Category Archives: Travel

Extreme eating

Adventures, trains and train stations, travelling in Korea

A long weekend is a rare blessing in Korea, particularly as a Hagwon employee. This long weekend – courtesy of Buddha’s birthday on Friday – was a chance to take a trip to the less touristed, less famous South West of the country. Except that there are no trains that run across the country (east to west). In order to go from Daegu to Mokpo, it is necessary to travel half way to Seoul (heading North), change stations and catch another train back towards the south. Frustratingly complicated, especially because the whole country was on the move. Having bought my tickets 2 weeks in advance, it took me leaving Daegu at 7:40 in the morning (having worked until 10:20 the night before) to reach Mokpo at 12:20.

I arrived in Mokpo, hopped on the city bus (thankfully described in the guidebook because there is NO English) and promptly found myself going in the wrong direction. One more try and I made it to the Mokpo Ferry terminal. The terminal isn’t particularly well sign-posted until you’re right on top of it. At least, it isn’t in English. It may be perfectly signposted in Korean.

I took a wander along the road, loving the hot sun (I even put on sunscreen) while I waited for my partner-in-travel to arrive. Her bus was slightly delayed by the traffic jam of people leaving Seoul for the weekend, but eventually she arrived in Mokpo and proceeded to follow in my footsteps and get on a bus going in the wrong direction. While I waited for her to change buses and find her way to the coast, I sat on the steps outside the Ferry terminal and watched the world of Mokpo pass slowly by.

Mokpo is a relatively small and underdeveloped city. The whole province of Jeollanam, in fact, is underdeveloped, in terms of infrastructure for tourist but also economically. This is, according to guidebooks and the other usual information sources, apparently partly because the opposition was, for a long time, based here. This was also the hot-bed of revolutionary resistance to dictatorial rule during the early 1980s, resulting, among other things, in various security-force crackdowns, sieges, massacres and other strategies of oppression generally employed by authoritarian regimes clinging to power in the face of change. Unsurprisingly, this adds to the appeal for me. As a result of being the trouble-makers, this region was, apparently, systematically underfunded and has only in the last few years begun to be given the kind of investment it needs. This is one of the reasons the transport systems are nowhere near as prolific and efficient as in, for example, the South-East (where I live) which has produced a large number of recent leadership figures.

After her bus adventure, Anna arrived. We were, by this stage, both a little hungry, hot and tired, so lunch first. There are seafood places all along the street across from the ferry and marina. You know they are seafood places because they have pictures of seafood creatures on their signs. There is also the dead give-away of the tanks of sea creatures outside. When I first saw shops with tank upon tank of octopus, squid, crabs, fish of all makes and sizes, not to mention eels and weird mollusc-ey things, I thought they were pet shops. How wrong I was.

We picked a restaurant at random, wandered in and gratefully settled onto our floor-cushions and ordered beer. The women working there wanted to know (all in Korean of course) if we’d be eating too or just drinking. Anna went off to point at something in the tank (no menu, let alone in English). She pointed, the women looked concerned. She pointed again. They told us the price. We were a little shocked by the prices but really didn’t feel like going elsewhere so we decided to pay anyway and pointed meaningfully at the tank of baby octopus. The price really did seem rather high for Korea, or for that matter anywhere. In retrospect, that should have been a warning.

Korean food sometimes arrives too quickly. I like being able to relax and chat for a while until the food is ready. Here they tend to bring it quickly and relax after. Even for Korea, this food arrived remarkably rapidly. They brought us a couple of sides first, one of which was baby potatoes – making me particularly happy – and then the main dish was brought out.

What was placed in front of us was a dinner-plate sized platter of cut up baby octopus. Under normal circumstances, this would not really have bothered me. I quite like octopus. I’m a big fan of calamari. But calamari, at least in my previous experience, does not usually move. I know, it’s probably my own fault – I should have learned a little more of the language before venturing into the less touristed places and we should have asked more questions before ordered. We certainly didn’t intend to order a plate of raw, grey, slimy, squirming octopus tentacles. They were moving and wriggling like a mass of worms. One, I am not kidding you, almost managed to escape off the plate. They twisted themselves around the chopsticks. They stuck, with their little suckers holding on for dear life, to the plate. We waited a while for them to die – after all, the tentacles had been severed from the bodies, waited for them to stop moving, but the minute you touched one with your chopsticks, they all wriggled madly. The woman who worked there showed us the red sauce to dip the tentacles in. Dipping them in the sauce had no effect other than to turn the grey wriggling tentacles into red-brown, dripping-with-sauce, wriggling tentacles.

