It's been quite some time since a blog entry has been added to this thing. I've had a bit of a hiatus from travelling for the past couple months what with working overtime on Saturdays and teaching new courses that require much more prep time than usual from me. However, this trip had been planned 4 months before its occurrence...making it my motivation to get through the nontravelling months. Seungmi and I headed to 제주 ("Jejudo") from Cheongju airport early Friday morning. We flew on Jeju Air, an orange plane that reminded me a bit of Air Canada Tango. I was glad as we didn't have to wake up uber early or anything...and yet we still arrived in Jejudo around 1130am since the flight was only an hour long. As a small informational side note, Jeju ... read more

My crazy-packed end-of-October weekend started off with an early trip to the Dongbu Intercity Bus Terminal in Daejeon Saturday morning. Since our first tour (Chungju) with Adventure Korea left from Seoul, it didn't make sense to meet them in Seoul first thing Saturday as the city of Chungju was closer to Daejeon. It took 1.5hrs to get to Chungju from Daejeon. Chungju is a city in North Chungcheong province, South Korea. Its flower is the Chrysanthemum, its bird is the Mandarin Duck, and its tree is the Apple Tree. Did you know? Chungju is famous for its production of apples. The principal reasons being because of the large amount of daylight received and high different in temperatures. Once we arrived at the city, we took a taxi, which drove through a beautiful winding road with autumn-coloured ... read more

As a perfect follow up to my previous post about the autumn season: Today, there was a lovely performance held in the same park! Since I walked through it everyday on my way to work, in the past several days I had noticed the beginnings of people setting up some sort of stage in the middle of the park. To my delight, I realized that starting Wednesday October 21 there would be some kind of a performance for the next few days. As a result Ryan and I met up in my area of the city to partake in the audience viewing. We were not disappointed as one of the very first performances of the afternoon this Friday was a bunch of ahjummas and ahjussis playing all sorts of traditional korean drums. Their beat was so ... read more

Finally. On a particularly cool autumn Saturday with the occasional spattering of rain, Chantelle and I finally decided to conquer Zooland...our first original exploration destination. We caught the 315 from Timeworld which led us straight to O-land. O-Land is the cumulative name for the combination of Zooland and Flowerland. We started our adventure off with riding Daejeon's infamous african safari by piling into a yellow lion-shaped bus. Seated amongst a bunch of eager children between the ages of 4-6, I was surprised at how enthusiastic I began to feel as we crowded around the windows to spot close-ups of the elephants, lions, ostriches, antelope, indonesian bengal tigers, and other assorted african safari animals. The black bears were quite amusing as they would sit up and wave their paws at the children as we passed them by. ... read more

Mt.Gubong is one of the designated "8 Sights to See" in Daejeon. It is pretty much also one of the many many mountains you can hike just outside the city! What makes this mountain so special is that its highly recommended to hike during the autumn season as one can see the leaves change colour. My mate and I decided to hike this mountain last Saturday since the weather was starting to get colder: signs of autumn, right? We weren't disappointed as we did see evidence of leaves changing colour. The mountain is a smaller mountain compared to others in surrounding Daejeon. It towers at a height of 264.1m while my previous Bomunsan hike was at an astonishing 457.3m. It was a nice and relaxing hike up the mountain, and I noticed that it was a ... read more