The Lost Amusement Park.

The story goes that there used to be an amazing Amusment park at the very top of the mountain in Okpo, but unfortunately, one day, a child somehow fell off the rollercoaster or one of those dangerous rides and died. The family in their greif sued the crap out of the Amusement park and due to the fact they had no insurance, lost their fortune and their park. The Great thing about this park is that they never bothered to dismantle it. Many if not all the English teachers on the island find their way to the park at least once in their year here, and Joseph and I are no different.

Joseph at the Grand Entrance... you can sort of see the makeshift Mickey Mouse in the left part of the arch...yeah but this tiny park is no Disney!

The random duck head in the bumper car, I wanted to sit with him, but it had just rained the day before so there was a foot of water in the bottom and on the seat... bummer.

The bumpercar ride was further down the hill, not sure why all the cars were up here.


Joseph found a K for Kelly, and then he put it down because it had bugs on it!

We were really in awe of how nature was taking it back! Everything was covered in vines, I felt like I was in an Indiana Jones Movie.

You can't even see the tracks on the bottom because of all the plant life, It was kind of eerie being there knowing at one point it was bustling with people, screams and movement, and now nothing but stillness.

Tickets Anyone?

The carousel of DOOM!!!!! We didn't ride this one. After viewing the rusted out bottom we scheduled tetnus shots!

And this used to be some prize basketball game called "The High Top" and for some reason it was all plastic except for the laces.

There was a whole other section of the park, but my lithium batteries failed me when I needed them most... we will however probably go back, because the rest of the park is way more exciting.

Shabbu Shabbu, Okpo and faulty sidewalks.

I forgot to put my photograph drive back into my camera, so I had to take pictures on the actual camera this weekend, but I happily found this picture of Joseph and I in the old teacher office on one of our first weeks of school. We have come such a long way ( and both of us have much longer hair now) But it was fun to reminisce and think how much has changed and how much we done and how much we have learned.

Us in early October, Picture by Sen.

Now onto this weekend. We decided to be Adventurous with our appetite. We stopped at a street stall and order a Japanese fad food item called "Unbelievable Taki Yako"...which is a piece of octopus tentacle cooked in a breading dough outside layer topped with Mayonnaise, BBQ sauce, Fish shavings, Seaweed pieces and vinegar... It sounds awful, but it is actually quiet tasty, but you have to wait for them to cool off a bit or it is more like octopus tentacle covered by LAVA.
We actually passed this octopus in a bucket near the Okpo fish market, he was still alive and blowing water bubbles, so I got a picture. WE ATE THIS!!!! VOLUNTARILY!

We did a bit of Shopping in Okpo before we went to dinner, and while looking for fun gifts to send to people we came across this coolest combination, Keychain, toenail clipper and bottle opener... I have to add this to the list of Mustard with Paper towels.

While doing our shopping an interesting thing happened, Joseph is so powerful he broke the sidewalk... Literally he was walking and the sidewalk gave out underneath him... just one brick though, which was really odd... here is a side view with his food exactly as it was placed when said collapse occured.

The offending brick. Crazy.

On our shopping adventure we stumbled arcoss a photo studio.

I still maintain that Koreans are weird when it comes to photographs. Here is a picture of a baby looking out the window at the rain, crying, completely naked and taking a leak all at the same time... I would have a hard time having this above my mantle place with company coming over..

This was right off the main street as a promotion of what kind of work they do... yeah....

And I love how the underwear stores do the same thing... Gee I guess Valentines day must be coming up.... I doubt many American boys would be caught dead in this get up!

We also found another bookstore (SCORE) with some aswesome english books, this one caught our Eye. The Obama story, he is so famous here, there were several biographies of him as well.

I like how the back cover makes it look like he had to escape Kenya via hot air baloon to live in American so he could be President.

We also found this comic book retelling American History in comic form, unfortunately these comics are not as funny as Calvin and Hobbes. According to the comic, the Native American Indians were peaceful hippies corrupted by Europrean Greed.

Here is a selection of the wooden tables to use for the Solar new year holiday, they also had a chart that told what kind of food you had to eat for a successful new year and the placement it needs on the table. Very traditional, and beautiful.

We actually had Indian food in Okpo but Sunday night we went out for our other favorite food, Shabbu Shabbu! I figured I would show pictures of this meal instead since indian food all kinda looks like mush!

They start you off with a big pot of beef flavored broth, and fill it with several different kinds of mushrooms and cabbage. They give you different sauces to dip the boiled mushrooms in. They also give you a big plate of thinly sliced beef, and you put it in the pot to cook it ( another place you cook for yourself) The you place the cooked meat on these already prepared rice balls on a type of lettuce. (they also garnish it with black seeds and crab meat.)

Plate -o- meat

Half of the mushrooms, the other hald are in the pot.

