drifter riff raff: Camping It Up

Only a day left until my sister and Dave arrive and I'm still some way short of meeting my deadline for updating. Ooops. It's all because we keep doing stuff! Like having fun! Damn us and our evil wanting to have fun. Ah well. For this reason, I'm going to just skim throught the details. Let the pictures do the talking!

My best friends from home, Vicky and Dom, came out to visit us here in May. They explored Seoul and Busan while we were working, and came to stay with us for the middle weekend. We took them to our favourite galbi restaurant near the apartments on the first night, then to a small bar called Free Hug, where we introduced them to soju cocktails and made a random Korean friend. He tells me I'm better looking than David Beckham and he wishes he had a nose like mine, so he is one of my new favourite people.

The next day we showed them around downtown, did a little shopping and visited the pet cafe. As the name suggests, this is a cafe (not that we saw any drinks for sale really) filled with cats and dogs. We'd been meaning to go there for a while and thought this'd be the ideal opportunity. Despite having seen the way many Koreans like to dress up their dogs in comical outfits or dye small tufts of fur bright colours, we were a little unprepared for the terror in store. The animals were all dyed funny colours, shampooed to the point that their fur was all puffy and looking a little overfed and lazy. There was even an Old English sheepdog with it's floppy fringe tied into bunches. Not an attractive look. We lasted about 20 minutes before it all got a bit too much and we had to leave.

That night we had a few work friends over and went out for a few drinks at Speakeasy. Sunday we attempted to show off Yangdong market, but it all seemed to be closed for some reason. We relocated to a DVD room instead, then went for shabu shabu. They left the next day before we went to work. It was all too brief a visit really, I wish they could've just stayed out here with us! Hopefully they can arrange another trip during our second year and come see us some more, maybe when we've got some holiday and can actually see them properly!

The main source of fun in recent weeks has been camping trips. We've been to a beautiful island called Biguemdo and camped on the beach, and we've been to a beautiful national park called Gamagol and camped on the side of the road. The first trip required a taxi ride, a bus, another taxi, a ferry and then another taxi ride to get us to our destination. It still cost less than a train to the coast at home though. There were 4 couples, a small dog and one poor single guy who had to sleep on his own (but actually knew us from reading our blog! We're internet celebrities! Wow. Hi Mark!).

We brought bags of beer, music and fishing rods to keep us busy, as well as attempting to swim in the sea. It was very very cold so the swimming was very brief, but we were definitely in the water. I have pictures to prove it. We had some tasty food (and some ramen noodles) on the barbeque, a big fire and a lot of fun. In the morning we sat around sunbathing for a while, then went to a spicy chicken noodle restaurant, took some walks, dug a big hole in the sand and buried me up to my shoulders in it. Also got semi devoured by little bugs. Eventually we had to leave and take the ferry home. On board we had more beer and were force fed enormous shots of soju by friendly Korean men.

The following weekend was the birthday of one of the guys we went camping with, Anthony. We went out to a park just outside Gwangju called Sangson Youwonji (if I remember correctly). We had another barbeque and a few drinks in the sun, watched people throw themselves off a nearby mountain strapped to flimsy strips of material, hired duck shaped pedal boats and generally had good times.

Anthony's girlfriend then snuck off downtown to prepare a secret party for him, while we kept him busy with beer and failing to get off the bus when we should. Eventually we made it to a soju room - essentially a karaoke room, but instead of paying by the hour for singing, you pay for food and drink, stay as long as you want and sing for free - where Lokhee and her friends had decorated with balloons, banners and food. We drank and sang for a few hours before heading to Speakeasy for a few more drinks and some dancing. Another good night!

The weekend following was the second camping trip. We took a couple of buses carrying all our tents, sleeping bags and barbeque equipment, only to arrive and discover that camping was no longer allowed in the national park, despite the website saying it'd fine. Undeterred, we left all our stuff by the entrance to the park and set up the barbeque next to a small pool next to a little waterfall. People paddled in the water, ate some tasty food, drank beers, used the waterfall as a makeshift waterslide and caught tiny crayfish to cook on the barbeque.

Sadly, my camera battery died before most of the excitement happened, but I assure you it was amazing. We then made our way back to pick up our stuff and debated whether to just go home or find somewhere else to camp. After about 10 minutes walk, we found a small strip of grass on the side of the road and, rather than spending anymore time walking with all the bags, set up the tents. It was a pretty quiet road, so we weren't too bothered by cars. We wandered about in the dark trying to find firewood so we could make a campfire and somehow stumbled upon a huge stash of dry wood behind a tree, so dragged it back to camp and got started. After more barbeque, music and beer, we staggered to our tents and got a little sleep. The next day Lokhee took us to an amazing galbi restaurant in Damyang, a nearby town. Instead of the usual grill on each table, a line of Korean women were sat grilling huge buckets of meat and sending them out to the waiting tables. The meat was excellent and finished off a heavily meat orientated weekend nicely.