We woke up in the jjimjilbang feeling surprisingly rested and refreshed, crazy when you consider that we'd just spent the night in borrowed pajamas, on the floor with a hard rubber pillow! After a quick shower we made our way to the Jagalchi Fish Market, reportedly the biggest fish market in Korea. The Jagalchi Fish Market is in an impressively built warehouse with the bottom floor full of buckets of live fish and things, and a the 2nd floor with restaurants serving meals similar to the one we had on our first night in Busan. I won't lie, the fish market was a bit of a disappointment, perhaps this was because it's not peak season (We found about 5 floors that were completely empty... Jagalchi would be a crazily big fish market if these floors ... read more

Travelling tandem joins a pelleton! This trip we went with a group from our office. We left on the Sunday night hoping to make the most of our time at the coast. We stopped off at Seoul Station to see the rest of the group off on the KTX, Korea's new and prized express bullet train to the coast. (it takes 3 hours to get from Seoul to Busan!) Our budget, unfortunately, could not cope with the bullet train, so we headed off to the Express Bus Terminal instead :) The bus terminal, as it seems all terminals in Korea do, looked more like an airport than a bus station. Our travel guidebook told us that the bus would take about 6 hours, so we bought tickets for just after midnight so that we could sleep ... read more

Incredibly, the only reason we eventually stuck our heads out of our fantastic little tent was because it was already 9am and we still had a good deal of exploring to get done before sunset. Sleeping on the sand without matrasses, we each woke up one or twice during the night, but if we hadn't we would have missed the soothing breaking of the waves which were now 20m away from us rather than the distant 200m when we climbed into bed at low tide. All in all, almost 12hrs of sleep is a great way to break in a tent, and put a 6day work week far behind. Our fantastic little home quickly folded away into my daypack, and we strapped the sleeping bags onto the bottom. Man, what a way to travel. It's like ... read more

Okay, I appologise for the long blog, today was exactly what we came to Korea looking for. Our most incredible day... We didn't see a single other westerner today. Having made a bit of effort to get out of Seoul and the busiest parts of the country, we very quickly found ourselves far from anything or anyone familiar. We woke up this morning in the small Yeogwan that we found last night. Despite being tucked away in a little alley, we had a very peaceful night. The room was a little larger than the double bed against the wall, but there was enough space for a yo (futon-style) mattress on the ondol floor (wooden floor heated from beneath). I enjoyed my traditional bed and Cathy slept very well on the double bed, so that we ... read more

Yesterday we looked in our cupboards to find something to eat. It wasn't good news. We quite literally only had bread and butter left. Oh, and 2 min noodles. But since we've been eating noodles for a week now we decided it's time to go do some proper food shopping. Instead of taking a taxi $7* ride to the closest E-Mart like last time. we caught the free shuttle into Ilsan, about an hours drive. We then walked the 3 blocks to the supermarket there, another huge grocery store. Every time we go to one of these stores it amazes me what they have. We were so keen to buy fruit, but a bag of apples costs almost $4 and a huge pear goes for $2.5. Crazy! Veg is also almost as expensive, but we ... read more