My Week-Long, Plague-Filled Trip To Jeju

And by “plague”, I mean my friend and I kept getting sick.

A few days before we left for Jeju, my tonsils swelled up and my voice went from healthy young woman to chain smoking old lady. On Thursday, the day before we left, I went to the doctor and got some medicine. I’m going to ruin the ending – it barely helped. Regardless, my friend and I left for Jeju Friday afternoon from our Daegu “International” Airport.

The trip was with my friend’s parents, and we stayed with my friend’s aunt and her husband in their old house, with their frikkin ADORABLE, if bite-y, dog.

They tell me Hoho (the dog) got her dyed ears and tail from my friend's cousin's dog grooming business. Those ears were SO SOFT.

Also, I’m incredibly attractive.

I’ll admit, we went a lot of places and most of the time I didn’t know where we were, but I took a lot of pictures. I will do my best to describe what was going on, even if I can’t tell you where we were specifically. All of these pictures are from Jeju though.

People repeatedly tell me that Jeju is like Korea’s Hawaii. I’d say it’s more like a mix between Korea’s Hawaii and Korea’s Florida. In the tourist-catered places, it seems more like Hawaii because the plants are very colorful and everything’s very pretty, but we saw a lot of non-tourist-catered places, and it was dirtier with palm trees that were sort of dying, or at least dried out. Not to say Florida is dirty or dying, just that Florida looks more lived in and less of a tourist trap. If you go to Jeju and have a local show you around, instead of being part of a tour group on a bus, you’ll see more of the normal Jeju, opposed to the “Hawaii” Jeju.

Anyway.

I don’t remember where we were heading for the first day – a museum of some type – but we stopped at a beach to see the lady divers that Jeju is famous for.

That's my friend's mom out there. Chillin'. Not a lady diver.

A lady diver! Still in shallow water, so not really... diving.

These lady divers are famous because they’re OLD. Like, 60s, 70s old. And they go diving for various seafood. The one we saw was collecting starfish, I think, to sell to people who make skin cream (ew, starfish skin cream). She even took pictures with us, which is apparently not normal at all for tourists – but luckily for us we had a local taxi driver showing us around (my friend’s aunt). I don’t have that picture though, because it was taken by my friend’s father. BUT IT HAPPENED.

As we were leaving... I took another picture. Lighthouse!

Later we went to a folk village that showed how the Jeju inhabitants used to live, in one of those folk-village-y ways.

It was really, really hot, so of course I first noticed the waterfall and took a picture under it.

I pretty much wanted to climb in and take a shower.

But yeah, to the folk-ness.

All the buildings kind of looked like this.

They also had some random cows. Poor cows.

They made sure to keep English signs outside of all their folk houses to really keep it authentic.

They even had authentic hunters! Which scared the CRAP out of me and my friend. (not real, we just weren't expecting him to be in there)

There’s something about this island and wax figures.

Like these school children.

The school also had possessed children! HOW AUTHENTIC TO HISTORICAL JEJU CULTURE.

It was REALLY hot there. Everywhere. Jeju is really hot.

Then we found this fountain thing and I played in it because I was sweating a lot and it felt good.

My friend took this picture because I was too busy ENJOYING MYSELF.

While that was going on, this older dude was watching us and came over when it looked like I was finished playing. He asked where we were from and then told us he was an artist and that he would draw for us, no charge. We figured he was incredibly bored and a bit creepy. He drew two things – one for each of us, with our names in Korean on them along with a bunch of Korean. Supposedly mine says he misses my love or something awkward like that, but I also think he screwed up my and my friend’s names sooo… yeah. Anyway, I didn’t take a picture of the art, but he insisted we take pictures with him.

Oh hi.

Feel free to add him on Facebook! I won’t, because he only has 11 friends and he was kinda creepy. But he does have a Facebook account!

After that, we found ostriches!

HONK

We also found a really nice place on the top of a hill with a place to sit and shade and a really nice breeze that we sat at for about 20 minutes, I would say. We didn’t want to go back down because it was so hot.

Just thinking about that place cools me off. Mmmm~

After that we went to another museum, this time for slightly more recent things. My friend’s mom and aunt talked about how they grew up with a lot of these things, so they really aren’t that old. Makes me wonder why this particular museum exists already.

This wax woman is making fish pancake things that are available just about everywhere in South Korea. /HISTORY

Either the stuff seemed too recent, or seemed unrealistic.

What is that white family portrait doing in there?

These students could pretty much be my girls.

I'd say this class could be mine, minus I'm not that short, but I kinda am that short.

Art Fart /pbbbbt

/pbbbbbbbbbbBBBBBTTTT (I really like this one)

RABBIT. Probably that deadly one that bites off people's heads.

LIZARD. And my friend's hand. She touched its tail :D

This cave thing leads nowhere, I just thought the entrance looked cool. Must say, do not know how this is historical.

And then we went back to my friend’s aunt’s house! Aunt in Korean is “Imo” so I’ll just refer to her as that from now on. Imo kept calling me Seon-saeng-nim (teacher) the whole week, too, which actually was just weird. No one calls me that. She even got my friend’s mom calling me that all week, which was even MORE weird, because she knew me already as Rachel.

They had a couple hunting dogs that were not super friendly :/ That white one barked a lot.

