Trip to South Korea August 2013

At short notice we (my wife Sue and I ) decided to visit South Korea. We booked flights on the internet with ebookers.com. It seemed quite strange not having the normal tickets that you get from travel agents, instead we had A4  sheets which we'd printed from the ebookers site. Much to our surprise, it all worked well.

The outward journey took us from Inverness to Amsterdam, from there we took a 10-hour flight to Seoul, where we had an overnight stay.

The Korean Traditional Cultural Experience centre had various things going on in the airport, one of which was this parade. It appeared to be a wedding ceremony of some kind but we were unable to find out in the time we had there. 

Traditional Korean Cultural Ceremony 1







Traditional Korean Cultural Ceremony 2

From Seoul we took a one-hour flight to Busan in the south of the country. This was where things started to get interesting, we needed to get a bus from the airport to the town of Okpo, which is on Geoje island about an hour's bus ride from the airport and connected to the mainland by two bridges. The problem we found was that buses in the area don't have numbers, just the destination, written in Korean!

 A Korean man, who saw us looking confused, approached us. With the help of a card we'd prepared before leaving Scotland with the address we were going to written in Korean, he indicated which bus stop we needed. This was our first experience of how helpful the Korean people are.



The main street going into Okpo with local police car, blue and red flashing lights always on.

We eventually got the bus and were dropped off in Okpo. We now had to find our way to the apartment we were staying in. I flagged down a passing taxi and, using our prepared address card, we eventually arrived at the apartment, which was on the seventh floor of the building on the right of the image above.



Road art, cars ignore pedestrian crossings in Korea



 

The first thing we had to get used to was the fact that pedestrian crossings are really no more than graffiti. They may well be an indication to motorists that people may be crossing but they don't give way in any form. Some crossings are situated at junctions with traffic lights but even then we saw cars ignore them.


Wooden walkway at Okpo harbour

Koreans seem to do a lot of walking and there appeared to be well laid out paths in the forests. The image above is of a wooden walkway that connects the harbour area with one of these paths which then meanders along the coast passing a number of beaches.

 



Sidestreet in Okpo town centre, just thought it would convert to mono well

 

 

I had intended hiring a car whilst in Korea but after seeing the Koreans driving and being unable to make any sense of road marking, like in the above image, I decided I wouldn't have time to get to understand the signing in just the two weeks we were there.



Market stall laid out on the roadside in Okpo, South Korea

Market stalls were to be found on most of the roads within the town area. Most were selling vegetables of one kind or another but there were others selling a variety of foodstuffs cooked and uncooked. Also clothing and even stalls of nothing but knives of various types.

 



Indoor market in Okpo, South Korea



Indoor market in Okpo, South Korea



 



Fish appeared to be the staple diet of the people of Okpo and fishing boats and nets were in abundance in the harbour.



Fishing boats in Okpo harbour



The Deepsea Aberdeen under construction in the Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering’s yard in South Korea.


Deepsea Aberdeen Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering’s yard in South Korea.

The trip back from Okpo was slightly different to the outward journey. This time we took a flight from Busan to Osaka in Japan, had an overnight stay at the airport hotel then flew to Amsterdam, followed by a short flight to Inverness.



Osaka airport in Japan



Escalators in Osaka airport, Japan