The cherry blossoms….were AMAZING, STUNNING, MARVELOUS, UNBELIEVABLE…really, to tell you the truth, I don’t think there are any words that can truly express how magical seeing all the cherry blossoms in full bloom really was. This has been on my bucket list since I have known about them and once Casey found out about them, he was just as interested in seeing them too. We just never got the opportunity to see them. Every year the blossoms bloom at different times. So, in order to see them, you easily have to commit 3 weeks somewhere, which was always impossible given the timing of the blooming. They bloom between the end of March and beginning of April. Since we were in the accounting industry getting this time off would have been really hard and unfair to our teams. So it was just something we always passed on. Oh, by the way, the first part of the blog is written by me (Brittany) and Casey wrote the second part, just so you know :) So long story short, we ended up having to get a rental car this particular weekend because we had to get to the veterinarian we found to get the cats their rabies shots. We really didn’t want to fall behind on the cat’s shots since we are in a foreign country. Also, if there was ever an emergency and we needed to get back to the states, they have to be up-to-date on everything. Technically, I guess we could have taken a taxi or public transportation, but we wanted the least stressful option for the cats, and as an added bonus, we could use the car all weekend to get to places that are harder to get by public transportation. Anyway, flashback to when we were newbies in Korea. We had been eyeing the largest cherry blossom festival in Korea. Sadly, it was just really hard to get to by public transportation from our neck of the woods since it was just soooo far south and further from the bullet train lines than we liked. So we quickly dismissed the idea of going, and started looking for easier places to go to enjoy cherry blossom season. We quickly found some other really neat spots and moved on with our life. Anyway, we successfully secured the rental car and had this whole big trip to the coast planned out. We were really excited! Then out of the blue Casey goes “OH MY GOD! The Jinhae cherry blossom festival is going on this weekend! We can totally take the car down there!” We had completely forgotten about the festival and never even thought about looking up the date for the festival once we booked the car. So we scrapped all of our other plans and decided we would get up bright and early to make the 3.5 hour drive down to Jinhae to see the festival. SCORE! Here is a side story about the rental car. So, we secured the car online and felt pretty good about it. Then the morning of the day we were supposed to pick up the car, Lotte Car left us a text saying to call because there was a problem. Well, our limited Korean wouldn’t fix the problem. So we were like whateves, we will just go there and see what they say. They spoke a little English, so Casey decided he would keep his phone with him just incase they called back. Well, in the middle of his honors class, (a class of three girls who speak almost fluent English) his phone rings. He was playing a lyric game where you have the kids listen to a song and have them put the cut out of the lyrics in order. The three girls in his class knew his phone was ringing since it was coming through the computer. He told the three girls it was the rental company and he had to take the call. So, he picks up the phone on speakerphone and the guy goes off in Korean. The honors girls jumped in for the win. One girl took the phone to talk with the man in Korean. Another girl translated to Casey in English, and the other girl took Casey’s answers and translated it in Korean to the girl on the phone. So, what the honors girls found out was the car we rented wouldn’t be ready. So Lotte Car was wondering if it was ok if they upgraded us for free. They were concerned we really needed the smaller car. We said any car was fine and the problem was successfully taken care of thanks to Casey’s amazing students. He owes them a special treat for sure. The next morning we were up early and went to Tom N Toms for a coffee. Tom N Toms is one of the few coffee shops open 24 hours in Cheonan. For some reason most cafes open around 10 AM so usually we just make coffee at our place, but with such a long road trip ahead of us we figured we would treat ourselves. We started our road trip down to the Jinhae Cherry Blossom festival around 6:30 AM. The Jinhae Cherry Blossom Festival is the most famous cherry blossom festival in Korea. It is ten days long and within that time about two million people will visit the festival. We actually went down a day before the festival started but everything was rocking a rolling just the same. After we finally found parking we made our way to Yeojwacheon Stream. This stream is easily 1200 meters to 1600 meters and it is just lined with cherry blossoms. It was just stunning. We spent easily a half an hour walking one side of the stream. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom. We couldn’t have had better timing. Next we made a walk through the Jinhae Water Eco Park. It was gorgeous. We walked the whole lake and took way too many pictures. But hey, that is what you do in Korea. You take pictures. We then headed to Jehwangsan Park. This park has the Jinhae Pagoda of Mount Jehwang. To get to this nine story pagoda we had to climb 365 stairs. The climbed up the stairs is supposed to give you good luck for each day of the year. So we should be good until about mid-March next year. Once we made it to the top of the mountain and pagoda we saw the views of the coastline and the city. They were fantastic. Following Jehwangsan Park we made our way to Gyeonghwa Station. This is the famous train station where the Korail train sits under the cherry blossom row. We waited in line to take our picture on the train and walked along the tracks. By this time it was starting to get dark and we had a 3.5 hour drive back to Cheonan so we decided to call it a day and start the walk back to the car. Little did we know, we would spend another hour at the Yeojwacheon Stream. At night the stream is lit up by who knows how many LED lights. It was incredible. We decided we just couldn’t miss this and decided to walk the stream again and it was so so worth it, even though traffic out of Jinhae was crazy. We ended up getting home around midnight, but that was totally fine. We had a shorter drive to the MBC studio the next morning so it wasn't too big of a deal. “Let’s get dressed up in traditional Korean clothes and take pictures at old K-Drama TV sets this weekend” were the words coming out Brittany’s mouth and going into my ears. All I could do was smile and say yes. This day was all about Brittany and doing what she wanted to do, which is very rare. I was more excited about driving the rental car to and from the place than anything. As couples know, there are things that one person loves to do and the other doesn’t really care about. But the other person can find immense joy in doing something with the other person because the other person loves it so much. And this was just such an occasion for me. The Yongin Daejanggeum Park is a place where the Korean TV show producer “MBC” built over a dozen life size sets to film historical K-Drama’s (aka: period-piece) during the 90’s and 2000’s. MBC made several dozen K-Drama TV series over several decades and all of them were filmed at this location. It’s about 1.5 hours drive outside of any medium sized city, so it is a very quiet and peaceful place to be. Surrounded by mountains and farmland and away from the city noise and traffic is a great way to spend any Sunday afternoon. The park has a couple small cafes and quick-bit restaurants, so you could easily spend 6 or so hours here. We were there for about 3 hours and spent about ½ the time walking and other ½ taking pictures. On our way out to the park, we stopped at this unique restaurant located in a tiny farm town to eat some lunch. The husband (lead chef) and his wife (su-chef) own and operate the restaurant (like 95% of all restaurants in Korea). Both of them spoke English very well and were obviously very happy to tell us about their restaurant, the menu options, and what makes their restaurant special to them. There is such a sense of self pride in the Korean culture from everyone we meet. It is truly inspiring to feel such positive energy and glow from people. The lunch was udon soup with a piece of fried chicken, and honestly, was one of my top 3 favorite meals ever. I am not a foodie or into food-porn, so I am not going get into the details of the amazing taste - it was just a very special meal to me that I shared with Brittany that I hope to never forget. After making the easy drive out to the park, we paid our admission fees and costume rental fees (totaling about $50 USD for two people). We were armed with our Hanboks, hats, camera, and tri-pod to begin our own period-piece. At first the scale of the park and each set is overwhelming and trying to figure out the best place to shoot a picture was a struggle for me. Also, I was wearing this huge wooden hat that my neck was still adjusting to have to hold up. All the pictures were shot from our tripod and self-timer camera. One of us would stand out in the frame for scale while the other focused and framed the shot. Then the timer was set and one of us would come running up the road, over the bridge, down the stairs, or around the corner before the camera started taking the 5-6 exposures. Then in between each click of the camera, we quickly change our pose to 1 of 7-8 poses we know how to do and just hope 1 would turn out fine. We did this easily 30 times in different places all over the park. The day was over-cast, so the lighting was wonderful. Plus, being on Easter Sunday, there was hardly anyone else at the Park. We saw maybe 5-6 different groups of people and spent most the time all by ourselves. I believe most the pictures will speak for themselves, but some of them look like as though were posing for dramatic effect. This is a thing we see lots of young Korean men and women doing when taking pictures with friends. They spend many minutes twisting and fanning their hair and adjusting their shirt and pants in preparation for the picture shoot. The person in the photo usually isn’t even looking at the camera. They could be sitting on a park bench or garden area, so the picture will show one person from the back staring out over the skyscape pondering life or in mid-flower pick pondering the importance of said flower. Naturally, we coined this effort the Korea-ponder or K-Pon for short. We are still practicing our K-Pon skills every chance we get, but some of these pictures are our very first ever K-Pons and we are very proud of them!
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