Oh my goodness! Where has the time gone?! I know it’s been some time since our last post. We have been quite busy and we finally had a little time to sit down and write. Over the past few weekends our adventures have taken us to the city of Suwon, up Mt. Manggyeong, and to the Korean Independence Hall. We also made stops by the cities of Pyeongtaek and Incheon! Suwon The government of Korea has an awesome English website that lists out all the UNECO Heritage Sites in the country. When we were clicking through it one night we saw that Suwon had a UNECO Heritage Site and it was a huge fortress. No doubt, we had to go see it! We took our local line (not a bullet train) up to Suwon for about 3,000 Won ($3.00 USD). The first stop of the day was the Suwon local market. The market is called Yeongdong (or Young-dong)Market and was originally opened in 1917. There are over 300 stalls that sell pretty much anything you can imagine. Of course, our personal favorite stalls include anything with food (droll). Since we had a pretty big trek ahead of us, and didn’t want to be immobile, we stuck to just trying two things. The first item we tried was pretty much a red bean donut. It was shaped like a taco, and had red bean in the middle. It was pretty amazing! Next we found the stall with the longest line. We usually do this because we figure if it has a long line, it has to be good food right? Anyway, this specific stall was selling dumplings! YES! We waited for about 20 minutes and we ordered two orders when it was our turn. We ordered the gogi mandu (meat dumplings) and kimchi mandu (kimchi dumplings). We headed up to a really huge and older looking cathedral called Jeongjadong Cathedral. We couldn’t get inside since service was going on but the cathedral was absolutely ginormous! We found a nearby bench and enjoyed our dumplings while overlooking the city (so romantic!). It was time to start our fortress hike! We headed back down the hill to the entrance of the Hwaseong Fortress. The fortress took two years to build and was finished in 1796, (during the Joseon Dynasty) so it’s pretty old. The fortress wall is an impressive 5.52 km in length and encompasses the entire old city. The trek around the wall is about 9.5 km, since it weaves around the old city and into the mountains a bit. There are four large gates that face each cardinal direction: Janganmun Gate (north), Paldalmun Gate (south), Changnyongmun Gate (east), and Hwaseomun Gate (west) and we made it to all four. As we weaved our way through the fortress, we stopped by some of the statues scattered throughout the area and stopped at some fascinating sights. There’s also a bunch to do within the fortress walls. There is a hot air balloon ride, archery fields, and historical movies. We didn’t have time to do it all, so we will most definitely be going back in the spring or summertime. There was also an old palace within the fortress, and the last time we took our holiday in Korea we learned a little bit about the palaces in Seoul. We could see similarities in the architecture between the palaces in Seoul and the palaces in Suwon. Even way back when, the Koreans had the whole floor heat thing figured out (its called Ondol, 온돌). You can see in the pictures how the houses were elevated on stone blocks. They would create a fire under the floor and the heat would radiate through the floor and heat the house. You can see small holes in the stone bricks and a large chimney to help with the ventilation of the smoke. Another cool thing we learned was about the stone path leading up to the palace. We were told they would place stones on the ground that were slightly separated so that the person approaching the king would have to look down to make sure their footing was ok. That way, you pretty much had to show respect to the king. We really enjoyed Suwon and will be going back for sure! Mt. Baebang/Mt. Manggyeong/Mt. Taehak On one of the “warmer” days, we hiked up a mounting called Mt. Manggyeong, and it may be the hardest hike we have done to date. Round trip, the hike itself was just about nine miles, but the kicker was, in just over 3/4s of a mile, we climbed 1,148 feet. It was crazy intense but the views along the way were absolutely amazing. At the top, we ran into some locals who were just so happy to see us. They shared their Korean rice wine, Makgeolli (막걸리), with us, and even tried to give us some meat (we only had oatmeal so we couldn’t share with them)! Makgeolli is actually pretty amazing. There is another peak past Mt. Baebang we want to go to, but we will have to wait until summertime when we have more light. Pyeongtaek We have also explored Pyeongtaek a little. Pyeongtaek is right next to Camp Humphreys, which is the US Army base. It was an exceptionally cold day, so we were trying to find inside things to do, and Pyeongtaek was just the place to do it! First off, we went to an amazing Japanese ramen restaurant. This specific ramen is the best ramen we have had outside of Japan. Pyeongtaek has a lot of US expats, and there is an app/blog we found that lists out restaurants to try and things to in the area. If you ever come to Korea you should check it out. Anyway, the place we tried was called Raku Ramen (we have been there twice now) and it was delicious. Casey got the spicy ramen, which was literally the spiciest thing either one of us had ever eaten. I got the shoyu ramen and it was delectable. Next up was archery. So apparently, archery is pretty big in Korea. We had no idea, but there are indoor archery ranges everywhere. We tried our hand at a place, and we didn’t do that bad! It was 10,000 Won (about 9 USD) for 50 shots. It took us about 45 minutes to get through all our shots. It is definitely something we would like to do again! We then made our way over to the batting cages. We played nine innings and each person is on a different team. You hit for your team every inning. I don’t want to brag or anything but lets just say that Casey needs to work on his batting skills :). Incheon On another weekend we headed down to Incheon. Incheon is where you would fly into if you flew into Korea. It was especially cold this day, but we toughed it out and explored Incheon in the cold. We started our Incheon day at Bupyeong Modoo Mall (Bupyeong Underground Shopping Mall). There are over 1,400 stalls and it is amazing! There are so many sweatshirts that have misspelled (or make no sense) English sayings and we wanted to buy them all! I ended up settling on a shirt that had a pug on it. The only caption on the shirt is the word, “thinking.” Huh….. We then made the trek over to Sinpo International Market. This market has a little over 140 stores, but it is famous for fried chicken called dakgangjeong (닭강정). It is fried chicken smothered in sauce. We waited in line at one stall that many bloggers raved about and it did not disappoint! So yummy in our tummy! We also couldn’t turn down the opportunity to try some flavored egg tarts (hey don’t judge, we had to have something to eat while we were waiting in line for food!). Next we went to Songwol-dong Fairy Tale Village. It’s just a residential area where old English and Korean fairy tales are painted throughout walls in the neighborhood. It was actually kind of cute. We took some pictures and ended up playing a round of darts in one of the side shops. We won a stuff animal named Totoro (he is from a Japanese anime). He is now hanging in our door with our other stuffed animal prize. Chinatown was next! Incheon has a pretty good Chinatown. We weaved our way through a large park on the way over and at this point we were freezing. We made a quick pass through Chinatown and then headed home to go warm up! Cheonan On two other weekends, we made some trips out to The Independence Hall of Korea. The hall was officially opened in 1987, and it signifies the liberation of Korea from Japan, which happened on August 15, 1945. There are seven museums to make it through, and we have gone twice, and we have made it through four. The museums are amazing and really opened our eyes to the history of Korea and its people.
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