Gatbawi

Today we wanted to go Gatbawi ( a giant buddha statue on a mountain )
We didn't tell Samantha that we had to climb a mountain..
We couldn't go back anymore.
Or well we could but that would be giving up.

So at first the road went a little uphill and we walked past a river where people were chilling on rocks and walking through the water.
It reminded me of ''De rode beek'' in Brunssum.

As we climbed higher we noticed the road started to look like stairs.
Or maybe just because it were stairs.. A WHOLE LOT of them.
And believe me.. climbing stairs is not easy when the weather is really hot and humid.
I don't get how all these old people are trained to climb these mountains every day..
They walked past us the whole time.
It made me feel like I was just overreacting my hardships.
For some reason these people were really friendly and greeted us.
They were probably thinking : Ha-Ha stupid foreigners.. do you even know how much stairs you have to climb before you get there?

Bell!
Too bad i couldn't ring it.

I saw the most beautiful temples i've seen so far:


So beautiful.
I was just staring at it for minutes.

After we left the temples to go higher and higher up the mountain.
Samantha was being bugged by bugs.
Bugs everywhere since it was like a big forest with stairs.

But we kept going up anyways.
At some point we reached a man selling charms.

Charm for making my wish come true.
Can you guess what I wished for?

After buying some stuff we continued to go up and up and up.
Till we reached a souvenier shop.
I bought another bracelet with really cool symbols.
I don't know what the symbols have got to do with Buddhism though.

I like it anyway.

When we got up the mountain we could see people praying to Buddha.
Bert said some people even do a 100 days of prayer here.
These people are so dedicated to their religion.

Here is the Gatbawi buddha.



The view was amazing!
It was totally worth the climb big time.

I still can't believe we climbed this high!
We climbed about 2 hours.
And now.. we had to go back all the way down.
but luckily that just took an hour instead of 2 hours

So eventually we got down and my shoes suffered some damage.
I couldn't wait to get home to clean them.
Oh yeah.. and take a shower!
So when we took the bus.. the whole bus was full of ajumma hahaha!
I think old people climb these mountains regularly.
Ajumma's must be superheroes in disguise..

When we got home we showered and decided to go to the restaurant with the cute waiter again.
We got there and.. it was closed.
Bummer!

We had to go back tomorrow and hope that he was working tomorrow as well..
I was grumpy and we had to eat at mcdonalds instead and become fat.
Just kidding.

I ordered a australian burger menu it was quite good.
Not worth making a picture though.
And we've had ice cream with chocolate that tasted like nutella afterwards.

Annyeonghi Gyeseyo

Shopping shopping shopping!

It's like all I do in Daegu is shopping.
But let's be honest.. Daegu is perfect for shopping!
So today Samantha wanted to do some shopping as well.. she wanted some clothes.
So I ended up buying more things :

Shorts with a bow in the front.

An asymmetrical skirt.
I really wanted one of these although I have no idea how to combine it :|


And Samantha ended up buying foundation instead of clothes.
Cosmetics are EVERYwhere here.
Also the really expensive ones are available in ALL the department stores.

Little fact : a lot of girls have Louis Vuitton bags here but NOT sure if they're real or fake.
I really started hating brands even more when I arrived here.
Hollister? GOD. What a fail brand.. but somehow everybody wears that :|

AND I found the Dr. Martens store so I was finally able to get the shoes that look like the ones Krystal is wearing in the Electric Shock MV.
I absolutely love them.
I'm so happy I bought them even if they're quite expensive :).

After all the shopping we went to a restaurant and there I met..
the most handsome korean guy I ever seen. (he is a waiter at this restaurant.)
Big eyes, cute smile.
Geez. He was incredible.
I like his little imperfections on his skin too.
OH YEAH. RIGHT.
THE FOOD! I´m sorry. I got distracted.

I ordered Udon soup!

Ok.. not very korean of me.. i know.
But it's not my fault they had in on the menu

And then we ordered some mandu after that as well.

We're definitely going back there so I can ask for his facebook/kakaotalk. :D!

Annyeonghi Gyeseyo!

Hanging with cool girls Jinjoo and Eun Ji

Today was going to be my favorite day of all here in Korea.
I was going to meet my penpal Jinjoo who I was writing letters with for 2 years already!
She was going to bring her friend Eun Ji along so it was going to be SO MUCH FUN!

We planned to meet at 11 at Jungangno.
And.. didn't find her.
So we searched around for 15 minutes and found out she was on the other side of the rail.
Waiting for the train from the other direction.
I don't know.. something went wrong.
She saw me, came running at me and hugged me!
I was so happy we found them :)

The first thing we were going to do together was taking photos in a photobooth.
(purikura)
We actually took them 3 times Hahaha because I wasn't satisfied.
The booths we were in with Heelim were so funny!
These were really different but we still managed to take really cool photos.
Jinjoo and Eun Ji never went in 3 booths in one day before so I guess we set a record!

