Christmas Vacation: Korea and Japan

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Wow. It has been a very busy past few weeks. The first week of break was pretty relaxed. We just hung out around campus and finished up some school stuff before our vacation. One of the nights, we had a few of the ninth grade girls over to play video games, which was super fun. One of them, Angeline, was going to watch Camo for the two weeks that we were gone, so we also "showed her the ropes" of feeding him and scooping poop 😉

We left for Korea the night of the 23^rd and spent four days there. We then flew to Tokyo and met up with my brother (who is studying in Nagoya, Japan for the semester) for three days. The next week was spent with Pete and my parents (they flew in from MN) traveling around Japan. The vacation was awesome and it was so great to see (most of) my family again. Here’s a run-down of the first week of the vacation.



Friday: One of our students’ family brought us to the Clark airport (only about 4 hours from here instead of 7+ to Manila), which was incredibly nice. We spent the day with them as well. Our flight didn’t leave until 1am, so we had quite a bit of time to kill in Clark. The family recommended that we go to a Korean spa, and of course, I jumped on that. Brandon wasn’t too thrilled, but he obliged anyway. The spa was in Clark, but it was mostly attended by Koreans. I really enjoyed it. We pretty much just went into a sauna type thing (hotter than a sauna though, so we only could stay about 10-15 minutes in it) and then cooled off in the ice room and went back and forth. We also got massages there, which were awesome. Brandon actually kinda enjoyed it. Then we went to the airport. Flying out of Clark was great. It’s super small (probably about Fargo airport sized, maybe even smaller). It was about a 3.5 hours flight to Seoul, so not too bad.

Saturday: Daniel (one of our students) and his aunt and uncle picked us up at the airport, which was awesome. We didn’t have to try and figure anything out. They were right there. We hadn’t really slept since our flight was a red-eye, so we went to his aunt and uncle’s place for a little while to take a quick nap. Then we were ready for our first day in Seoul 😊 What better way to spend Christmas eve than crossing into North Korea? We went out to the de-militarized zone, which is the section right on the border (part is owned by the north, part by the south). There wasn’t a ton to see there, but it was still neat just to go there. We got to climb part way down a tunnel that the North Koreans built during and invasion of the south and then see a train station that the South Koreans have built as a symbol that they are ready to reunite. After the DMZ, we headed to the Seoul tower. Since it was Christmas eve, it was incredibly busy. Mostly with young Korean couples. The view from the top was great. Especially since it was at night, so you could see all of Seoul lit up.

Sunday: We spent Christmas at an amusement park 😊 Everland was so much fun! It’s like Disney World combined with Valleyfair. It’s huge! We spent the whole day there and maybe saw like half the park. It was really cold to be outside the whole day, but it was still super fun. Since it was cold, it wasn’t very busy, which definitely made up for the cold. We just switched off between outside and inside activities. Everything was in Korean, so it’s a good thing that we had Daniel with us. We couldn’t really go on all the rides because it was so cold, so some of them were closed. I don’t think a 50mph roller coaster would be a good idea at 20 degrees. I think one of the coolest things that we saw there was the lights parade at night. There were numerous floats and people in it with lights everywhere.

Monday: Daniel and his dad picked us up in the morning and we went to a huge shopping place and just kinda walked around. We went to an aquarium there, which was kinda neat. They had “exotic” fish there, like a largemouth bass and a bluegill 😉 Daniel had SAT school that night, so we just went back to our hotel early that night because we were pretty exhausted from the past few days.

Tuesday: Daniel had SAT school all day, so we were on our own. We decided to go on the Seoul city tour bus. You pay like $10 and you can hop on and hop off this bus all day that stops at some of the major tourist attractions throughout Seoul. We saw a couple temples (little did we know how many more we would see during our trip in Japan…) and a few shopping districts. Nothing too amazing, but it was nice to get a tour of Seoul. That night we met up with Daniel again and went to a movie. Overall, Korea was a very successful trip. It was so great that Daniel was able to show us around everywhere and translate, because Koreans don’t speak very much English.

