Incheon

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We met up at Incheon subway station at around 1. I've been wanting to visit Incheon and its Chinatown forever, but the almost two hour long subway ride has always put me off. Luckily, I managed to get seats on both trains, I was surprised at how empty the trains were given that it was a Saturday and a holiday weekend. Chinatown is directly opposite the subway station, but before heading to Chinatown we took a taxi to the ferry terminal and found a love motel to stay in for the evening. We dumped our stuff and took a taxi back to Chinatown ready to resume our sightseeing. We headed into Chinatown, I'm not sure if it is the only Chinatown in Korea or was the first. Anyway, we took plenty of photos of the gate at the entrance and the buildings. It definitely had a bit of a feel of China about it. We stopped at a stall and bought some fortune cookies. Yeri translated them for us. I can't remember what mine said now, so it mustn't of been anything very good.

We were all starving by this point, so as we wandered up the hill we looked for a restaurant to eat at. The whole area was heaving and all the restaurants had massive queues. We picked one and joined the queue, even though the queue was massive, it got smaller pretty quickly. We must of been queuing for less than half an hour. We had to walk up all the stairs to the third of fourth floor. We were seated in the window and had a great view of the street below. We spent ages perusing the menu and the waitress even came over and told us to hurry up, the cheeky bitch! We finally decided what we wanted to eat. We ordered crispy chicken in soy sauce, chicken and cashew nuts, and white jjajjangmyeon. The two chicken dishes were lovely, the white jjajang weren't great, but they were better than the regular jjajangmyeon, which I detest.

We were stuffed, so decided to go for a bit more of a walk to work off some of the food. We headed up the hill out of Chinatown. The steps up were gorgeous they had Chinese pictures painted on them. We strolled through another Chinese style gate, this one was a lot more ornate compared to the one we entered Chinatown through. We walked over to a pagoda and climbed to the top. There were great views looking down on Incheon, the port, and the newly developed cities in the distance. That's one thing that can be said about Korea, it never stop advancing. There's always construction going on. As we headed further up the hill we saw the Jelmupo Club. Jemulpo was the original name of Incheon. The Jemlpo Club was established in August 1891, as a place for foreigners in Korea to communicate and exchange information with each other. The Club was pretty small, but had a grand old world feel to it.

We wandered further up the hill to Jayu Park. The park had more great views down over the surrounding area. There was an aerobics group having a workout session. Most of the people were older and were really cute to watch. Some of the blokes had some right moves. Their instructor was a bit power mad, when some random got up on the stage, she chased him off. The stage was huge and there was only her on it. We watched them for a bit and then headed over to the General MacArthur Statue. He looked canny funny as he had a pigeon sitting on his head. We read the info about him, it was pretty impressive stuff. He has a 50 year military career, that's a long time to spend working in any job, but in something as highly stressful as the military, no way I could do that. Also his method to attack the North Korean Army was ingenious as instead of attacking from the east, this fleet circled around the Korean peninsula and attacked from the west.

We came out of the park and we wandered around, we went one way but it seemed to be a bit of a dead end, so headed back in the other direction. We came across 'Mural Street' it is a street, which is lined with murals that show scenes from the 'Records of Three Kingdoms.' Yeri was telling us that most people learned about it in school as a kid, so really all Koreans should know it. I was completely clueless, but had a look at some of the pictures, but it was mainly battley stuff, not my cup of tea. We walked done the street and ended up back in Chinatown. We walked through Chinatown until we reached the end and then kept going.

Just after Chinatown, there is Fairy Tale Town. This is a great example of rejuvenation. The area was really run down and they decided to paint the walls and fronts of buildings with cartoon characters and fairy tale scenes and characters. Now the area has been transformed as loads of people come to visit and take a walk around the streets. We had a wander around and took a load of photos. The town was cute and worth the detour from Chinatown.

We took a taxi over to Wolmido to catch the sunset. Wolmido is kind of like Blackpool, tacky seaside resort. We walked along the promenade and watched a bit of the sunset. There were loads of people watching the sunset and there were also about a million seagulls flying through the air. The sunset was beautiful and produced some great colours, but it was too cold and windy. So we retreated to this nice cafe and sat there nursing some hot drinks and chatting. After a while we were feeling hungry again, so we went in search of some dinner. The promenade was filled with seafood restaurants, but since some of the others aren't keen on seafood, so we found a restaurant bar and ordered some food there. I shared a cheese donkass and cream spaghetti with Malia. Both dishes were good and the donkass was unusual as the cheese is normally with the meat wrapped in the breadcrumbs, but this had the cheese melted on top, delicious. there was also a lovely baked potato to go with it. Nom nom! We had a quick look around the fairground area, it was pretty dead, but I suppose it's still too cold and it would be a lot busier in the height of summer. The taxi drivers were taking the piss in the fares they wanted to take us back to the motel, seriously, I hate Korean taxi drivers. Most act like they are doing you this huge favour, I think that they forget that we are paying them to do their job, but I suppose most of them just want to sit on arses drinking coffee and watching TV in their taxis. Anyway, after wandering the streets, they were deserted, for a bit we found a taxi and headed back to the motel.

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