Thousand Islands

11-08-2010
Day 244 of 365: After not having access to my account for a couple weeks, I'm back. Long story short, I switched my OS to Windows 7...mayhem ensued. Nothing too catastrophic, just some lost passwords, cookies, computer functionality, etc. Anyway, I'm back now and have some catching up to do. Last week I traveled with some teachers and staff from my school to the southern tip of South Korea and caught a ferry from the city of Mokpo to Hong-do, or Hong Island. Hong-do, which is more than two hours from the mainland, is 1 out of 1004 islands in the Korean waters to the south. Most of them are uninhabited chunks of rock jutting out of the ocean, but Hong-do, which is largely a fishing community, has a population of 300. The ones who don't make a living from fishing most likely are in the tourism business. Even though there are few people living on the island, there are many hotels, motels and restaraunts in the village, as well as many types of guided tours available.

Apart from Jeju-do, Hong-do is considered to be one of the more scenic islands that Korea has to offer. It's not tropical with beaches and palm trees, but the natural beauty around the island, including 150 water formed caves and rock formations, give it a unique and mysterious feel. Personally, a city boy like me couldn't imagine living on a rock, eating fish and seaweed, and looking at the same 300 faces every day apart from the tourists. Actually, when I looked at the faces around the island, many of them were weathered and wrinkled beyond their years, making some of the people look extremely old. No doubt they live a hard life there, but for some reason they stick around. Being on a trip with my school, we visited the island's elementary school. They have four teachers and 23 total students. I saw six of them throughout the day. The dirt playground/soccer field, which is standard in every Korean elementary school, was the only flat area I saw on the whole island. The rest of the town is on a hill. The multiple levels actually enhanced many of the photos I took, giving me lot to look at in a small area.

Although it was pretty cold (probably high 40's), we took a two hour boat tour around the island to see many of the beautiful rock formations I mentioned before. Supposedly the tour guide was telling legends about the island and stories of pirates and treasure and all sorts of things, but I didn't catch any of it in detail because I still don't understand too much Korean. At one point a smaller boat pulled up alongside of us (no, it wasn't a pirate ship) and some fisherman began selling fresh sushi from fish caught just moments before. Three guys were cutting up the fish in front of us while another man was handling the transactions. Koreans love the raw fish. Needless to say, this was the freshest sushi I've had in my short 8 month career. It was pretty expensive - about $40 for a small plate that 4-5 people could snack on. However that didn't stop about fifty people from lining up to put in their orders. Our group of twenty shared two plates, so it went fast. I asked what kind of fish it was, but again I was at a loss for not knowing Korean. It happens a lot.

Overall it was a fun two day trip, fully payed for by the school. I appreciate the fact that our school frequently has outings like this to take care of the teachers and staff. It allows me to do things in Korea that I would have never known about or done on my own. Even today, we went on a two hour mountain hike followed by dinner with about thirty teachers and staff. Though I still don't speak much of the language, I feel like I fit in because we do things together, which is afterall, how Koreans do things.