Wednesday: We took a cab to the airport early in the morning because our flight to Tokyo was at 8am. The flight and everything at the airports went well and we were off to meet Pete at the McDonalds by the Ikebukuro train station. Once we got into Tokyo and got our bags, it was time to figure out the train system. Luckily, a lot of it was in English, so it was fine. We arrived at the Ikebukuro train station and it was huge. Not like most subway stations in the states. Like Grand Central Station. There were a ton of exits and I couldn’t remember which one Pete said to take. So we just took one and looked for a McDonalds. After walking around for about 15 minutes, we found one. But Pete wasn’t there. So we waited. My phone didn’t work there, but luckily Pete has email on his phone, so I was able to find wifi (had to pay for it… free wifi is surprisingly uncommon in Japan) and email him. He was at a different McDonalds by a different exit. But we met up with him and then attempted to find our hotel. After wandering around for a while, we finally did. We then set off for some wandering around Tokyo. We decided to go to the government building and go to the top for a great view of Tokyo. It was going to be closed the next few days after because of new years, so we had to take advantage of it right away. The view was pretty great and it was incredible to see how huge Tokyo is. It goes on forever! Most of the time when you’re up in a tower in a large city, you can see it start to dwindle after the downtown area. Not Tokyo. It just keeps on going. We went back to the hotel fairly early because Brandon and I were tired from waking up so early that morning.

Thursday: We walked a lot. The morning started out at the Tsukiji fish market. That was really cool, but very smelly. We went late morning, so a lot of the vendors had left, but it was still huge. Every type of fish you could imagine and more. Some still alive. Some being filleted right there. Early in the morning there are the famous tuna actions there. A few days ago, one of these tunas sold for $736,000. It is very frowned upon for tourists to attend these, so we didn’t go (plus, they’re at like 4am). Here’s a link to video of the market early in the morning (and tuna auction) by someone who did get to go that early

. After the fish market, we went to the Ginza area. No reason really, just a cool place to walk around. We did come across the Sony Building which was really cool. It’s like five floors of Sony products (including ones that aren’t for sale yet) out on display to try. From compact cameras to tablets to 3-D TVs to $5,000 DSLR cameras. That was really fun just playing around with all the electronics. After that, we went to a “Cat Café.” It’s a café that just has cats running around that you can play with. It was super fun. There were about 20 cats just chillin out in this room and we sat and had some pop there and played with the kitties. It was surprisingly clean and didn’t smell, so it was obvious that the cats were well taken care of. After that, we went to the Shibuya area and just walked around for a while. This is where the famous huge crosswalk is. That was a really neat area to explore, especially at night. We found a nice little art gallery/bar and hung out there for a little while and then headed back to the hotel.

Friday: This was our full day in Tokyo, so again, we spent it walking around a lot and seeing the sights. We started out in the Akihabara area. That was an interesting one. That area is famous for its anime and electronics. However, a lot of the anime is incredibly suggestive and it doesn’t seem to be a big deal there. There are maid cafes, which have girls (late teens, early twenties) dressed up kinda like anime girls that serve you food. We did not go to one, but there were plenty of the girls on the street trying to get people to come to their café. One cool thing there was a huge electronics mart. It was fun just to walk around and look at (and play with) everything. After that we went to some temple and then went on a river cruise to Odaiba. The temple was pretty cool, but not nearly as interesting as ones we saw later in the trip. The river cruise was cool because it was about an hour of just sitting on a boat and looking out the window at different parts of Tokyo. It brought us to the man-made island of Odaiba. The island was really modern and had a few really neat mall type buildings on it. So we pretty much just walked around those. We went to a Sony science museum there, which was really fun (although I think we might have been the only people there without kids). It was pretty much a small, hands-on science museum. They had these really cool light bar things that when you looked at them straight on, they just looked like a bunch of blinking lights, but when your scanned your eyes in the direction the lights were moving, they looked like different objects. After that, we went back to Shibuya and found a 270 yen (about $3.50) restaurant/bar. That was really fun. We were in a small room with just us and another small table with two Japanese girls (about our age). After about an hour of us sitting there talking, the two girls asked us where we were from (in pretty broken English) and Pete responded to them in Japanese and they just cracked up. They couldn’t believe that an American could speak Japanese. Though they were wondering why in the world he was studying Japanese and not some other more beneficial language. So we (and by we, I mean Pete because their English wasn’t very good) ended up chatting with them for most of the night. After that, we went back to our hotel for the night. My parents’ flight got in that night and we were meeting up with them the next morning.

I’ll continue this either tomorrow or Tuesday 😊 I will also add some videos to this one too in the next couple days. The internet is incredibly slow right now, so I don't think I have a chance at uploading video.

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Photos

At the train station at the DMZ
The train station is not in use. It was just built by the South Koreans for when they are reunited.