In February 2007 I decided to leave my job, pack my bag, and fly to Korea to meet my friend Kate. She'd just finished up a year and a half of teaching English in Korea, and we decided to backpack our way from Korea to India together. We had an amazing time over the next two months and saw a lot of pretty cool things! This blog will hopefully capture most of what we went through on our Amazing Asian Adventure! :) Here it goes......
.....You can pack a lot into a week!
The trip started with a side visit to Ontario. After flying in, I spent 2 hours in a van on the very very icy 401 to get to Melissa and Daves place in London but made it in one piece just in time for Greys Anatomy! The next 3 days were all about relaxing…spent a happy day at Mel and Daves watching tv and making cookies, and even had a massage thrown in there! (thanks Mel!). Meghan, Matt and I managed to have a random day in Hamilton checking out old forts, tasting wine at 11am and we even made it to Niagara Falls. I didn’t think that this trip would include seeing something in Canada I’ve always wanted to see! We hooked up with my cousin Jim for some dinner then Mel and I bummed around Toronto for two days window shopping and eating pub food. We managed to find a pub in the middle of a snow storm that served Keiths…good way to spend my last few hours in Canada!
We made it to the airport in the snow with plenty of time to spare. I got on the biggest plane I’ve ever seen with what seemed like thousands of people (as you can guess mostly Koreans) and spent 2 hours on the tarmac “de-icing”. Lovely…turned that trip into 16 hours. The flight was pretty good…Korean Air beats Air Canada any day! I ate my face off, but had trouble reading the English subtitles on the Korean movies because I managed to sit behind the tallest Korean on the plane! Had no troubles in the airport in Seoul, and found my way to the bus station pretty easily. Spent another 5 hours on a bus getting to Kate in Tongyeong (Koreans get a kick out of the two white girls both named Kate!). We managed to keep busy all day…I got off the bus, we ditched my gear and went straight to lunch with the teachers Kate works with. The last few days we bummed around Tongyeong while Kate finished packing and running errands (hard to leave a place after a year and a half!). I’ve never eaten as much food as I have here…good thing my pants are adjustable. And I’ve never been told more in a week that I’m very beautiful…my ego is gonna take a blow when I get back home!
Tomorrow morning we hop on the bus for Seoul and on to Incheon to catch the ferry to China and the real adventure begins! In the past week we’ve managed to do and see a lot of things but it’s been very laid back and relaxed. The hard core travelling is yet to come.
I would give more details about everything, but I’ll save the long, detailed entries for the rest of the trip. I’m sure that this has been enough to read already as it is!
