Day 123: Spring is Coming

Although the winter weather here has definitely been more mild than back home, both of us are definitely ready for spring. Without snow this winter, it feels like we've been in perpetual autumn for about 6 months now. Fortunately, spring is showing signs of its arrival! Two weeks ago the highs were in the 50s almost every day, and we've only had a couple nights below freezing in the last two weeks. We're excited to see the island come to life. Lots of trees are budding or even beginning to flower, and it's really exciting.

It's good to finally have a change in the weather, because work has been stressful lately and beautiful days help. The spring term at school has started out a bit rough, and not having a manager hasn't helped. There's good news and bad news on the manager front, though. Good news: we're getting a new one. Bad news: we're getting a new one...in May. So by the time our new manager starts, we will have worked at Chungdahm for 5 months: one with one manager, one with another, and three without any manager at all. Hopefully the new one turns out more like our first manager than our second...

Anyways, last weekend we felt so wiped out by the week of work that we just tried to recover, but this week went better so we decided to get off the island yesterday. We went to the town of Tongyeong, which is the closest mainland city to Geoje. It's only a 30-ish minute bus ride away. It turned out to be really cool and we saw a huge variety of things in one day.

First, we went to the Dongpirang wall painting village, which is a neighborhood perched on a hill where almost every wall has a mural of some sort. Pictures do better than words at describing it:

Some were whimsical. If you turned around here, you'd see this view in real life (minus the flying fish, of course).

Some were pretty clear political statement. Among the figures I recognized in this mural (this is only half of it) were Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Che Guevara, the Dalai Lama, Confucius, Vladimir Lenin, John Lennon, Gandhi, and Mao.

Others were just colorful.

And this one was 3-D!

The Beatles made an appearance...

The harbor from the wall painting village

After that we went down to the harbor, where they have four replicas of turtle boats, which were the stars of the Korean navy 500 or so years ago. For only 2,000 won each (less than $2) we could go in all of them, which was pretty cool.

Spiky turtles!

One of the four turtle boats

We saw a bunch of old Korean men playing games on along the harbor.

We then walked for a while to the base of a mountain that boasts Korea's longest cable car ride. To get there we had to walk under a narrow waterway (yes, under).

Undersea Tunnel

We took the cable car to the top of the mountain, which was packed with Korean tourists. There were so many people taking pictures. If you need to learn to count to three in Korean, the best way would be to find a pack of tourists taking pictures of each other. (Hana, dul, set! Click)

We looked over the beautiful bay with tons of islands, but we wanted to evade the crowds, so we got off the boardwalk superhighway that connected the cable car station to the peak and found some real trails. On our way down the mountain we saw two different temples. We then proceeded to lose a trail and traipsed around in the woods for a bit trying to find it again. (We only lost the trail. We weren't lost lost since we could see the ocean the whole time.) We eventually found our way out through some terraced fields that were probably usually used only by the farmers, but it was really cool to see.

Looking down from inside the cable car.

So many islands!

Temple complex number one (Miraesa)

Miraesa

The second temple (Yonghwasa) looked super modern. Same architectural style, but there were fancy glass doors all along the bottom.

They were in the process of building another building.

 

Cool terraced fields we walked through.

By the end we were tired and hungry, but it was a really cool day. We got an awesome mix of history, culture (old and new), mountains, ocean, forest, and farmland, all in one day.