They also had chickens.

Then it was the next day! We went out again, like we did every day. Imo wasn’t the most focused driver, so this happened a lot.

"STAY IN YOUR LANE."

We almost got in a few accidents, actually.

Ah, yes, this next part. Imo said we were going to the beach because the tide was out and we could collect things. Then we ended up here.

I'm sorry, where is the sand?

All the rocks looked like this, and it was creepy.

Little shells and a HUUUUGE creepy bug. Those bugs were everywhere. Thankfully they ran away from humans.

Then my friend started collecting all the little snails and putting then in this tiny pool of water.

They were about this big. And adorable. For snails.

Her little snail farm.

A better look at the snail farm. Some of them are flipping themselves over.

Here's Imo, collecting snails for eating. I didn't have any, because ew. Plus they fed me way more times than necessary that day so I was too full.

Eventually my friend and I got bored so we wandered back to the street to just wait. However, we had to wait a long time – Imo was really into collecting the snails.

Here's my friend's father, also getting kind of bored with collecting snails, I think.

This was the other side of "beach." Smoother, but equally non-beachy.

And then we found a DEAD BODY IN THE ROCKS.

Just kidding :P I think. I didn’t investigate the shoe to see if it was attached to a foot. I’m going to hope it wasn’t.

I think the next day? Man, I don’t remember… anyway, at some point after that we went to a waterfall because I said I wanted to see waterfalls because I like waterfalls. So we went to a couple waterfalls.

It was hard to get a picture here because everyone wanted to and it was a really small space. But hey! Waterfall!

More room here, but also more people. Also, for those of you who complain there's not enough people in my pictures... these next few are for you.

This picture would be way more artsyfartsy if there weren't so many people in it.

Where the waterfall water lets out. Random chick adds a little art fart to this picture, I think. /minipbbt

Yes I was there. New vest thing is new.

Then we went to this area that had a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum! It was pretty sweet.

I mean, just look at the outside!

It had some cool stuff, like a moose made of nails.

And a fish made of bike parts!

But then there were the signs. Apparently no one gave this place an English once-over.

Like there were a lot of mashed titles of things.

TREX. Like Chex, but more toothy.

In the process of screwing up the title, they also screwed up the word order.

Yes.

Ah yes, the Tibetan things again.

I just thought this was cool. I want a vampire kit!

But back to the silly signs! This one has a title-description issue.

Then there were some artistic statues made of metal that looked pretty sweet.

An awesome storm trooper!

Optimus just kind of looks like he's supposed to...

Awww yeah Mech-Yoda!

We don't really care about the other astronaut.

And last but not least!!!

M&M Elvis!

After that we went to a chocolate museum and bought some delicious kiwi chocolate, and then met up with my friend’s parents and Imo over at this huge bridge/waterfall place nearby.

This was the actual reason we came to this place, my friend and I just got distracted by the Ripley's building and chocolate.

Nice view from the bridge. There were waterfalls further upstream.

Walking over the bridge. It was not breezy enough for being so high.

Not the waterfall.

That night (I think) we went to see the Dragon Rock on one of the beaches. The whole area gets really active at night and there are lights and snacks and general fun-ness.

We walked over this bridge. We like bridges. This one shakes.

An area you can see from the bridge! Spooky~

But not spooky enough to keep us from going over to it! Here's the bridge from not-on-it. The lights changed color. I'm easily entertained.

Some writing on one of the pillars of the temple-gazebo thing. It says something about how a guy will always love his wife. It's cute!

A lit up area of the small river. Kinda creepy, but awesomely green!

I thought the lighting here was pretty cool.

I'm not sure what this is but it seems romantic and sweet <3

Imo buying chestnuts.

Here's dragon rock! Look for the dragon!

The next day (haha who knows) we went to these caves but they were closed so we went to a tea farm instead that has a cafe IN A CAVE. They covered the top of the cave with that paper stuff to keep it from constantly dripping on the customers.

Frikkin awesome cave cafe is awesome!

This is where you order. We got Pat-bing-soo which is like this ice, red beans, fruit, and ice cream sundae thing. My friend always eats all the red beans because I don't like them.

I'm sorry, I can't get over how awesome this is.

Outside the cave cafe was the rest of the place, which was really pretty actually. I took some pictures, like I do.

Here's some pretty.

More pretties.

Hey look at the pretty sky! And the pretty water! And the pretty plants!

Hey look more of the same!

Yeah, ok, you get the idea.

Later we went to this huge cave thing. It’s an old lava tube (where lava ran through ages ago). It’s super cold in there which was really nice with how hot it was outside. I maintain the cave is the entrance to Korean Batman’s lair. No joke.

Outside the cave looked like a jungle.

Into the dark abyss...

Yeah, just think... Batcave.

It's wide enough for the Batmobile.

Lit path to the very end of the tube. Though this is looking out from the end of the tube, rather than looking at the end.

THIS is the end of the lava tube. Hard to take pictures with all the people.

The last day we spent at Black Sand Beach. I swam in the ocean with my friend, got hit with a few nasty yet awesome waves, and came out burnt like a tomato. Good times!

And yep, that was Jeju. To round out this picture heavy post to 85 pictures, have a small colorful dog.

Hoho is adorable.

Thanks for reading :)