Yulpo Beach

Happy Buddha's Birthday! This weekend was a long weekend in Korea celebrating, you guessed it, the birth of Buddha. It was for this holiday that there have been lanterns decorated the streets. While we were told that temples did give out free portion of bibimbap this weekend, my friends and I decided to use the long weekend to journey across Korea. I traveled with Adri and our friend Samantha. 

Gyeongju is located on the South Eastern side of Korea (Fig. 1). Boseong, the green tea fields, are down in the South Western tip in South Jeolla Province. Because it is so far, we decided to stay overnight. Boseong, the actual Green Field town, doesn't have much going on in it and we had trouble finding a room, so we ended up staying about 20 minutes out in a seaside village called Yulpo. Finding a room was an adventure in itself, and I had to ask my lovely coteacher to call and make reservations for us. Many places were booked up, but luckily we finally found a room. I couldn't understand most of the conversation on the phone, but I heard her use the word for "foreigners" a lot, so I was glad the pension owner was warned of our arrival. The place we stayed at is called a "minbak" which is a small place offering simple rooms. It was just what we needed. The owner tried in vain to talk to us a lot, but of course we never got very far. Anyway,  we had to take 3 buses to get there and got caught up in major traffic, causing our journey to take a very very long time. Despite an early start in the day , we arrived around 7pm and  were extremely happy to have a room and kind woman waiting for us.

Yulpo was an absolutely tiny town, I can't even find it on Wikipedia. It reminded me a lot of little tiny maritime towns I had done some Oceanography field work in.. not much around but a few boats and a lot of fishing. It was amazing to breathe such fresh clean air. We ate at a seafood restaurant where the specialty was raw fish.. but the steep price of that made us wary. We ended up getting as mystery soup chosen by our patient waitress.  We didn't do much other than eat dinner and go to bed to rest up for our next day's adventure.

(Although we did entertain the local children. We were even more rare there than in Gyeongju, and one boy in particular loved screaming HELLO at us and I AM CRAZY. Good times)

The following morning, using a ton of broken information, we managed to catch a bus from Yulpo up to Boseong. On the bus was only us and three older ladies who were travelling together. We were only able to communicate very slightly, saying where we were from, where we lived in Korea, and that we were English teachers. This tiny interaction impressed them a lot, and they nodded in great approval of us.

Figure 1. Map of Korea highlighting the locations
of Gyeongju and Boseong/Yulpo.

Crazy looking guy with a metal detector.

If you look carefully you can see tunicates!

Dried anchovies is one of my favourite side dishes here.
Not only are they delicious, but I can pretend
I am a giant crunching down on bones.

Mystery soup. Was quite mild, almost bland even.
Involved a lot of molluscs and radishes.

Mystery ingredient we weren't brave enough to try.
Adri did and said incredibly chewy.

Outside of seafood restaurants are tanks so you can
become acquainted with dinner beforehand.
Most are full of fish, but some have mysterious animals.
This floating things have a remarkable resemblance
to a certain part of human anatomy.