First Trip to Mainland South Korea

 Some trips are hard to categorize and place in a "normal" blog format. Here I'll just sorta, unorganizedly (I know that's not a real word) summarize my trip to mainland South Korea.
This is more of an online journal than a professional blog at the moment. 



I flew from Jeju island to the  main land South Korea city, Busan. Didn't have any plan of course except to sleep on one of the beaches.  As I mentioned before, I was quite surprised that a flight was  cheaper than the ferry, usually the slower transportation option is cheaper. 

I explored several beaches, they were all very wide,  but none of them stretched out long long in length like the kind where I could walk way down the beach until I was away from people.   
My camping this time would be in the city!

The beach as you can see is in the city. Also, Busan had many lights, I watched a light show of that bridge and then later, giant words appeared on the beach!  

Very surprising that Korea is a developed country which didn't care if people camp on the beach,  unlike America and a few other places where police and security freak out if anyone is camping outside of an official campground where one must pay a fee.  I even met others who had also camped on the beaches in Busan. But I didn't meet anybody in Busan. lol. 

Something I had noticed there was that there were so many couples. It seemed like no woman was single in Korea.  Maybe also because I was near the beach there were more couples walking around but I still had that impression in other places too.  Also on a totally random note, one morning I woke up and stepped outside and onto a fucking centipede.   

During my time camping there, I reached my official 1 year mark.  I decided to write a long inspirational Facebook post.  It took a long time to write and think of the words. click to enlarge.

There was a Starbucks, which is a great place to charge my laptop and use Wifi.  Around that time I began to search for a couchsurfing host for Seoul, I didn't feel like being homeless in a beachless city and I needed to meet people. One particular interesting profile stood out,  a guy named Yongmin who claimed to have traveled Europe for a year without money.  Sounds like someone I could learn something from as my money was going one direction, down,  and I wanted to travel forever.  

It was time to meet my couchsurfing host, Yongmin, also he hosted 2 Russian girls at the same time as me. One of them was really tall. 

The bed I was given to crash on.  

While we were there, It was Korean Thanksgiving which I didn't know.  So Yongmin's mom cooked a delicious Korean BBQ.

The Russians took us to a Russian restaurant in Seoul. Unsurprisingly, bottles of vodka were on the tables. 

We also went drinking later. 

North Korea is somewhere on those mountains in the distance.

What is this stuff? 

A Psy energy drink?! 

So, Yongmin was probably the most hospitable host I've ever had. He never let me pay for anything except one time and I had to practically beg him. Staying there felt like a hotel. 

We talked a little about his travel. He said he first traveled all the way across Russia. South Koreans don't need a visa to go to Russia, I'm jealous, and he said he met a few North Koreans there too, because apparently some North Koreans go on business trips to Russia! Yongmin said that by the time he got to Europe, he ran out of money.  But he continued travelling by hitchhiking and survived off the kindness of strangers.  Of course, he became exhausted and one day had to stop.  No wonder, he treats travelers well.

                                                                                  

                          

I had met many people at a hostel on an certain island in Malaysia, and since then I had met up with 4 of those people again in another part of the world!  In Korea I met with number 5, a Korean girl but it was brief as she had been in another city visiting family for the thanksgiving and wasn't available until the day before I would leave.  We met up in Gangnam, which I was surprised to learn was an area of Seoul. I've heard the song Gangnam Style plenty of times but never knew that -___-  

   

                                                                               

All the fish gathered at the site of a person, wanting to get fed.

Yongmin took me to the bus station and said goodbye, I took the bus back to Busan where I took a flight to Japan.