Blogs from Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea, Asia - page 9

The past couple of days have been a complete contrast with one another. On Sunday, we had nothing to do, and the time passed by so slowly. Today was a completely different story. Yesterday, we woke up early to meet with our friends, Kim and David (students at Namseoul), so we could get a tour of the campus. Poor Charity woke up around 4am because she hadn’t completely adjusted to the time difference; her room was very neat & tidy by the time I woke up. I had to wake up much earlier because I didn’t get my usual shower the night before. The lights went out early on Saturday (the lights turn off automatically at 11pm; the hot water turns off at 11:30pm...I don’t understand the time difference) so I didn’t get to have a ... read more

Earlier in the week I was told that I needed to be at Shanghai 16 July for an inspection on a new Marriot hotel, so we cancelled our plans to go to the "Mud Festival" 13 July through 15 July, and we started making planes to go to Shanghai for four days. Once all our flight and hotel reservations were made we were ready to go, as a true Friday 13th would have it, I checked my email and saw one about my trip, seems like the owners were not ready and cancelled the trip. Well after we cancelled all our reservations, we re-made plans for the "Mud Festival" 1st weekend; Saturday morning we headed down to the Mud Festival to meet our friends from our Thailand trip, once we met up with them we had ... read more

Saturday at 9 o'clock we left for Boryeong. It is a city on the west coast of South Korea. About 2/3 hours, pumping speakers, dancing, lots of stops and laughs we arrived at Boryeong! Sugi asked around for cheap accommodation and we were settled in... Swimming costumes, hats and suncream and we were off to the mud. On Daecheon beach people were like ants everywhere. Because it was high tide not a lot of beach was available. The sun was beaming down and the South Africans were glowing. In Boryeong seven kinds of cosmetics including Mudpack are produced after processing the mud gathered from the plain near the Daecheon swimming beach. The Boryeong Mud cosmetics have far-infrared factors which are good for humans and also have high Germanium, Mineral and Bentonite components. There was a ... read more

So you've had enough. You've just finished teaching hundreds of Korean kids for 6 days in a row and the one thing that's kept you going is the though of a 3 day weekend. Finally it's here. With Cathy taking the lead and doing all the planning for this trip I'm completely ing the dark. All I know is we're off to the coast. And that's good enough for me. We both decided that after our tough hiking weekend we were rather looking for peace and relaxation. Feeling a bit more Seoul-wise these days, we managed to catch a bus down to the leeetle town of Seosan without much trouble. Here we found the one reason for stopping, a fantastic old fortress from the 1400's that has been carefully restored. Wandering around the old buildings and ... read more