Graphic design with Samantha : decorating our pictures.

So many pictures!
Now I have enough pictures of eunji and jinjoo for an entire lifetime haha!

After this we went shopping again and I bought some really cool clothes!
These are so popular right now in Korea and I've seen them in magazines before too.

 I also bought some shorts

I bought some stuff at Etude house as well.
Etude house is one of Korea's famous cosmetics stores and not even that expensive.
I wanted to buy some lipbalm and apparently bought the special SHINee edition lipbalm.
I can't believe a guy group would advertise for lipbalm.. :|

Bert wanted to see a temple or just a big attraction in Daegu so the girls wanted to take us to house of Lee Sang Hwa. We had some trouble finding it at first and it was really hot outside so we wanted to cool off.

Searching for the house.
Me and the fan Jinjoo bought for me!

We entered a nearby warehouse.
I bought some really expensive foundation but it covers up red spots so i don't even care about the price.

After buying stuff and resting in the airconditioning we continued walking to the house of Lee Sang Hwa.
It's one of Daegu's most famous attractions.
It really amazed me how small it was..
Even though it had so many history.
The women at the counter was so friendly and she even gave us a little tour.

We were starting to get a bit hungry so we we're goint to eat samgyeopsal.
This was also a big search since the girls didn't know a nearby restaurant so we searched for a while and found one.
Jinjoo and Eun Ji were so happy!
They did a very good job finding this place :)

We went in and everything went really fast.
We got all sidedishes, the meat and the sauces incredibly fast since it was not busy at that time.
The whole table was full in a matter of time.

Lovely sidedishes.

Leaves and lettuce to make a pork wrap!

BBQ!

Someone turning our meat for us :D!

We ate a lot!
And ofcourse after eating it was time for NORAEBANG!
It´s korean karaoke.
Yes i know what you are imagining.
Me singing a song in a room full of people but NO.
It´s not like that.
It´s actually just a small private room with a TV, microphones and a device for choosing songs you would like to sing.
Okay so Bert and me did a few kpop duets.
Jinjoo and Eun Ji sang a few songs together as well.
I sang some english songs with Samantha too.
I think I sang about 80% of the time.
I absolutely LOVE Noraebang ( it means singing room if you literally translate it)

OH OH
And I want to tell you about the thing I never ever heard before in my entire life.
Jinjoo is about 1.55 meters so she said to me : I envy your height.
Hahaha. to me it's so weird because people consider me to be small in the Netherlands.

That's probably all..
I hope to meet Jinjoo and Eun Ji again.
They're really cool girls :)

Annyeonghi Gyeseyo!

Exploring Daegu in korean heels.

Okay, so today I wanted to do a lot of shopping and a bit of sightseeing in Daegu.Daegu is so beautiful since it has a lot of parks and temples located in the city.It's more quiet than Seoul and the people here are curious in a good way.
Many people try to talk to us in korean or with the little bit of english that they know.

As you can see.. I'm a fan of Daegu.
My KBF lives here ( Korean best friend), Jinjoo!

Downtown daegu has this extremely large underground mall with a lot of cool stores.I wanted shoes with a lot of straps.So I bought them for 37000 won (28 euro?) and the man said he gave me a discount.
Yeah right.
Somehow I feel like buying more shoes xD.
Oh these are the shoes I bought:

After I did some shopping we went to a one of Daegu's lovely parks.
Somehow I can't really remember which park it was, but it was a small memorial park.
 

Daegu National Museum and there was an exposition about korean marriage culture and traditions.

The room i liked best was about korean marriage clothing, hanboks for marriage.

The clothing looked so pretty!

It would be cool if people would still dress up for marriage like this in current life.

Marriage clothes for women.

Marriage clothes for men (the fancy one for government people)

These are the ''seven friends'' of the women that made the hanbok.
Women who were able to make these had them in their home.
Scissors, needle, thread, thimble, flatiron, and normal iron.

The huge headdresses korean women had to wear.
The bigger the headdress the prettier korean women were seen by society.


Since those big headdresses were way too heavy to use people made hairpins.
These hairpins replaced the headdresses after a while.

Here you can see how hanboks starting to get more western influences.
The shapes of the sleeves became more round and they changed the top part of the hanbok a bit.

Hanbok including the colors of the old korean flag when Korea was still 1 country without being divided in North and South.
Yellow, red and blue.

A miniature small village with hanoks.

Written stories by a famous korean writer written in hanja ( the old hangul still being influenced by the chinese characters ).

