Jinju...

So I meant to put up this post earlier but kind of forgot about it. Last weekend a group of us went to the southern part of Korea to Jinju for the Lantern Festival mentioned in my last post. It was a really good time and here are some details. We left Seoul Express Bus Terminal around 9:15 and arrived in Jinju around 1:30 in the morning. Not the most fun sitting on a bus for 4 hours but the seats were actually pretty big and I was able to get a couple hours of sleep on the trip.

We then walked from the out of town bus terminal to the main area where the Lanterns were on the river. We got there about 10 minutes before they shut off at 2AM so we were able to get some pictures taken before it went dark (all the pictures are on facebook). We then proceeded to try and find a place for our group to sleep, only one of the hotels/motels that we went to had anyone awake at the front desk and Leona was able to decipher the notes on most of their doors saying that there were no rooms. We did find a place called Dong Bang that was a bit nicer and actually had a lobby closer to what we are used to in the US with someone at the desk all day. He was able to send us to a Jimjilbang that was fairly close (however went through the Jinju version of the red light district) and we were able to rest for a few hours.

If you don't know what they are go to the link attached to the word, but basically it is a bath house where you get orange outfits and there are separate floors for men and women and one mixed floor that is a sauna. You sleep on a blanket for the most part and people are scattered all over the place. I was smart enough to bring some ear plugs and was tired enough to sleep for 4 or 5 hours. Once we got Jinjuseong Fortress and walked around there for a bit.

A side note from the jimjilbang experience, there were some girls staring at the people that I was with as they probably don't see many foreigners and were giggling as we were waking people up. I thought that one of them was cute and figured, hey why not give them our number and see if they want to hang out later and maybe they can help us figure stuff out. So I leave my number for them on their blanket and they call but do not know much English, we text back in forth for a bit and yep they were down there for an interview for dental schools because they were seniors in high school. Yeah you gotta watch out for the ages here they could be 16 or 30.

Anyways back to the tourist stuff, so we walked around the Fortress and were stopped by a lady from the tourism department and they were asking people to take surveys on foreigners impressions of the city. She spoke English so we were talking to her as we filled out the survey and then she offered to help us find a place to stay. She said that she would call us back before noon and sure enough at 11:30 she called and had 2 rooms for us to stay in at the Lotte Motel right on the river. It was nice to have a place that we could put our bags, shower and know that we could go back and sleep.

Before going to the motel we stopped for lunch and got some traditional Jinju Bibimbap which they are known for in the area. It tasted like the regular bibimbap that I have had before but I guess there was something different. After eating we dropped off our stuff showered and rested a bit and then went and checked out a tent area with carnival type games and a few flea market type shops and finally grabbed dinner, which was some great samgyeopsal or Korean BBQ. Unfortunately it rained while we were at dinner and made things very muddy for the remainder of the evening. On the plus side it only rained for a little bit so we were able to walk around at night just had to watch our step.

For the night we wondered around the river and checked out all the festivities in the area and took lots of pictures and shot off a number of roman candles. There was an area where you could add to lanterns that they would be putting out on the river as well as an area that you could create your own lanterns. We went ahead and added to the existing lanterns to get our "culture" fix. After going up and down the river we decided to figure out if there was somewhere to go so we checked out a place by us and they sent us on the other side of the castle where there was more stuff to do. We went into a number of places looking for darts but apparently there were no bars/restaurants that had them in all of Jinju. We went to a few bars and then headed home as we were going to get the 11AM bus back into Incheon.