Korea 2011 - Day 3: Daegu (대구) - Jeju City (제주시)

Today will be a pretty long day, not because we had a lot of activities lined up, but because we'll be making our way to Jeju Island, for me at least, this is the highlight of the trip.

Since our flight isn't until the late afternoon / evening, we had several activities planned enroute to the airport.

We had some time to sleep in this morning so our first activity happened around 10:30AM, and it was a visit to the Wine Tunnel.

Called the Wine Tunnel because a tunnel was actually used to store the wine bottles. The temperature is around 15-16 degrees C and humidity is controlled. Nothing special was planned other than a simple wine tasting.

All seated and ready for the wine tasting.

Some guy was explaining the qualities of the wine we were about to taste, I honestly do not remember what was being explained.

And finally, on to the free wine!

It was nothing fantastic really.

After the tasting, we had roughly 20 minutes to walk about and to purchase wine for those who wish to. The end of the tunnel was locked, it was just rows and rows of wine.

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After which, we proceeded to lunch, which is also the place where we will be plucking cherry tomatoes and experience making Korean Mua Chi (Rice Cake).

We arrived early and the restaurant wasn't ready to serve us.

I wandered off the farm area behind the restaurant with Yi Hui, one of the new people I met a day before.

The entire place was just very quaint and lovely.

Some of the tools used for farming, no doubt:

There were a few locals around and we presumed they were the owners of the farm. They didn't stop us from wandering about. Guess the two of us looked harmless enough.

Even the dogs left us alone and seem disinterested.

After about 20 minutes, we were told lunch was ready and we headed back.

Naturally, lunch was... more steamboat.

It was also the first meal we dined like most locals, seated on the floor.

After lunch, we proceeded to the tomato farm on this sorry excuse for a tractor ride.

It was a very bumpy ride.

After trying not to fall over (the young folks were standing so the elderly and kids could sit) for 10 minutes, we arrived at the cherry tomato farm.

Here's Mr. Kim (aka Superman) handing out boxes for us to keep the tomatoes.

The tomatoes were pretty sweet, but I didn't eat many.

We next headed back to the same place where we had lunch. Now to experience making Korean rice cake.

Our two Mr. Kims setting the tools required for making the rice cake.

Our 'instructor' for the day:

She was complimenting how good Singapore was while teaching us how Korean Mua Chi is made.

Step 1: Cooked glutinous rice

Step 2: Hammer it!

Step 3: Continue hammering it until it's flat!

Step 4: Roll it up!

Step 5: Hammer it again!

Step 6: Roll it up some more and repeat steps 2 to 5 until the auntie tells you to stop!

Step 7: Bring in the grind peanut powder and mix it with the hammered rice cake.

Step 8: Cut it up!

Step 9: Cut some more into bite size pieces!

Step 10: Ready for consumption!

I don't really know how to describe the taste, but it was certainly different from the Mua Chi we have here at our pasir malams (night markets).

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We then proceeded to the domestic airport for our flight to Jeju.

By the time we arrived in Jeju, it was near dinner time. Hence, our first activity at Jeju would be at dinner at this seafood restaurant.

It serves super fresh seafood!

So fresh that the certain seafood on the cold dish were still alive!

And of course, what's a Korean meal without steamboat.

This was also the restaurant, where at one point, one of the staff went about with a live Octopus, feeding people with its tentacles!

It's still alive!

What they do is to get you to bite one of the tentacles, and they cut it off. And while the damn thing is still wiggling, you are to bite and shallow it!

A few of the folks on tour tried it, while others were pushed into doing it. For instance, Yi Hui was one (un)lucky folk to be shoved a live octopus into her tummy. Cool stuff!

Think this is gross? Go watch Taboo: Gross Food on NatGeo, the food featured in the show are way worse!

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After dinner, we checked into our hotel in Jeju and will be staying here for two nights.

This hotel gets zero points for naming creativity.

Wah lau, T.H.E. Hotel, lydat also can. It's as if the management was going, "Okay folks! We need a name for our hotel in 5 minutes! What've you got?!"

We had some time to walk the streets of Jeju near our hotel.

Was walking around and I saw this...

The Face Op? Do they offer plastic surgery now? Haha.

And had time to try one of it's fast food outlets - The Lotteria. They had this buzzing device that notifies you when your order is ready. This is similar to what Party KTV in Taipei uses. Pretty cool.

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This pretty much concludes Day 3. We were warned that Day 4 will be a freaking tiring day. As it turns out, it was the most packed day of the entire trip! More to come!

Korea 2011 - Day 2: Yongin (용인) - Daegu (대구)

Day 2 began with a morning trip to the Herb Gardens, which was a 30-40 minutes bus ride from our hotel.

We reached the garden around 8AM (which is FREAKING early CAN?!), and the air was very fresh. We could smell the flowers and the herbs too!

View from the entrance, very very pretty and serene (:

There are many "sub-gardens" within the garden and below is just one of many:

Comfy within a bed of roses.

There are many flowers and herbs within the garden and we spent about an hour there.

