Being a Korean English teacher at a hagwon, M gets only five days of vacation per year – two of which are a weekend. I’ve scheduled my leave to coincide with her vacation dates so that we can travel together. We have the same idea: We want a quiet beach vacation where we can simply laze on the beach in the sun. M discovered the perfect place and has made all of the bookings for us.
I meet M at E-Mart at 10:00am. I’m worried that there’ll be a lot of mould in my apartment again after the four days but there’s not really anything that I can do about it: After all, it’s not like I can spend my days sitting at home and watching mould grow! We do a spot of shopping for a few basics before heading to a car repair shop where M needs to get her oil changed before we can hit the road.
Roadtrip
The roadtrip to Jeung-do on the southwest coast is a pleasant trip and it’s great to just goof around. We arrive in Jeung-do at around 15:00 but it takes us a bit of time to find our minbak (inn) at which M has made the reservation for the first two nights. When we do finally find it, we take a short nap before trying unsuccessfully to find the tourist information centre. Giving up on the tourist information centre, we head for the downtown area to find a local mart. There are only two choices and neither is particularly big or well-stocked; this is when we realise just how small the island actually is as it makes Soryong-dong (my neighbourhood in Gunsan) look really well-developed.
Finding a Chinese restaurant in the downtown area, we eat a filling meal of jjajjangmeong, sweet and sour pork and mandu before heading down to the beach to watch the sunset. The beach has a bit of a quasi-tropical feel with it’s grass thatch umbrellas and wooden loungers scattered at precise intervals. We settle on two of the loungers and chat until long after the sun has set and the tide goes out before heading back to our minbak for the night.
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