Chuseok: Lotte World

Chuseok is a major harvest festival in Korea, where people will visit there hometowns, feast with family and drink rice wine among other celebrations. To the foreigner, Chuseok is a three day holiday! five if you count the weekend, which we do. Many foreigners use this time wisely as breaks this long are rare, some use it to travel; Busan, Jeju Island, Japan and China are popular destinations for example.

What about us though, It's only a couple of weeks since we landed and we're still awaiting payday. We decided to meet up with a couple of friends from Jeonju, and head to Lotte World. It's a theme park here in Korea just south of Seoul and only an hour away from us. It only cost us 4,000 won (about £2) to get there by tube and 22,000 each to get in as we had a half price code. We had already been to Everland, another popular theme park close by, but thought a change of scenery would be nice. After all, it's meant to be the largest indoor theme park, or something to that effect.

As we walk into Lotte World, there's a huge open space where you can see all the floors and goings on, in the centre and the main focus, is the ground floor ice rink. We would have liked to have had a go but it's an additional cost to your entrance ticket. It's a strange place, inside there's the loop to loop ride, literally just a loop that just goes round and round. The standard pirate ship, although here they prefer to call it a viking ship... it's always a pirate ship to me, and other pretty standard rides that don't exactly get the heart pumping. It's a pretty small place and going on a Korean holiday was a bad idea due to the amount of people there. Shortly after we arrived a parade started, a Halloween parade full of cheap costumes, wigs and floats farting bubbles for all to enjoy.

Can we go loop de loop? 

However this is Korea, and a people can't seem to just stand by and enjoy a simple parade, they have to push, barge, shout and force their way into non-existing spaces  to get the best possible photo with their Samsung Galaxy. The best thing about it was that this was the adults, the kids really didn't seem all that bothered.

As I stood, camera at the ready to potentially capture the moment, some muppet decided he wanted in. Forcing his way in he also knocked my camera from my hand! Thank god for camera straps. Obviously a little annoyed I did what any Brit would do, I said;

"Excuse me!"

In that slightly angry tone with the expectation of an apology. What did I get, a backpack in my face as he decided he needed a step back to get a better shot. No shit, why do you think I was standing there in the first place.

Tired of the hustle and bustle from the front row of the parade, I decided to move back and find some space. No matter where I stood, someone would make it their mission to not only walk into me, but through me. One father who was in such a rush to get to the parade, was power walking dragging his daughter behind, actually led her face first right into my butt! She fell to the floor as the farther continued dragging her obliviously by the hand. The poor girl was flailing around on the floor, not knowing what's going on.

We decided that we'd had enough inside and made our way to the outside section of Lotte World. With a little more space and some fresh air, we felt instantly more comfortable here. As you come out onto a bridge you can see pretty much all the park has to offer. They have the Gyro Drop and a big drop - essentially the same ride but one spins as well. An underground roller coster, a standard roller coster, bumper cars, boat rides and other small attractions. Nothing much to write home about, yet here I am writing home about it.

The queues we're ridiculous, close to an hour just for the bumper cars. If anyone is considering a trip to Lotte World, just go to Everland instead. Lotte world is more for the pre-teen crowd in my opinion with average rides compacted into a small space which all feels very claustrophobic. The best day to go would be if you get a day off work for whatever reason, when the kids are still in school! That's what we did last Christmas with Everland and had a great time. Longest queue time was only 15 minutes. Also, they have a fantastic zoo at Everland.

For the full photo album of the day, please follow the link below.

Lotte World Photos

Suji-gu, A trip to the Korean Folk Village

We've been in Suji now for a couple of weeks and have had the chance to wander the streets and see what we could find. Now, depending on what your looking for thats either a lot, or pretty much nothing at all! Don't get me wrong, Suji seems like a lovely place so far and we're very happy to be here. However, if your looking for a hotspot of social activity and a booming nightlife, you might want to look else where.

Here's what we found, our apartment is nice and well situated in central Suji. With just a 20min walk we're at work, 15mins from the subway station into Seoul, also around that area is a theatre, shopping complex and sports centre. We're only 10mins from downtown which is where we found our favourite restaurant Sor li (I'm unsure of how to romanize it's title) and only 5 mins away from a Lotte Mart. Even closer to home we have some floodlit basketball courts open to the public, literally 30 seconds away. So far so good!

My favourite restaurant in Korea, downtown Suji

With our first weekend here in Suji, we decided to take a trip to the traditional folk village which is here in Suji. Now, whilst exploring, we noticed road signs stating that it was 8 kilometers away from where we are. So, we decided that it would be a nice walk for a sunny Saturday afternoon. With clear blue skies and temperatures reaching highs of 29 degrees, this turned out to be more like a trek in the Sahara for us pasty Brits.