Had I not heard of this ‘delicacy‘ before, I think I would honestly have assumed they were trying to play some horrific joke on the foreigners. But I had heard of it. In fact, I have friends who tried it and were warned that you have to be very careful to chew each tentacle thoroughly (and hard) to make sure that they’re dead, otherwise they can sucker onto your throat, killing more people each year than blowfish. It had never even vaguely occurred to me that anyone would assume that’s what two accidental walk-in tourists, who obviously had no idea what they were doing, wanted to order for lunch. We were horrified. Anna at least is a fairly experimental eater. I’m not. And I’m certainly not going to happily chow down on a bowl of wriggling tentacles which arrive with no warning or time to psych myself up.

Which is not to say we didn’t try it. We each tried at least two tentacles. Picked up with chopsticks (around which they instantly, squirmily wrapped themselves), dipped in the appropriate sauces and (deep breathe and eyes half-closed) stuffed into the mouth chewed as fast as possible to stop them wriggling about. We sat for a while looking at the plate, hoping all the time they’d stop moving so that we could eat the rest. They never did. We couldn’t do it. It seemed a terrible waste to leave all that expensive food but there was no way. I am very solidly a carnivore but even I cannot quite bring myself to eat something that is still fighting back after it is sliced up and sitting on the plate.

We paid our bill and left as politely as we could given that all we wanted to do was run out of there before anyone suggested any more extreme eating experiences. I have it on video (a video of lunch!) and watching it again, I can’t believe that a) I actually ate some and b) people think this is a good thing to eat. It certainly wasn’t delicious enough to make it worth the trauma, to risk death by wriggling things. That said, it didn’t taste bad, actually. Not amazing enough to make it worth it but it wouldn’t have been too offensive if only it hadn’t moved. No-one died, so I suppose we escaped relatively unscathed but we got out of Mokpo post-haste and couldn’t quite bring ourselves to eat at a seafood restaurant for the rest of the weekend.

3:52 am, Seoul Station

Adventures, Seoul, trains and train stations, Travel,

Not too long ago, I took a day-trip up to Seoul. Seoul is nearly 300km from Daegu, so it’s a fairly long way to go just for the day. In Korea, in fact, it’s almost clear across the country. It was worth it to see a old friend I haven’t seen for ages and who was in the country for just a few days from Japan.

I took the bus up (3 and a half hours), managed to find my way through the rat-maze-chaos of Seoul Express Bus Terminal and navigated the Seoul subway system (which is huge and confusing) to reach Itaewon perfectly on time (amazingly). In order to manage it, I’d woken up at 7am, which will become important later in the story.

I had a great time with my friend. It is so nice to see someone with whom you have common history, to just talk and talk for hours and explore a new place together. It was particularly nice to be able to talk about where we are now and compare experiences. I read something recently (and cannot remember where I read it unfortunately) about how meeting up with old friends sometimes turns into a largely uninteresting litany of ‘remember when’ stories. This wasn’t that. We share a lot of common history but most of the afternoon was new memories and new experiences. It was lovely.

After dinner with two of his colleagues from Japan, I said my goodbyes and headed off to catch a late subway to Seoul station and take a train home. I had settled on taking the train back to Daegu because I wasn’t sure of the bus schedules and the train system is the mode of Korean transport with which I am most familiar and most comfortable. I managed the subway just fine and found my way to Seoul Station.

The first inkling that I may have miscalculated was when I walked into the airport-hanger-style station building and saw a departures board that seemed to indicate that the next train to Daegu wasn’t until 5:30am. I got a bit of a fright but was sure this must be a mistake. I had checked the schedule a few days earlier and was certain there were several late trains. The automated ticketing machine unhelpfully said there were no tickets, so I went to the counter and asked the rather harassed-looking ticket salesperson. He confirmed that the last train to Daegu had left 10 minutes earlier. Perhaps I looked at the train schedule for Daegu to Seoul, not Seoul to Daegu. Either way, I was clearly wrong.

I turned away from the ticket-counter and looked across the room. I will admit to a moment of panic before my new-found sense of adventure and humour in the face of crisis kicked in. I laughed it off: I’d simply wait for the next morning. It would be a little bit of an adventure. Plus, I had a brand new book to start reading and a pen and paper – more than enough to keep me busy for a few hours.

