January

For being on vacation, I sure feel like I'm busy!

January has flown by and I can't believe that soon it will be February.

Which is good I suppose as it means that we're one month closer to warmer weather and I'm getting closer to leaving on my trip to Thailand.

Still keeping me busy this month is trying to study Korean and my TEFL course and banging my head at spin class.

Stephanie, Darren and I rented a car last week and drove across the country to see the old historical temples and things of Korea. Driving in Korea is always an adventure and even more so this time, as I completely forgot to ask for a GPS system.

So the atlas was cracked for the whole trip and we all had to work on our navigating skills.

On our way East we stopped at nearby Wolchulsan National park and the Boseong green tea plantation.

The first night we decided to bypass the city we had planned to stay in and head to beautiful Busan. The coastal city which was once one of the largest port cities in the world.

We wanted to head to the Haeundae area which is right on the coast and has a great Indian restaurant that I definitely wanted to get to that night.

Being only another 109 km away, I figured it wouldn't take us all that long to get there not including the time to figure our way around the city and get to Haeundae.

Well, it definitely took longer than expected but we made it and got to see quite a bit of Busan while driving around and made it to the Indian restaurant before it closed!

The next day we took a lovely walk along the water and made our way to Gyeongju, the historical area where we went to Bulguksa, the largest temple in Korea and saw some huge tombs.

We were excited to get back to our 5 star hotel (which I got for $70 online) where we could enjoy the hot springs, the lovely view and just relaxing.

I spent quite a bit of time in the sauna and got an amazing massage from an adjumma.

It was a fabulous way to end the day.

The next day we fueled ourselves for the long drive home with these amazing buns from this bakery. Oh my goodness, they are amazing!

Darren took the morning shift as he is a morning person and I am definitely not.

After a while we arrived at a tool gate. We were hoping that it was one where you take your ticket and not a toll gate where you give them a ticket and pay as we did not have any recent toll gate tickets in the car.

Sure enough, it's a give your ticket and pay type gate. Oh man.

So we had to pull over to this little booth thing and wait for this other couple to finish their dealings with the boothe lady.

We had to fill out some paperwork and the couple was nice enough to help us but we still ended up waiting about 10-15 minutes to finally figure out how much we were going to owe for not having out toll gate ticket.

Turns out it was only 3 bucks and we were standing there for that whole time wondering what our punishment was going to be.

A whole 3 bucks!

Like you couldn't have said that 10 minutes ago. hahaha

So we were on our way.

After missing a higway turn off and finally making our way back on course we noticed that the weather was drastically different from the weather we had that morning.

We were welcomed back to Mokpo with a lovely blizzard.

We think we are cursed as when we returned to Mokpo with Stephanie the first time, it was also a blizzard.

I hope this is the last one of the season!

Tomorrow Stephanie and I are heading back to Busan to spend the night and then take the "Beetle" ship to Fukuoka, Japan where we will spend 2 nights.

After that, we will spend one day in Mokpo and then head to Seoul again to send Steph on her way to Sydney, AUS.