Here is the pot, the table acutally has a burner in the middle of it so you can adjust the heat as needed. Joseph is picking out some meat right now.

They also put additional things in the broth including shrimp, a weird bread/noodle thing and dumplings. All of it is boiled in a delicious broth.

After you eat your fill of all the different mushrooms, and the meat, they then take the leftover broth and cook rice in it adding seaweed, dried carrots and mushrooms, soy sauce and an uncooked egg to create a rice porridge so nothing is wasted. You can also get noodles, but they tend to put spicy kimchi with the noodles, so the rice is a bit more bland and more to Joseph' s and my liking.

It is so delicous, and we have gone several times, but this is the first time I have ever remembered to bring my camera.

Hope everyone is doing well and staying warm with all the Snow... we hope it will start warming up here soon!

Saturday and Sunday

Saturday Joseph and I decided to hit up a few crucial stores in Geoje, and then go to dinner in Okpo. Not a wild and crazy fun adventure, but we needed some things from the foreign mart that you cannot buy in Home Plus, and since it was relatively nice out, we wanted to get away from the apartment! Our first stop was a small stop and shop on the other side of town (near the bus station). We had left early in the morning, so we needed some sustenance to keep us going. We stopped in a Brown and White Bakery (there are two apparently) and picked up what we thought was a vanilla creme pastry thing. Next we stopped at the family mart and picked up drinks! Then we took our spoils to a nearby park we had never been to before and we sat ourselves on a pretty patch of rocks under a tree and watched a group of kids playing basketball.


This was about 15 seconds before Joseph discovered the pastry we bought that said "vanilla" was definitely "banana"... it was still fabulous though. He really didn't want to share.


And My fantastic discovery. Mochacinno Milk tastes exactly like the Starbucks Frappachinos you can get in the glass bottles, but this is 1,000 won as opposed to 3,500.... Yeah!

"Ummm, this is banana flavored"


He also bought this little gem, because everything is so cutely packaged in Korea, and he needed a smidgen of chocolate to complete this pastry tasting.

We always love to try new drinks, this one was a "fiber and beauty" drink... Koreans are all about the vitamin/power/caffeine drinks, and most of them are terrible, but this one can only be described as "like flat orange Fanta mixed with Sunkist with a bitter aftertaste..." Well they can't all be winners.
After Joseph took the first bite this was me being way happy about accidentally buying the banana version!

And then I shoved it in my face! Yes!!!!

Uh oh Someone needs a napkin. He was really mad I took this picture, and is going to be even more mad I put it on the blog! Oops!

Here is the little Korean park we sat near. You can go sit in the Pagoda things, but they were both occupied by kids playing Pokemon cards. Very cute.

This was the tree we sat under, it looked like it had a bunch of pea pods hanging from it's branches.

We also did some shopping after our snack... The Awesome thing about Korea is they constantly give you free stuff when you buy something, we always try to buy drinks at the family mart and they remind us that it comes with a packet of cookies for free... Sometimes though the combos are very interesting... like this one.... for those students who like to write but end up with chapped lips...

One time I saw buy a bottle of mustard you get free paper towels (I know how easy it is to get crazy with mustard), and even napkins with free socks....(? no idea on that one) we have decided to keep a list of all the interesting combos and try to take pictures, and we will see which is the most odd or weird combo.

We ended up going to the bus station and heading to Okpo. We first went to dinner at Quiznos ( country chicken soup in a bread bowl was calling my name....) and then we stopped at the foreign mart to pick up some amazing Indian food and fiber bars ( because Joseph went through the ones Lindsey and Amanda sent already...which by the way the apple ones were awesome!)

With our tummies full as well as our backpack, we headed home... since it was only 8 when we got back to Gohyeon we stopped by the D cube and went to Starbucks to sit and chat for a while. We really like the Starbucks near our house, it has a very cool vibe to it and we can always talk, or sit and read, a nice way to get out of the house in the winter. I went down to the home plus for a minute to grab a few items I needed for dinner one night this week.

When I came back I found Joseph has ordered us a lovely dessert, a chocolate crunch cheese cake, which was very different from cheesecake you get in the us, but it was still really tasty. ( we usually don't eat this bad everyday, but we do splurge on weekends.)

Well with Saturday over, on Sunday we decided to go see the Movie Nine... which I kinda liked ( simply for the fact it was a musical, and had lots of theatre aspects, as well as a long list of famous stars in it) but Joseph didn't really like it... so instead of just going out to dinner, we wanted to save a bit of money ( and we could not decide where to go) so we came home and I ended up making my best attempt at chili. I had bought some salsa at the Home Plus the night before, so I added some of that to the chili so it would have a Mexican feel, and it turned out surprisingly well.