The thing they don’t tell you, and which I imagine very few people ever have occasion to learn, is that Seoul’s extremely busy train station does not, in fact, stay open all night. This was a surprise. The train station really is a major transport hub and I think it just didn’t occur to me that it would close. Also, they have a 24-hour McDonalds and a 24-hour Lotteria.

At around 12:45, the police and station security began rousing and clearing out the homeless people sleeping on the station floor. I frantically did mental calculations to try and figure out a way to afford a taxi and somewhere to stay and still get home. It was after midnight, so my bank card was of no help. There was no way I was going to be able to do it. Just then a kindly security guard came over and confirmed that they were indeed closing and throwing everyone out, but, perhaps taking pity on the bewildered foreigner, said earnestly that they’d be opening again at 2am.

Relieved that I’d only be stranded for an hour, I swung my pack onto my back and headed out into the night. Outside, it was dark and raining. Distinctly thankful for my less-than-trusting relationship with Korean weather, I pulled out my never-leave-home-without-it umbrella and pulled the built-in rain cover over my backpack. As the last people straggled out of the building, I watched the lights of Seoul Station go down.

The slightly less damp areas around the building had been firmly claimed by groups of homeless with cardboard for beds and their belongings firmly tucked up as pillows beneath their heads. I looked around. I’m a South African. Every muscle in my body was coiled in tense anticipation. I was alone on a dark, damp night on the side of the road in a city of 20 million people.

I saw a restaurant but I didn’t want to have to spend money on food I didn’t want. And anyway, it looked rather dodgy and like it might close any minute. The area in front of the station wasn’t pitch dark, thanks to streetlights and neon signs and a row of taxis waiting, forlornly, for passengers to appear out of the night. I spent some time idly trying to decipher the bus route information board. A Korean guy, sitting at the bus stop playing on his i-phone, asked in perfect English if I needed help. We chatted briefly before I moved on. I contemplated taking a walk but the streets seemed to disappear into darkness and all the assurances of low crime rates in Korea couldn’t persuade me that moving away from the lights was a good idea. I walked back and forth, back and forth in front of the station. I stood around. I watched the rain. I watched the night-people. I waited. Waiting, watching, staying near to the pleasant-enough taxi-drivers who tried, repeatedly, to convince me to take a taxi back to Daegu (at 5 times the price of a train and for which I most certainly didn’t have the money right then).

At 2am, as promised, the lights of the station came back on and the homeless station-sleepers and I, the one lone, lost foreigner, trickled back into the building. I found a bench free of people trying to sleep and returned to my book, willing the hours to pass quickly now.

At around 2:30 in the morning, the exhaustion was starting to kick in. I decided it was time for coffee. Because I didn’t have much money on me and I was now in the kind of head-space where I wouldn’t take any chances, I didn’t want to spend too much, but strong black coffee sounded heavenly, especially after an hour of walking in the rain. Plus, of course, I’d been awake since 7am. I went into the “24-hour” Lotteria (ha!), which had finally reopened.

The waiter disappeared as soon as he had served me. I sat down at a table with my coffee, glad to be comfortably sitting in a restaurant, away from the fights for bench-space and disputes with station security. I was a little chilly, so I got out my  jacket. The only other customer stared at me, open mouthed. “Is that a springbok jacket?” he asked. Of all the Lotterias in all the Train Stations in all the cities in all the world, what were the chances that the only other person in this one, at 2:30 in the morning, would be a Capetonian named Derek? We had the kind of conversation that happens when you randomly meet another South African in a strange country in the early hours of the morning: where in SA are you from? Where did you study? Do you know so-and-so? He went off, chuckling at the randomness. I think I might have believed I’d hallucinated it had I not caught a glimpse of him getting off the same train as me as we arrived back in Daegu. The last remnants of weirdness about spending the night at Seoul Station trickled away as I relaxed into the inexplicableness of life. If Derek ever reads this, he should he did a great job of brightening my morning.

I bought my ticket home, now that the machines were working again, and whiled away the next few hours reading and writing and occassionally wandering. At about 4:30am, the station began to fill up and slowly returned to its usual, busy, bustling self. At 5, I had another coffee to tide me over until departure time. I managed a couple of hours of broken sleep as the train swept across Korea before finally heading home.