It was all well and good for the first 3K of the trip and we were enjoying the walk, pretty flowers lined the path with beautiful butterflies fluttering around, to make it the perfect rom-com setting. The stench of romantic cheese thickening in the air before being overpowered with the smell of burning skin,  Sophie's pale complexion falling victim the the powerful rays of the sun was set to turn this rom-com adventure into a devastating episode of British soap quality!

Mood and morale soon begins to fall as the realization sets in that we still have 5k ahead of us in this heat, and a little further on decide to take a rest at the first convenience store we came across. With a cold drink and shade we contemplated turning back but decided that the burn would be for nothing if we admit defeat! So we soldier on through what seems like an endless journey, now with the knowledge of future pain that comes with sunburn. 

One thing I've noticed from walking around in Suji is the amount of apartments here, it's unbelievable just how many are here. The skyline in almost every view is an endless sea of apartment buildings!

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I'd hate to be a paper boy in Korea!

Suji Arrival

So after a rather stressful journey which started in Coventry at 8:20am Monday, we finally walked through the door of our new apartment for the next twelve months Around 9:00pm Tuesday and started to prepare for work the following morning! If you're considering teaching in Korea, try and fly at the weekend to give yourself a days rest before you work.

Let me talk a little about the journey, for a start we were on a pretty tight time frame. We needed to get to London to pick up our visas between 10:00am and 12:00pm, so we left pretty early and decided to treat ourselves by traveling 1st class on the London Midland train - pointless - 1st class on London Midland is half the size of a normal carriage and nowhere to put luggage! We ended up blocking isles and upsetting the suits as we struggled to bundle our overweight cases on the seats!

A few minutes in and as far as Rugby we hear the announcement for all passengers to get of the train and wait for more information, as it turns out a skip lorry had slipped down an embankment and onto the tracks, all trains cancelled! Great. We, or should I say I paced around winding up the stress levels as Sophie tried to find out what was happening, I thought a twirl from the vending machine might help calm me down until the inevitable happened - it didn't drop! Typical. So, as I stood shaking the vending machine through the tears of desperation we got the news that we were to board the Virgin train in an hour which would still get us to London on time.

As we make our way to platform five we head to the first class end - we bought first class, we fully intend to take advantage of this upgrade to Virgin. The train pulls up and as everyone crams into economy, me and Sophie stroll into first class to be greeted with seats filled with important bags and suit jackets with not a single offer to make space, but instead the refusal to even make eye contact to ignore the issue. After walking up and down we finally just tell a couple that we're going to sit at their table and force them to move their stuff,

We make ourselves comfortable and settle in for the journey when the announcement calls 'ladies and gentlemen due to the merger of trains we now have declassified the train, passengers may now make their way to first class to find seats'. Great, the first time we buy first class and the train gets declassified! It wasn't long before the flood of excited people made their way through desperately trying to find a seat and the reluctant suits forced to clear their accessories seat. First class announced they would be serving food and asked if only first class ticket holders would take food as supplies were limited, yeah right, everyone took advantage of the service and food was fully depleted before it even reached the final carriage.

Once we finally arrived in London our journey was pretty straight forward, we picked up our visas and made our way to Heathrow with hours to spare. The flight was was smooth, no turbulence at all and we changed over in Istanbul for our final leg which was a 10 hour flight to Korea. I was seated between Sophie and another girl to my right. It didn't take long before I had a sleeping heads on both shoulders and legs and feet forcing their way into my footwell! this was not the best 10 hours of my life.

On arrival in Incheon we were collected by a driver and take an hours trip into Suji, our new home for the year. We make an awkward change over of cars which was nothing but random, meeting new people in the rain as our cases get put into one car as we get ushered into another - it's Korea, what else did we expect. Anyway, we take a short trip to our new home and the nerves start to kick in, nerves about what kind of apartment we'll be getting. As we make our way to the door I'm desperately hoping it would be clean and of a decent size, all I wanted was to sleep!

The door opened to our new apartment and the rush of relief was overwhelming. It's clean with a new fitted kitchen, two bedrooms - one of which is a double, and a small dining table with a couple of chairs. We couldn't have been happier. The furniture is reasonable and everything is in working order, a vast improvement on our previous apartment.

Suji Apartment: Our main bedroom, a good size however the TV is so old I can't plug in the xbox

Suji apartment: The spare room which will become the office

Suji apartment: The kitchen and utility room at the back