Monday, June 22, 2009

There's a myth on Jeju that people take their elderly parents and grandparents to the island, and return home without them, having left the older folks there to roam as they will on the biggest island in Korea, a way of setting them free in their old age. Jeju is to Korea like fertile fields are to retired cows and horses. Jeju is called by some as the Hawaii of Korea, but I never really saw the comparison. It just didn't seem fair to do that. There are farms just a few yards away from white, sand beaches and the hills bear more resembelence to the rolling nature of Irealnd than the tropical sexiness of Hawaii. Whatever one wants to call Jeju is a personal choice, for me I call it the best place in all of Korea. And I'm making that bold statement having just seen a handful parts of the peninsula. The 3 M's of the Kids College office set off together yet again, with plans to meet up with a fourth M, a guy called Matt whom I met at Polly's Tavern in Itaewon a few months back. An excellent tour guide, and a pretty good looking guy as well :) He was gracious enough to show us around his island and even though we only had about 36 hours on the island, I'm fully satisified with how enthusiastically we embraced it.
On Friday night, after a commute where more time was spent traveling to the airport than in the actual air, we got a room at a cheap love motel and had mystery meat tacos at a Mexican restaurant. We got some beers to drink on a pier made entirely from giant man made rocks that looked like pieces from a game of Tetris. On Saturday we headed to Seongsan for a leisurely hike up to a very green, very large, very windy crater. As soon as we hit the top of it we were blasted by a wind that immobilized skirt-wearing Maranda until Michele rescued her with a pair of capri pants. We got our first glimpse of haenyeo's-female divers who scour the ocean floor off the island’s gnarled coast harvesting conch, octopus, urchin, and abalone, they dive without tanks holding their breath for up to two minutes at a time. Pretty impressive. And by impressive I mean tough as nails and scary as hell to meet out of water. Coupled with Matt's spirit guide bird, the Blue Rock Thrush, I felt as if I met the most authentic inhabitants of Jeju-do. After the hike we headed to Udo Island, a small island off the north east coast, where we rented scooters and scooted our way around an island that was as picturesque and as homey as tropical islands come. Like the foolish girls we are,we underestimated the power of sun when behind clouds and we all three developed interesting tan lines. And by tan lines I mean intense sun burns. Early Sunday morning I went swimming in cold, cold ocean water with the girls, refusing to leave the water until my legs were literally turning blue. We had been bitten by the scooter bug, so we chose to spend our remaining few hours on Jeju scootin' some more before taking the ferry back to the mainland, saying goodbye to Matt, and heading back to the airport to catch a reluctant flight back to Seoul.

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