Day 6

Tuesday was our last day, but definitely the longest. We got up early to drive up the eastern coast, which we hadn't completed yet, and planned to make it to Jeju-si (the city where we'd catch the ferry) by 3:30 or 4 in plenty of time for the 5:30 sailing back to the mainland.

Our first stop was Seongeup, a traditional folk village.

Blending in with the harubang.
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Two original harubang, but it didn't say how old they are.
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Navigating the second half of our drive.

Every coast road we took was well adorned with squid hung out to dry. We passed on this snack, too.

On one of the roads there were several kilometers of rock piles that looked really cool: they were everywhere! They are a Buddhist tradition, and when you build one you can make a wish.


It looks like these men are fishing, but I don't know what they were fishing for. Maybe they are gathering seaweed.

We came across a really impressive bunch of rock piles just after it started raining a little. We decided to get out and make our own, and both wished for the rain to go away.

My pile is the little one in the window of the huge one. These things were massive, and must have taken a lot of time to balance and build. I wonder what the wishes were....

Wishing for the rain to stay away worked, but when we got to the ferry terminal we realized we had wished for the wrong thing. The ticket and terminal system is extremely confusing. There are many ticket counters for each ferry service, and each counter is at a different terminal at a different pier. But they were only selling tickets for our ferry (the cheap one) at one of these many counters.

So we finally found the right terminal and counter, only to be told that the tickets for the 5:30 sailing were sold out. Jaime and I both had to work the next morning, but there are only two sailings a day, and the next one was the following morning. This is when we decided we were vacationed out.

We put our names on the waiting list and went outside to make a new rock pile and a new wish.

To help me come to terms with the idea of forfeiting my no-absence bonus, Jaime pointed out that if we missed Wednesday, we'd only have a two-day work week. Assah! ("yesssssss" in Korean).

But our wish pile worked again! Ten minutes before boarding (an hour and a half after we put our names on the list), they called our names. This warranted a much more enthusiastic ASSAH! from us than the idea of an extra day of "vacation" (big quotes around the word at that point).

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Sunset from the boat.

One more chance to blend in on the train from Mokpo back to Daejeon:

In all, our return trip took about 12 hours: thirty minutes finding the right terminal in Jeju-si; an hour and a half waiting for news on the stand-by list; a five-hour boat ride; an hour waiting for the train in Mokpo; a three-hour train ride back to Daejeon; and a thirty-minute cab ride in Daejeon. We finally got home at 3am. Three days later, I feel like I'm still recovering from fatigue, but at least I used every minute of my vacation.