I am absolutely no worse for the experience. It was totally worth it to see an old friend. I even relish a little being able to add to my repertoire of stories ‘The time I spent the night at Seoul Station’. I feel a little bad that I was unable to let my friend know I was okay – my cellphone couldn’t get internet and his wasn’t working in Korea, but other than that, no harm done. It was a little bit of an adventure: a day trip that ended with me sitting on a bench in Seoul Station, writing, at 3:52 in the morning.

A village out of time

Adventures, bus, travelling in Korea, ,

My travel-partner tells me this is a moment she will never forget. ‘She’s right,’ I think. We’re sitting on a bench, under twisted, Korean pine trees, the a sky full of stars, watching the Nakdong river meander past Buyongdae Cliff. The night is perfectly still except for our laughter and the calls of night birds. Very occasionally, a rustle or murmur of household noise drifts across from the village at our backs. It is a perfect evening: relaxed and calm and beautiful and (finally) not cold enough to chase us indoors.

Earlier in the evening, we sat on the floor of restaurant near the village and savoured a glorious dinner of exquisitely-cooked mackerel, yummy haemul pajeon and creamy dongdongju.  There were many restaurants to choose from. This one was buzzing with multi-generational family groups around little tables, all sitting on bright red cushions on the warm, polished-wood floors. Our spot was in the open air, under a little roof, just at the edge of the building. Sitting cross-legged on raised floors to eat is the one disadvantage of wearing hiking boots to travel in this country because each time the boots need to come off and then be replaced at the end, which is rather a mission. For leisurely and delicious dinners like this one, it is worth it.

I arrived at Hahoe Village around mid-afternoon. Anna got their earlier through a series of unfortunate timing moments: she, travelling from Seoul, arrived earlier than expected while my bus from Daegu was delayed due to traffic problems. The bus to the village only leaves from Andong every couple of hours, so it made sense for her to go ahead, to secure us accommodation and spend some extra time exploring. She meets me at the bus stop. I pay the 2000 won entry fee (R14). There is a bus that takes visitors from the entrance gate and ticket office to the village itself, but we decide to walk. It is the kind of place where walking made sense. The path winds up little hills and across bridges under tall trees, between the road and the river. We would walk this path again several times, back and forth, that afternoon sunshine and the dark, quiet evening.

Hahoe Village has been here for some 600 years. A farming village and the rural home of a line of scholars and government officials, it has sat quietly in its loop of river the Nakdong river that surrounds it on three sides, the people, simple farmers and noblemen, working side by side for all those centuries. Its current claim to fame is that it is a ‘traditional village’, a tourist attraction because the houses are still the same houses – both the noble tiled-roof houses of the Joseon dynasty upper classes and the little thatched cottages of ordinary farmers – as those hundreds of years ago. In a country that has developed so quickly that grandparents and grandchildren have grown up in worlds which would, quite literally, be hundreds of years apart in any other country, tradition is a complicated issue. The majority of the tourists who visit the village are Koreans, often Koreans taking their children from their sky-scraper apartment-block homes to see what the country looked like not so long ago. It is marketed as a glimpse of life in the past but t is more than that. The marketing creates the impression of a place artificially stuck in another time. The reality is far more comfortable and more interesting, at least for me. This isn’t a dead relic of a time that is long gone. It isn’t a museum. It is a real village where real people live and work. And these people aren’t stuck in the past. They still live in traditional houses and do traditional things, like make their own kimchi and farm vegetables, but they live in the real world. The traditional houses have cars in the driveways and electricity and sometimes even satellite dishes. That might disappoint some people but it isn’t intrusive. It doesn’t detract from the enchantment of the place, it just makes it more real.

We stayed in house number 42. A gate of sticks opened onto a dusty courtyard, where two elderly ladies were working their outdoor wood-burning oven and a pile of red peppers lay drying in the open air. One side of the courtyard was shielded from the road by a open-air, thatch-roofed storage area. On the other three sides, were traditional thatched buildings. Our room was in one of these. Up four stone steps and across the threshold – through the empty doorway, we stepped into the kitchen and shoe-pit area and took off our shoes before climbing onto the raised, wooden floor. Anna had warned me that our room was tiny. There were two little rooms opening off the small central area of the little house – a ‘room’ that was little more than a raised-floor platform of shining, polished wood resting on the stones that make the foundation of the house. Two sets of paper double-doors led to our room on the left and another on the right; doors too low to walk through upright. Inside our tiny room lay a mattress and bedspread. On the wall was a mirror. There were no other furnishings. The walls were papered white. Opposite the doors was a window of paper over a wooden frame. Beyond the window were some of the traditional rich-brown pots, a little grass and a wall topped with traditional roof tiles, above which we could glimpse other thatched rooves, a tree or two, and the sky. The afternoon sun seemed to rest on the scene of rural ordinariness.

