Today my two friends and I had planned to go to the infamous DMZ, the zone between North and South Korea. We got up at the ungodly hour of 7.30am on a Saturday and met at 9am before coffee. Trust me, these are all key factors.
We were on the subway (I admit, we jumped the gates so we woulnd't have to pay), and then realised we had ALL forgotten our passports. The one thing you need aside from money to pay to take the buses to get to the DMZ. So we decided to catch a bus, anywhere. Well.. anywhere our budgeted $20 for the day would take us, so we went to the main bus depot and for us some tickets for a place that was $6 each way, and went to find our bus. Turns out a lot of people had this same idea, and it was something here called 'parents day' that exact day, so everyone was holding carnations in one form or another, waiting to catch a bus to where there parents live. Our line was easily the most popular, and after trying to figure a way to hop that line, we just came to realise we wasted an hour and the mob WOULD attack. So we got a refund and headed on the subway again, this time to a place called Suwon.
We stumbled around and found this fortress stuff; old ancient walls and archery towers and other cool stuff at the top of a small mountain (huge hill?), which we got to after paying $1.50 to get thru to some weird old villiage...deciding it was lame, and hopping the fence in search of a giant gold bhudda we had spotted earlier. Turns out we hopped into another area you were meant to pay for, but due to the lnaguage barrier, we just got away with it with directions to the bhudda! We found him, by the way. He was huge, and there was a monk who went to go bang on some hollow gord type thing that mad a surprising amount of noise while chanting for a while in the sanctuary underneath, and then we found all these yellow bikes, all lined up. We stood there mostly just poking them and trying to figure out how to use them, when someone who spoke a bit of english explained that we could take them for free!
The three of us basically terrorized the city for about 40 mins, riding down the back alleys, on the streets, up thru the old city gates, and wherever we felt the urge to go. We even found a man pooing outside on accident. He just yelled at us a lot.
By this time we were staarrrrving, so we returned the bikes, and went on the hunt for food. Somehow we got the attention of a drunk middle-aged man and he followed us for a few blocks, determined to get us to sit down - anywhere in any resturant it seemed. So when he was talking to one of the resturants, we all ran as fast as we could away and ducked down an alley, faint with hunger. We landed right by a bib-em-bap place tho (we love bib-em-bap!), and went in there for our meal.
Afterwards, I went to go try and figure out the automatic coffee machine, and got talking to the only other patrons there - some drunk old guys who ended up buying us a bunch of beer and talking to us in Korean the whole time, while the owner of the place (who was drinking with them just before us I would like to add!), just shook her head the whole time, and tried to get us to sit back at our table.
Turns out one of the old guys totally understood english (whoops, we were making our own subtitles to what we thought they were saying and gesturing about... busted!).
One more hour home on the subway, and we were back in Seoul; our packed lunches not going to waste for the day. Phew.
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