"Good morning Vietnam!":.. nope, wrong movie! This time, it's neither Vietnam nor Thailand but South Korea where I will be able to spend some time! Seoul will thereby be my new home until x-mas as I will be studying at the Seoul National University (SNU) as an exchange student. However, I'm currently not in Seoul yet as I'm travelling with my friend Benjamin aka Bäumli through South Korea for the next two weeks.
As it's my first visit to Korea, I was not sure what I can expect from this country. So far I've been to China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand, thus I'm kind of used to the Asian culture. However, every country has its own habits and society variies quite a lot.
So, what's South Korea like? Well, not many of my friens have set foot to this country yet - and this is matching one of the first impressions we had: there are barely any (Western) tourists around! And this is definitely a big difference to Thailand for example, where lots if Western and especially Europeans are travelling and on every island you ar meeting some of them for sure. However, that's definitely not the case in Korea! So far, our journey was about five days and we have met tourists from the West only two times! we were e.g. at a big beach that is approximately 150Km south of seoul, and we were the only not-Korean there - kind of strange to be honest :) However, as we are the foreigner, it's quite funny to interact with them as we are something "special", haha.
A country that has not many Western tourists, however, is not really an easy deal if you don't speak the local language - something we experienced quite early on our travelling. Even though English can be seen as the global language, it seems as Korea is an exception! Neither are there many signs or menus in English nor talk the people English.
Ordering a menu is consequently some kind of random guessing, as we did not understand more than you probably do when reading it :) But, "never try, never know" is always a good advice and given the not too expensive prices (ok, I admit that as a Swiss it is in most countries comparable cheap) you can also afford a "bad pick" every now and then.
But sometimes, at least a bit of English would really make life easier...
especially when there's "information" written in English you hope for some tourist information, any brochure or just a person who speaks some word in English - but no, not here!
Of course, this language-barrier makes it also hard to interact with Koreans, which is sad as they are very open and friendly in general. But most of the time, it's hard to have real conversations as our Korean is even worse than their English :) But at least we are able to "survive" with hand language, facial expressions and some words from our lonely planet - really a useful travel companion!
The weather is great so far - and warmer than in Switzerland even though we had an outstanding summer! We have constantly temperatures between 30 and 34 degrees, with a peak of 39! but the heat is not the problem, it's rather the humidity that makes you suffer. But what's the best thing that can happen to you when you're suffering? Right, a friend who's suffering even more, haha. Thus, thanks Beni :)
So far we have been travelling from Seoul southwards to Malipo, where we enjoyed the first beach day. That brings me to another funny attribute: as Koreans do not want to get tanned, they do quite a lot to avoid any sun while hanging around at the beach. And as most (or all?!?) Koreans can't swim, it looks quite funny seeing them hanging around at the beach :) Packed in long sleeve shirts, equiped with a tube and sometimes even with a life jacket!
and I guess it was never as easy to impress people at the beach, as here you can do that already by only being able to swim, haha! And those who know me well, know that my swimming skills are not the world's best ;) or as Tobi and Schelling used to describe it in Thailand: like a longtail boat: lots of noice but only few speed and movement! ;)
Later, our journey continued to Mokpo, a city located another 150Km further South. We had a great night out, actually the first one since we're here, and after a hangover-Saturday we climbed up the nearby mountain to get a view of the city with it's nice scenery
After Mokpo we drove even further down to Wando where we took the ferry to Jeju-do Island. And that's the place where I'm currently writing this blog entry. To be more specific, Beni and me are "free camping" on a volcano, a UNESCO world heritage place :) apparently, the sunrises should be quite nice and since we finished just around 10pm with dinner, we thought that we already climb up the volcano during the night instead of paying for accommodation :) we hope that no guard will come up during the night and that the surveillance cameras did not caught us - and then we're going to be the first ones in the morning for sure ;) so keep fingers crossed... and good night!