The afternoon is wearing thin as I wander along dusty paths between traditional houses in a world so far from my own. Anna has gone to lie down for a while, so I am exploring alone. The traditional rooves and the fancy houses that typify Korea sit, happily, alongside traditional thatched cottages. I walk past houses where husbands and wives sit on their wooden floors drinking tea and talking. Children play in the tourist-attraction restored buildings. A Korean fir tree sits proudly next to an information board proclaiming that it was planted by Queen Elizabeth II. I wander further, along semi-deserted dusty streets. Swallows flutter back and forth under the eves of a thatched house. I am struck by memories of the swallows back home (in SA). They must have flown from there by now to have arrived here. Not the same swallows, of course, but still a strange sense of sameness in all the difference. Around a corner I come out of the village into farmlands stretching to the river and the hills. A farmer is driving his tractor home at the end of the day. Anna and I talk several times during the weekend about the universal sameness of ordinary rural life.

Two old men, clearly residents of the village, chat on a pathway, one in a full suit, complete with hat, the kind of suit my own grandfathers used to wear. A middle-aged man passed me on a bicycle. A woman in a little cottage is sells curios. There are so many twists and turns and paths and alleyways and pretty buildings. 180 families make their home in this village. I find a house, no longer used, set in a square walled-in garden, complete with spring-green fruit trees. The house is empty and the windows are bare. Next to it is a two-story pavilion. The information board says that it was been built 1576 to take advantage of the views of the river and the cliff. The pavilion was named for the medicinal herb ‘Wonji’ because “the place itself is as effective for improving mood as the herb”, the info board tells me. The sun is sinking, so I find a quite spot by the river and watch it slowly drift towards the horizon, reflected in the quiet river below. The many tourists who cluttered the place during the day have, for the most part, left and the ordinary peace of rural life is beginning to descend on the village.

Later in the evening, as we turn away from the river to return to our lodgings for the night, an almost full moon is rising. We follow its rise, between buildings and across beautiful, traditional rooves and rustic thatch, as we walk through the sleeping village. There are enough electric lights but we don’t really need them tonight. The streets, between the walls topped with roof tiles, are quiet; empty of people, and magical in the silvery, moon-lit night. Our hostess looks across the courtyard and waved us goodnight as we quietly walk to our room. The heated floor takes the slight chill off the night air and we climb into our warm floor-bed and fall asleep in the stillness of a traditional village.

In the morning we wake to birdsong. ‘There are no cars,’ Anna says. It is early; way before the alarm we so diligently set. The people staying in the other little room are starting to move around. We follow suit and head out to walk the village before the tourists arrived. Strange, as tourists ourselves, that the best part of visiting this village should be the evening after the masses have left and the early morning before they arrive. We take a slow stroll around the village in the crisp morning light. The houses are still beautiful. People are starting to go about their chores. Farmers walk their fields. A church spire rises silently alongside the town.  It is difficult to describe the quiet joy.

We stop at a little curio shop just opening for the day and contemplate ice-creams but decide, when they don’t have chocolate, to go back to our lodgings and think about breakfast instead. Our hostess is sweeping the courtyard when we get back. With absolutely no common language, she asks if we’d like something to eat. Although still a little resistant to the idea of kimchi and rice for breakfast, we agree, partly to please her. We pack up our few belongings and sit on the polished wood floor to wait, enjoying the light and the breeze and the views. Before long, our landlady arrives at the open doorway with a small round table laden with dishes, and places it in the middle of the floor for us to sit around. On the table are bubbling tofu soup, a whole mackerel, two silver bowls of rice and 7 different side-dishes. Some of them are unexpectedly delicious: the greens (of an indeterminate variety) with sesame oil and sesame seeds, the small, fresh succulents with delicious red sauce, the pickled garlic. Even the kimchi has an unusual flavour. And the fish is delicious, too. I never imagined that I would find myself enjoying fish, rice and kimchi for breakfast. Then again, I never imagined I would one day eat breakfast sitting on the polished-wood, raised floor of a traditional Korean farmer’s house that may well be hundreds of years old. Just as we finish eating, our ajumma arrives with perfectly sweetened, milky coffee.

