Field Trip - Day 2

We got up this morning much later...... at 7am or so and got to breakfast area inside the resort.

These are the mascots for the winter Olympics!

They had really nice food selection for the resort!

And here's my plate.

After breakfast, we started for Jeongseon for the rail bike. This is the rice paddy on the way there.

So the place used to transport coals from one place to another using train, but since coals are not in use these days, they don't have any use for the rails, so they converted the rails into rail bikes.

We have four people to a car and we just start pedaling for about 40 minutes around the place. There are a few tunnels that are really decorated for the experience. It was SOOOOO FUN!!

I probably take the worst pictures.... but anyways, I try my best!

After the Jeongseon rail bike, we went to a place to learn the Jeongseon Arirang. So there are a lot of different arirang in Korea, for different regions. This is one of the oldest arirang... and this lady taught us how to sing it.

Here's a video of her singing the chorus part, which we mastered pretty quickly (no video evidence unfortunately).

Here is a video of her trying to teach us singing the second part, which she said was like rapping.... which I agree. We failed pretty miserably the first time around...

Here is the music sheet if you want to try it out..

We went outside of the place to look around and they have this bridge that crosses a river with two statues on either side. The legend goes that the boy was going to marry the girl before he sailed off to transport some timber, but got swept into a storm and never came back. The girl waited for him at the river for days, but realized he wasn't going to come back, so she jumped into the river. The statues are to commemorate them.

My classmate said I should try to take a picture with the man. Haha.

After that, we went to a restaurant that is a very traditional Korean place that you sit on the floor with lots of banchan. It was so much food that we just couldn't finish....

Our Korean TA came by and said in Chinese, "can I sit here?" we were like, "what?! You speak Chinese?!" And he said that he lived in China from 5 to 15 or so, so he can speak Chinese, but his Korean is the most fluent. And we got to talk to him a lot during lunch...... and then the director of KIP came over and talked to him to ask him if he spoke Chinese, and she can actually speak a little too! So I think in Korea, a lot of people can probably speak Chinese better than they can speak English. If you're a Chinese going to Korea, it's easier to ask if they speak Chinese than English, because most of them will tell you no.....

The school later took us to a 5 day market, which means they only open every 5 days. It's basically like traditional Taiwanese market... but the stuff was a bit expensive.

So the only thing I got was Sikhye because I've only had canned ones..... and this one was really tasty!

Mmmm... yum. I'm going to go to Namdaemun to shop a bit more... to see what else they have in these traditional markets.

Oh, and the school's so funny... they gave us each 10,000 won to spend in the market. Hahahaha... I've never seen anyone give us "red envelope" for spending money.

While waiting on the bus for other people to arrive, I managed to catch Farfech'd, which is the Asian Pokemon that you can only catch in Asia. Woohoo!

Now I can officially retire from Pokemon Go until I go to the next continent that has the special Pokemon.

Like I mentioned, Korean tour is quite funny that they keep giving us snacks to feed us on the long ride. They bought all of us a bag of walnut snacks for the trip (they said it's traditional to eat these pastries during the bus rides).

Then they gave us some more tteok.

It tasted kind of like 草仔糕 in Taiwan, but with red bean inside.

They also gave us Choco Pie to make sure we don't starve and a poncho since it started raining. Man.... they were quite considerate.

And that completes the two day trip! It was very fun :)

Last Thought: I am doubting if I will ever be fluent in Korean. My Korean learning has been so haphazard and I just doubt that I can really remember everything I learn in the next month. My communication skills is really bad... and every time I talk to a Korean, my confidence in communicating goes down because I'm more and more afraid to talk to them, thinking that my pronunciation is just so bad and I can't think on the fly that quickly using a new language.

I've also noticed that when I read Hangeul, I can't really search in my memory bank for the words it matches unless it sounds almost like Chinese. If it's just a specific Korean word I'm supposed to memorize, I basically will be reading the entire sentence without knowing what the word is.... until I read it at least 3 times. :( I really hope that I can regain my confidence in learning and just keep going until I can have a breakthrough!

