Daejeon

Well, I made it to Daejeon and back safely. I had a great visit with my friend Roger and had a nice time meeting people from Woosong College and seeing some neat sites.

After sleeping in a little later than I'd wanted to, I was on the 11:20 bus from Ulsan to Daejeon. I sat down and fell asleep. Three hours, give or take later, I was in Daejeon. It was like I magically sat down in one city and woke up in another, with no recollection of the events in between. I guess that's not much different from leaving my parents basement one day, only to wake up in Korea a couple of days later; just on a smaller scale.

After looking around and realizing that I wasn't in Kansas, or Ulsan in my case, anymore, I turned around and noticed three little munchkins trying to lead me down a yellow brick road to meet the wonderful wizard of Pyongyang. After finding my brain, courage and heart, I was able to resist them and find a pay phone in which to call Roger with. Within five minutes, I was met by Roger and his girlfriend, Su-Young. We drove off in Su-Young's car to her place, where we were greeted by her youngest son, Ee-san(?). He was about 14 years old. They were both super nice people and were able to understand my English fairly well. Unfortunately, I couldn't really understand their Korean. No surprise!

Since the original plan was to have a barbeque with Roger's university peers (he's an English professor there), we headed on our merry way to the BBQ location. Well, after making a quick stop to Roger's apartment to grab a healthy amount of beef burgers and chicken breasts for the feast.

Oh ya, we made sure that we had some beer as well...

We had the party on the padio (aka. the Korean style "yard") of the apartment where a lot of the foreign university teachers live. It was an awesome time. Well, it was really just your average super fun time with a bunch of great people mixed with good fun and good beer. I arrived early to help Roger set everything up; lights, grill, music, seats, etc. The burgers and breasts (every mans favorite meal, right?) were awesome. All in all, there were around 40 people that showed up. The age range was from two years old to way older than two years old. Following the BBQ (at I don't know what time), a group of us headed off to Roger's friend Richard's place. He has a good sized balcony, so it worked out good for the ten or so of us that went there. A few more beer were consumed, and Roger showed off his amateur wrestling skills. He was quite impressive; taking down a much larger... and much more beer-fueled man. Eventually, our night was over and I crashed on Roger's air mattress. It was comfortable.

I woke up by the crack of noon on Sunday. French toast with maple syrup and fried ham was on the menu. It was a great treat. It was followed up by a trip to Su-Young's place. We were thinking of going to the Daejeon vs. Suwon soccer game, but since it was Buddha's 2549th birthday we opted for a visit to a temple area.

After a quick trip to the bus terminal to secure a ticket to Ulsan for 7:40pm, we were off to the mountainous temple area (which is really all of Korea if you're outside of a city, and sometimes even when you're in a city). I'm pretty sure that we went to Gyejoksan mountain, but I'm not really sure. I'll probably just edit this post when I find out just where I was.

The area was really beautiful. It was exactly what I'd expected to see in Asia; cool little shops on the side of a mountain road, monk-like people mixing with local tourists at the foot of a mountain, trials heading up everywhere and cool temples. It was cool as hell. Everywhere was adorned in Asian lanturns (which would be lit up at night. I missed that). There was even a stellar looking "mountain monk" with dangly things hanging off him. It's hard to describe without a picture, but he looked like he was from a kung-fu movie.

Basically, we walked up a trail for a while, which was crowded with people, and enjoyed the prime scenery. The trail followed a mountain creek, where we saw steep and beautiful rocky cliffs, majestic pine trees which hugged the mountain side, graveyards marked with pagotas, the odd traditional resturant overlooking the creek and numerous Buddhist temples which were crowded with regular people and monks. Also beside the temples were the nicely sized SUVs which were certainly owned by the very well taken care of head monks.

Dukkha (all life is suffering) and Samudaya (desire causes suffering) my ass...

Before leaving the area, we decided to eat at one of those tranquil resturants on the creek. It was of the sit down on the floor in front of the coffee table variety. We were served some kind of mushroom pancake and omelettes to start, along with a couple of bottles of Cass beer. Then our main dished started arriving. There were probably 20 or more (small) dishes in all, ranging between things like rice various styles of kimchi, fish, mushrooms, veggies and other random Korean things. Good and spicy!

After the meal, he had about 40 minutes to make it back into the city to catch my bus. We didn't quite make it. I had to pay and additional 9000 won on top of the original 18,900 ticket price. Now I had a little more time to visit as my bus wouldn't be leaving until 9:00 pm.

I said goodbye to Roger, as he had some English teaching business to take care of, and headed to Su-Young's house. He oldest son, who's 22 years old (I can't remember his name right now) was there for me to meet. He was a pretty nice guy who showed me some funny card tricks. He didn't really know any English, so his younger brother had to do the translating when we couldn't communicate with our creative gestures. After loosing track of the time, Su-Young reminded us that we should get going to the bus terminal. It was only a 5 minute walk, so there shouldn't have been any trouble. We didn't take into account that the boys knew the owner of the corner store on the way there. After talking for 5 minutes or so, and eating some free ice cream, we were running to the bus station. We caught the bus just as it was leaving. My new friend had to flag the bus down so that I could get on. After some hugs goodbye (Korean men really like to hug people that they've just met goodbye I guess), I got on the bus.

After clicking my heels together three times, I was back at Tombstone bar in Ulsan.