what came.  I was expecting like chop chae noodles, and was a little disappointed when this noodle soup came.  However, when I tried it I was very pleasantly surprised.  It was a little spicy, but very delicious!  You had to stir the noodles.  It's topped with vegetables and dried seaweed. 

 

I will have to say the Koreans know how to make a meal. 

The woman who cooked our meat was nice.  She came back and checked on the meat as it was cooking.  When she thought the meat was finished she would put around the outer edges of the bbq grill.  We liked our meat a little more well done, and would put it back in the middle of the grill to cook a little longer. She would walk by and see the meat back in the middle and come move it back to the outer edges. I had wanted to dip it in my sesame oil, but she motioned, "No!"  I was supposed to dip my meat in the red sauce.  Red in food in Korea most likely means it's hot, so I didn't want to do that.

While I was eating my awesome soup, my mouth was starting to burn.  We had ordered Cokes, but the lady never brought them.  I had to ask again.  She immediately brought them out.  This time I took the bottle back to the hotel and stashed it in my suitcase so the maid wouldn't mistake it for trash. 

I think my mom tried everything at the table at least once.  If she said it was chewy or rubbery, no one else tried it.  She was very adventuresome.  Yeah, I didn't inherit that from her.

When we finished with dinner, we took a taxi to Kunsan Air Base.  Since that's where my parents were based, my mom wanted to see if we get onto the base.  She also was going to meet a lady who was going to take us to a babies home.

We had the taxi driver wait.  My mom and Mistie went to the gate.  Mistie has a military ID, but they told her she would have to register before they could let her come onto the base.  The officer said the officer where she could register was closed.  Also, they found out you have to have your passport and an additional ID.  This meant I would not be able to get on the air base at all since I didn't have my license.  My mom and Mistie would return the next day.


We came back to our hotel.  We decided we would have a girls night in our hotel room.  Everyone got into their pajamas, brought snacks (of course), and we sat back to watch Ironman 2.  It was on one of the only two English-speaking channels on television.  This was the first tv I had watched in Korea.  

I had seen Ironman 2, but didn't remember most of it.  My mom asked a lot of questions about the movie, but I couldn't help her.  When the movie was over, Mistie and my mom went back to their room.  I journaled a bit more and went to sleep around 8:30 p.m.  Gina fell asleep before during Ironman 2, although she likes to say she was just "resting her eyes".  Some things never change. 

I'm including this picture of Mistie because she was holding some Gobstoppers up to her eyes, which freaked me out a little bit because one was red and the other orange.  I looked weird.  Then I took a picture of her and the Gobstoppers changed color in the pictures.  One was orange and blue and the other was red and blue.