Oh something made my day..... the tour guide saw me and told the other tour guide (and she was showing me too), she asked if I'm Korean-American. I told her I'm actually Chinese. She said I look like Lena Park... I was like..... seriously? But she's so pretty! I was pretty flattered. When she searched on Google for Lena Park's picture, I was thinking, "oh no, this is gonna be another person who looks more masculine", because my sis had compared me to Arashi before -_-. I'm glad it's Lena Park, because she's really pretty.... and she looks super young even though she's almost 40!

Here is Lena Park's picture:

Field Trip - Day 1

We went on this field trip for two days and it was so fun!! So we got up early in the morning and met in front of the school at 7:15am to take a long bus ride to Everland first.

But first, breakfast. Well, not exactly breakfast. One thing I learned being on a Korean tour is that they really take care of the customers. They gave us tteok for breakfast (not exactly what I imagine as breakfast food, but it was quite good).

All the small tteok came with filling and were sweet (I'm not really sure what it is. I'm gonna guess it's some kind of sweet sauce with sesame). And the big one just doesn't have any taste... kind of like steamed cake?

So Everland is like Disneyland except not quite. I would say it's a cross between Knotts Berry Farm and County Fairs. Anyways, it's made by Samsung and it's quite big. The biggest attraction is T-Express... but it was not open!!! Ahhhh :( Booooo....

We went on several other rides. Since we got there super early, there was pretty much no line for any rides. We first went on this thing called Hurricane, which was just a spinning disk. Thank God I didn't get dizzy..... and then we went on this other roller coaster (something about X-train or something) that had two 360 loops and one corkscrew. It was good, but SUPER short. I would say the whole thing probably took about 2 minutes max.

After that, I went on this splash mountain-like ride by myself since the other people didn't want to get wet. It was pretty fun. They strap you in pretty well. One thing that I noticed about the ride that I thought was interesting is that because of the lack of space in the amusement park, they don't have area for the car to "turn around", you know, like make a turn to go down a slope. So what they do, is they put the car on a platform, and the platform turns so you can get on another track that goes down. I guess that's what you would do if you want to save space!

It was quite fun :)

There was also a Line store in the park... didn't buy anything. But the characters are cute!

It was extremely hot yesterday......... like extremely hot. Not to mention that there were just a bunch of hills to get from one place to the other. I was sweating like crazy. They also have people from the theme park shooting water guns at you, I suppose in an effort to cool you down. There are TONS of fans everywhere, and this kind of fans that also spray mists.

Too hot.

For lunch, the school gave us a voucher that we can eat at certain restaurants and we picked this place and got curry pork katsu. Pretty good.

After lunch, we went on this big foot rapid-like ride that has a lot of jungle animals on the ride. They protect you pretty well to prevent lots of water splashing.

They have this safari area that is full of animals (think zoo). They were either resting from the hot weather, or just too depressed to be in this place. Either way, most of the animals were just "lepak" in a corner. So I made these Singaporean friends and they taught me a lot of Singlish... hahaha. Lepak means "laying on a place and parking there".

I got an ice cream from the park because it was just so hot and it was only 2,000 won. I made sure I didn't drop it this time.

There was this really gigantic hill to get back to the entrance.... but thank God there was an escalator.

There is this big tree at the entrance..... not really sure what it's for.

And there is a lot of GD posters everywhere..... because there is a hologram GD concert thing that they have in the park.

After Everland, we took the bus over to Woljeongsa National Park, which is where they filmed park of the Goblin drama. It was soooooo awesome to be there. Not to mention it was at least 10F cooler temperature than Everland. I love how it's like hiking in the forest with not a lot of people and a lot of nature.

We took a group photo at the Buddhist temple entrance.

And then we continued walking....it was just so nice to be there.

The main thing at the place is the Buddhist temple. I took a lot of pictures of the outside of the temple, but I really didn't want to go inside it. So here are pictures of the outer parts of the temple.

For dinner, we went to this Korean beef place. It was really good :)

And it's self-serve banchan refill!

Apparently, a lot of famous people came to this restaurant before too.

For the night, the school got us to stay at a 5 star hotel in Pyeongchang, which is going to be the Olympic village in 2018 for the Winter Olympics. The hotel is called Alpensia and it's super nice! It's like a condo with two rooms, one living room, one kitchen, and one dining room. Super fancy!

And I semi-watched drama on TV. No subtitles. Isn't that weird?