A ferry crosses the river to a traditional house and Confucian school and the cliff on the other side. We gleefully perch on the wooden benches in the mid-morning sunshine as the ferryman poles the boat across the gently flowing water. We wander around, taking many, many pictures and climb the cliff (up the path at the back, not the cliff-face, obviously) to look down on ‘our’ village. There it lies, nestled in the curve of the river, looking just as peaceful and enchanting as our experience of it has been. A friendly Korean man obligingly takes some pictures of us with the village in its valley and the mountains beyond as a strikingly beautiful background. Touristy pictures just to prove that we really were there.

We both want to stay but we know we can’t. Buses are infrequent and the work week is calling. We walk the path for the last time to catch the bus back to Andong for a delicious galbi lunch and then  onward bus-trips to our respective Korean cities. It is a place, a moment we will never forget. A visit that will stay with us. It doesn’t seem like it rushed past or was too short. That sense of time passing quickly can’t capture the peace and the relaxation. There are many things to see in Andong, the majority of which we didn’t see because we chose instead to spend our time soaking up the atmosphere of Hahoe Village. I am glad, I realise, on the comfortable bus back to Daegu. Those other sites may be amazing but sinking into the calm of a place still living and working and laughing in the same kind of houses they have used for hundreds of years (plus the river and cliff), is probably one of the most precious experiences I have had in Korea.

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Some practicalities for those who might wish to plan their own Hahoe Village experience. Anna and I were travelling from Seoul and Daegu respectively. We both found that the most convenient way to travel to Andong was by bus (3 hrs from Seoul, 1hr 30 min from Daegu). This in spite of the chaotic nature of Daegu’s bus set-up which is destined to become a blog entry all of its own. Bus tickets were 7300 won from Daegu and around 16000 won from Seoul.

On arrival in Andong, the tourist info office outside the train station should be a first stop. They are super-helpful and have maps of the area, as well as bus times, prices and info on where to get a bus to each tourist spot. They also speak English, which is a great help to those (like us) who are linguistically-challenged when it comes to speaking Korean. There are also plenty of restaurants in town and I would highly recommend the steak galbi, even if it is a bit pricey – it thoroughly satisfied two South Africans who are used to good meat as the norm.

The bus to Hahoe Village leaves Andong only 8 times a day so make sure you get there in time or you will wait for up to 2 and a half hours. Once at the village, you will need to pay the 2000 won entry fee. This is nothing to pay given what you will be seeing. You can take a shuttle-bus to the village itself but, provided you’re not carrying too much baggage, the walk is far prettier.

We attempted to book accommodation in advance and were frustratingly unsuccessful. Once there, however, it wasn’t all that complicated. We stayed in one of the rustic, thatched houses and were extremely happy. It is probably important to note that this is not luxury accommodation. If you like 4-star hotels, you should go elsewhere. We were in a tiny room with only bedding and a mirror for furniture and the toilet and shower were across the courtyard in outhouse-type constructions. That said, we found it clean and comfortable and the calm and sheer peacefulness was glorious. There is underfloor heating in case of cold (Room price: 30 000 won). Also the breakfast was amazing (7000 won per person). Oh, and not being able to communicate at all with the ajumma running the house didn’t pose a problem either. The four French tourists who were staying in the other room seemed equally happy. Staying overnight is a good idea because it will give you a chance to see the village without the masses of tourists who descend on it during the day.

For those wishing to eat out at Hahoe, there are plenty of restaurants near the bus stop/fee-paying spot and we were very happy with the food – the mackerel is highly recommended. The famous Andong Soju (which is purer and has a higher alcohol content than other soju) is available in the village. If you’re looking for night-life, you will be disappointed – this is a tiny, rural community that lives a farming lifestyle and, as a result, tends to go sleep relatively early. If you’re still awake after dinner, try walking by the river. It is beautiful. And take the ferry across the river (during the day, 2000 won per person) and walk/hike up the cliff to get a stunning view of the whole area. For sheer quirkiness, be sure to check out the Korean fir tree planted by Queen Elizabeth II. There is also an “exhibition hall of Queen Elizabeth II” (because the world is sometimes a strangely tiny place).

Every place in Korea has its own charm. I don’t care how touristy and clichéd a traditional village may sound, a visit to Hahoe Village is a delightful, relaxing, charming experience that any visitor to this country would be making a mistake to miss out on.