After having shoulder surgery and things going smoothly it'd be really nice to pretend like I'm normal again and go travel around Asia for my vacation. However, the cautionary cow inside my head moos, "Stay here and find some greener pastures in Korea." Alright, cow, I'll give it a try.
So far with my morning off I've looked over several tourism sites in Korea and there are so many interesting things to do and places to see. Ideally I'd like to go hiking/ exploring the west coast or south coast but that's proving to be more difficult than I thought it would be because I want to work my trip around a rail pass. If I buy a rail pass for the week it measures out to 22,000W a day with infinite train rides which is pretty awesome. Exclusive to foreigners, its a great way to promote Korea in all of its beauty gliding from city to city and site to site on a warp speed cloud.
There are a lot of natural sites I want to see but since all the railways branch out from Seoul I'm going to have to pick and choose where I travel to make the best of my seven days. There's the lovely Northeast, prime for ice fishing and winter activities; Taean National Park, under Seoul; then further down more national parks; and the town famous for its mud, Boryeong. The South is really enticing with all the isles and lookout points, but the train tracks go north and south in this country so I'd be on a bus if I took this route. The alternative is climbing up and down on the train to hit each spot. This will probably be what happens. If I run out of days and I'm just going to take a monster long bus ride back to Busan.
I'm obviously packing light bringing along a camera, notebook, a phone, respective chargers, enough underwear for the journey (and the necessary extra one), and recycle through my warmest winter gear. I might be eating even lighter: Winter is the soup season and man'o'man do these Koreans know how to make a good soup. Looking at the travel websites made this seem really intimidating considering the mountain of things to do in the window I'm giving myself, but this will be my first adventurous back-packing (with a gym bag) vacation I've ever had.
This might become a brainstorming/ mapping out spot to list the things I want to see as well as the routes I'll be taking. My co-teacher said that Suncheon is a good place to go, so I'm looking into that as well right now. Currently though everything is up in the air and it's 75% likely to stay that way until cabin fever strikes (like my plan, I have no date(s) planned either).
I remember going out for dinner with this one person who talked about this memoir about a woman who wandered through the Appalachians all by herself for a month or longer on her own. Although I don't plan on doing something that isolating, I am going to try my best to only speak Korean and when someone speaks to me in English I will reply in French. This winter vacation isn't shaping up to be a typical vacation of searching for a beach or a cold beer but one of those Into the Wild explorations where (I haven't seen the movie or read the book) you soul-search, kill some stuff, eat it, bath in a stream, build a log cabin, whatever, I know it's going to test me, and I'm excited about that. I will also need to get a real pair of running shoes too.
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