And I ended up making much more "Mexican chili" than I intended, so we will probably be having it for lunch tomorrow too!

All I did was throw together Some cooked ground beef and onions ( I should have added green pepper but I forgot to buy one), a can of sliced tomatoes, a can of Kidney beans, 1 cup of Pace medium salsa, some water and a bit of flour to thicken it, some salt and pepper and let it simmer for thirty minutes. Way easy to make and filling (yet still kinda healthy)

I still have a few pictures and a cute story about our trip to Masan, but I forgot to upload the pictures to the computer, but you can look for that post sometime this week.

Okpo and Goesong.

Last weekend was actually quite eventful despite the rain and cold weather. It was a pretty sight since we had never been that far into Okpo. The Harbor had these huge cement "Jack" shaped barriers to keep back the waves. They were actually really fascinating, and you could walk out on them, so of course we did and we got a few pictures in the process.

Harbor View

You can see the Art Museum, the big partial dome thing towards the left of the photo. We didn't get a chance to go that day, but we will sometime in the future, especially now that we know where to go! It is fairly cheap too, so maybe we will save it for a rainy day one weekend.

More jacks!

Across the bay you could see a small red light house on the other side, there were two, the one on our side was white. People come out here and go fishing since it is so close to the ocean, although the only thing we saw anybody catch was a piece of seaweed.

The white light house on our side.

Another picture of the red Light house from farther back.

And this time with ME!

Joseph had to climb out on the things, so I got one of him with the ocean as the background. I love this picture!

We walked around town a bit, and really the only thing worth taking a picture of was this guy.... You can kinda see the sign on the glass behind him... the place was called Pizza Etang.... I don't know if they meant to say " Pizza Eating"... but Etang is kinda funny.

After a long day of walking and exploring, we went to an Indian/Pakistan restaurant where the head guy who owns it is really nice, plus the food is really good, and a bit different from the Korean spicy that we eat most weeks. It was a nice enjoyable meal of Chicken Sheh Kabab ( Not shisk Kebab, this chicken was ground up and served over onions) with a side of Palek Paneer( spinach with cheese) and really good Indian bread called Non. We have eaten here a few times and the guy remembered us so he gave us a free coke this time! We will certainly go back.

Our next day, Sunday, was supposed to be our outing day since we got a late start and had to go to okpo, since it was raining we figured we would go to a totally different place, just try taking a bus to somewhere cool... So we went to the bus station and paid 5,000 won to go to Goesong... we just wanted to see what was there and if any of it was interesting. We ended up not finding too much, and in the rain it was kinda gross... It was neat to explore though, I just wish there had been more to see!


Goesong is famous for having lots of dinosaur bones, And they have an outdoor Dino Museum, but since it was an outside thing, and it was a freezing dismal day, we decided to just explore and come back to do dino day another time. Here is the Outdoor traditional Market. We always stumble across this.

Walking through the town we saw this garden drying leaves or something, I love being able to see the more traditional side of Korea, rather than the commercial westernized side of it.

The House next to the garden

I wish these steps had led somewhere awesome, as it was there was just a big pile of trash at the top. I cut that out of the picture. I wonder what they used them for, they were so tiny and steep it seems that it would be difficult to use them for anything.

Candid "it's raining" artsy picture of Joseph. ( And by artsy, I mean blurry)

One thing about Korea that does bug me on occasion, is there are no public waste recepticals.... I mean seriously, how hard is it to put a dumpster behind a huge apt building.... We were walking by this pile though, and almost contemplated stealing the white and black sign in hanguel to hang in our apartment, but there was gross stuff stuck to the back, so we let it sit in the garbage pile. Korean people do this often, you will sometimes find entire bedroom sets ( in relatively good condition mind you) just hanging out on the street. Such a waste I think...

This was my artsy Forlorne "can we go home" picture.... the rain was starting to pick up and it was getting colder....

I call this one " Joseph in the rain with bamboo"... we saw some bamboo finally, it took long enough... I thought the stuff grew everywhere, but apparently only behind dirty apt buidlings.

The trucks in korea are very different from the ones in America, Most any truck you see is simply a utility vehicle.... which is odd to me having grown up in Raleigh and in Boone, you see trucks constantly, but this is the closest thing I have seen to a real truck, and it is a pitiful example.

And more with the Dinosaurs.

And More dions.... they were everywhere.... literally.

Rice field.... they are everywhere too!

And just because as soon as I saw it, I realized this was the first fire hydrant I have seen since coming to Korea.

Not too exciting of a trip for us either. We had fun, although we will probably just come back on a sunny warm day to see the dino museum....Not too much else...

We are planning a few trips to Seoul, Maybe Daegu, Back to Busan and to many more places.

As for now, we are going to clean the apartment, and prepare for school tomorrow.