Think this rose is huge? Wait till you see the ones in Everland's Rose Garden! But I shall not get ahead of myself.

We proceeded to Everland after that, which was a 2 hours bus ride away. Lunch would be self-served within Everland.

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We arrived at the entrance of Everland around 11AM local time.

Entrance of Everland.

Queuing up for tickets.

The lady who applied the entrance band applied it damn tightly to my wrist it almost cut off my blood circulation!

After a quick tour group photo near the entrance, the guide took us straight to the Skyway Gas ride, which was basically a cable car ride. It will take us to the main attraction concourse, away from the kiddy rides.

After a 20 minute wait, we finally got onto the ride.

And then... WE SAW IT!

The T Express Roller Coaster!

It was the largest roller coaster ride I've ever seen in my life! I was told it was one of the largest in the world! The entire ride was almost 3 minutes! More on that later.

At the bottom of the cable car ride, our guide gave us about 3 hours of free time while he settled the tickets for the Safari Ride. I had the 'privilege' of being dragged away by Mr. Kim to see the average waiting time for the safari ride while the rest of the group waited under the lovely shade. The weather was quite hot *grumbles*

We were told that the average waiting time for the T Express could be up to 3 hours! Undeterred, a few of us decided go for the ride. Some of my travel mates weren't keen on the ride so the rest of us went ahead with it.

It was also here that I really got to meet and talk to three other folks also on their graduation trip.

Made three great friends (:

This bunch of NUS and SMU folks are all on their second grad trip and go way back to their high school days! How cool is that! That's another thing I love going on trips: Meeting new people.

Anyhoo, the 5 of us made a bee line for the ride and saw that the average waiting time was about 90 minutes, which gives us more than enough time!

The wait was pretty uneventful but the ride itself was MIND-BLOWING! Below is the POV for the T-Express.

By the way, my friends thought I was crazy to even attempt to film the ride while I was on it.

Little did they know, I filmed another POV for another (smaller) roller coaster ride after the T Express ride. Haha. But that was a pretty mild ride so shan't waste time uploading it.

We had about 80 minutes of free time so we decided to explore the rest of the park and some rides.

We visited the Rose Garden, which was also huge:

And remember the rose earlier? Meet roses on steroids!

Need a closer perspective? Sure.

How's that for huge? Sure injected with drugs one.

Comfy among a bed of roses (take 2)

Also played around with my SLR a bit:

This was one of my favourite shots of the entire trip! Had to play around with the shutter speed and multiple frames to get this photo, which also means the poor ladies had to jump multiple times:

They also had mini-train rides, just like Disneyland :)

The non-operational ferris wheel. Eeyer, cheat my money.

By the way, they sell brilliantly-wonderfully-sweet-smelling pop corns! And in big big tubs!

Lots of kids were carrying one. Haha.

We also had time to visit a... brace yourselves:

That sounds and looks so wrong on so many different levels, by the way.

We met up with the rest of the tour group again around 3PM, where Mr. Kim (and Mr. Kim) led us to the secret (or what we called it, cheat code) entrance to the safari ride. I had the honor of being dragged away by Mr. Kim once again to view the super long queues, while the rest of the group boarded the (AIR-CONDITIONED!) bus *double grumbles*

But, it was a pretty cool ride! We were very, VERY close to the animals.

The main attraction was of course, the cross bred animals. Namely, what do you get when you cross bred a Tiger and a Lion? A Liger. No kidding.

Just like Tap Zoo for the iPhone and iPad. Can cross bred one leh.

We saw so many cats even I can't tell which was pure bred and which was cross bred actually. The predator enclosure was kept separated from other animals, naturally.

Of course, what's a safari without other animals?

There was also Zibbras but I'm lazy to upload so many photos. (Very tiring one, okay?)

The bears are damn cute too! They're trained to sit up while being fed by the trainer (who also happens to be the coach driver), so that the tourists (i.e. us) could get good photos.

After the ride, we came to the end of the allocated time for the park. Too short a time given to spend in such a big, big park. I must say, I am impressed with the scale and rides in Everland!

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We proceeded to dinner after that, and it was (no prizes for the correct guess) steamboat (which has damn spicy soup)...

and more meat (sinful!)...

But was saved by the veges (:

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After dinner, we had sometime to do a little night time shopping around the area.

Dongsungro Streets, I think.

Then, we came across the first...

Face Shop. And so begins the hunting of cosmetic products.

I couldn't resist taking a shot of this shop:

That's like opening a shop in Singapore and naming it "Tan" or "Lim" or "Ong", because so many Koreans have Kim as their surname.

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Finally, we were led to the hotel, which I honestly cannot remember the name of the hotel.

We'll only be spending one night here and will be moving off to Jeju Island the following day. I was damn happy to find NatGeo and Discovery Channel on their TVs, BUT, it was both in Korean :( They had a few English channels, one of which played America's Funniest Home Videos (the series is still running?). It's moments like this that I'm thankful for my iPad 2 :)

That pretty much concludes our second day. Can't wait for Jeju Island the following day!