Miniature of a korean traditional wedding.
Look a at all the hanbok!

Okay this is not a korean dish at all but i've never eaten Kentucky fried chicken before so I really wanted to eat it.
The chicken was quite spicy and the burger was delicious.
It was quite good but I still really don't get what all the fuss is about.
Korean people probably avoid these since it has LOTS of calories.

So after eating we wanted to go to Daegu bank to see an exposition about old coins.
Currency used in the past and now and also coins from some other countries.
But.. it was closed.
So we have to go another day.

a beautiful traditional park in another park in Daegu.
I didn't see sign so i don't know the name but it could be that this is the other side of the park we visited earlier

More water!
More fountains!

After this we went home.
This is what I bought:

STUFF I BOUGHT.
The Block B album (the correct one), f(x) album, 2 puffy keychains, hair ribbon, sunglasses, nail polish, bag, grape slippers, ViVi magazine and a little mirror.

A delicious kiwi fruit blast from Baskin´ Robbins

So that's all for today!
Annyeonghi gyeseyo!

Yeosu Expo

Today we had to get up early yet again to take the bus to Yeosu expo.

It takes about 4 hours to get there.
 Not funny AT all.

So we searched around for food and a bank first and after that we went to the bus terminal, bought tickets and waited.
While we were waiting some ajumma sat down next to Bert and tried to talk with him.
Ofcourse Bert still understands very little korean and didn't understand her.
After a while he found out that she was trying to explain that he wrote the hangul for some kind of metro station wrong.
Brilliant.

At 10.20 we got inside the bus and left Daegu behind us.
We sat at the back since it's the only spot that hold up to more than just 2 people.
The busses from around Daegu must have some kind of rocket blast-off programmed in it since we were going as fast as a turtle with a jetpack.
I can't remember travelling this fast by bus EVER.
This part of Korea has REALLY bumpy and narrow streets so you definitely needed to wear your seatbelt.
I was really scared in the beginning and I was thinking: ''How are people able to sleep in these kind of busses?''

When we finally arrived at Yeosu at about 14:00.
We walked straight to the reserved tickets booth.

Some girl there asked us what we were looking for.
So Bert showed her the ticket.
She said : ''WOW, that is really expensive, you could just buy a 3000 won ticket''
(We had the ones that cost 30.000 won per person)
About 21 euro, so that's alot of difference.
The girl told Bert that he could cancel his tickets online.
Yet another Korean girl that saved the day.

We went to the entrance and it was CROWDED and so hot everywhere.
From that moment on I knew we weren't able to see everything in one day or even 2.
And we only had 4 hours to spend.

We went into this marine civilization centre and got an english tour.
It was about how mankind was able to build boats and how seacraft worked.
Also a lot of information about trading and selling goods overseas.
And seacraft in the future and being to live on the water with luxury.

I'm so impressed about how they were able to build all these things.
Screens and little machines everywhere. I mean. They even had an aquarium (which we weren't able to visit because it was extremely crowded and the line of people was just insane)
Amazing exposition.
Even if I didn't got to see much.

We met up with Jooyoung at 16:00 (she works at Yeosu Expo) but she couldn't find us so it took another half our.
At about 16.30 she finally found us and we had just an hour to walk around with her since she had a job as a interpreter. 

So we visited the Netherlands pavilion.
Look, there is even dutch tv on the television screen.
I was so suprised to see dutch tv in Korea.

I got to see a lot about our country (I almost knew all of the things that were in there but that's no suprise.)
Almost the whole pavilion was about our dikes and our polders.
Also a little artwork from Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt.

But this was the coolest thing ever :

Even though they didn't sell Frikadellen or Kroketten.
They actually put applepie pieces on sticks and put it in there.
HOW CAN KOREA KNOW SO LITTLE ABOUT OUR COUNTRY!?
We don't put those things in there at all.
We like to put greasy things in there instead!

So then we visited the belgium pavilion.

There was this cartbord picture of the Belgium football team and all I could do was laugh.
Let's be honest.
That team doesn't even get to play half of the time and when they do.. they suck.
They should've put waffles or belgian fries instead!

After visiting both the pavilions it was already time to go back to the bus terminal and go back to Daegu.
So we took the shuttle bus back to the terminal bought something to eat and something to drink and went inside the bus.
I slept half of the time and for some reason the bus drive took only 3 hours to get to Daegu.

Good deed of the day in Daegu : Gave a homeless person my tuna sandwiches since i didn't wanted them anymore and he looked really hungry!
So instead of throwing it away in the trash I gave it to him.
He said : Are you from America?
I said : No, Nederlandeu.
I didn't think he understood but whatever.
He looked happy.

 Annyeonghi gyeseyo!