An interesting week

Well, Tylor has arrived. It was a bit iffy for a while there, but he's here in the flesh, and didn't even miss one flight ever. Good job!


He arrived on a Thursday, and I knew he'd be tired, so I took him to a few bars that night to relax and figure out his surroundings. We went around the local bar strip, and got some delicious 소주 cocktail, which I knew he'd love. (Delicious alcoholic beverages with strange names are hard not to)


We had a few, and came home at a half decent hour because I had to work Friday. Friday night I figured that Tylor had had enough of bars, and probably wanted to recuperate after travelling so much, so I took him clubbing in downtown Seoul.

Tylor, me, and our Korean coworker Danny.

 
We had a few drinks at a few places, but I was a bit sad because it was sort of dead (as dead as it really can be in Korea) for a Friday night. Sometime soon we're going to go back out when theres a ton of people.


This past week was our vacation, where things went from ok to great to terrible as the days unfolded. The plan was to go on a trip to an island off the coast of Korea from Saturday until Thursday called Ullong Island. We left Saturday night, and drove for a while overnight and watched the 'sunrise' (too hazy to see the sun but whatever we knew it was there) and then took a ferry to the island.


When we took the ferry to the island, all the organizers had us convinced (except for Tylor [that ole salt]) that the ferry was going to make us seasick. We all bought this medicine (probably gravol) (except for Tylor [salt in his blood 'tis]) to make sure we wouldn't get sick. I felt like a fool after I got on the ferry and realized that its just a bit of water. People complained about feeling seasick when we got to the island and I thought they were crazy.

Tylor's first time in the Pacific ocean.

 

 


On the island we did some hiking and jumped off a bridge, to much fun and glee. We walked all around the island (a few tall boys in hand) along the cliffs, and got some pretty good pictures. Also, tylor jumps like a pansy. The first night we had drinks with everyone on the trip, and then (sorry mom) a few of us went back down to the bridges for skinny dipping. One of the girls was way too drunk (maybe all of us were) but we were able to convince her not to jump off.

Funny story, the next day the trip organizers had a trip to a Japanese/Korean contested island called Dokdo, that cost a bit of extra money to go on. Most people on the trip were from central states/ontario and other landlocked places, and they could not believe me and tylor and brendan declined to ride a ferry around a small island.


They got back from the trip a few hours later, half of them seasick, all of them pretty pissed off. Apparently, since Dokdo is currently contested, going to visit it (at least for civilians) means standing on a cement slab for 20 minutes while being watched by Koreans guards and not being able to move off of it. We had a laugh about that for the rest of the trip.


The second day we explored the island a bit more, hung out with a few of the gals on the trip, and got a somewhat sad announcement. Because of the bad weather, the ferry would not be going back and forth the next two days, so we had to leave the following afternoon at around 12:30. We got a (small) bit of money back for missing a day, and most people were mad, but I wasn't so heartbroken about it. An extra day to relax at home is never a bad thing from my point of view.

 

This is where things got a little.... interesting. Like I said the reason we left the island was because a storm was coming... well when we got onto mainland Korea it was already pouring, and we shuffled into a bus for the 4 hour drive ahead of us. On the adventure Korea tours, there is always a giant screen at the front of the bus where they play movies. We took a vote and opted to watch a movie called Salt. About halfway through the movie the bus driver screeched to a stop and hydoplaned, and we all stopped paying attention and watched as he slowly went forward toward the stopped traffic on the highway ahead of us. Apparently there had been an accident.

Luckily we swerved just to miss a car, and when we came to a stop there was a visible breath of relief. 

Which is when Brendan's window crashed in. 

I told the boys to get the back seat of the bus because it's more comfortable and you can lean back further. And so in the back seat it was Brendan on the left, then me, then Tylor, and then a guy named Kevin we met. When our bus stopped, the other tour bus with all the westerners in it didn't have timed to, and rammed into us where Brendan was sitting. We all jumped to the other side and out of the way, and us and the back two seats of the bus were covered in glass shards. Brendan had been sleeping against the window up until our bus had started to stop, and luckily for him he wasn't leaning against it when we got hit. The glass was fine because it was specially made not to break sharply, or something, So we brushed it all off with a towel right away. 

The damage

When we looked out Brendans window, there was a Korean man with a gash in his head lieing on the pavement. A couple people who knew CPR ran out and we all gave our towels to cover him up from the pouring rain. Not knowing a thing to help, me and tylor and brendan mostly just stayed on the bus with everybody else and waited. The other bus got smashed up pretty badly, but the worst that happened was one girl got a concussion and had to go the hospital. An ambulance came eventually for the Korean man, who got hit by our other bus and went through his windshield, and we heard later that everyone was at the hospital and ok.  Still, it was one of the craziest things I've ever been involved with. Bad luck for Tylor, less than a week in Korea and already in a major car accident. We made the news and everything. 

Anywho. A couple hours passed and a new bus came for us, and we made it to Seoul with no incident after that. 

That leaves us up to about now. Sorry I've not been in touch but I'll give you a call soon. Zoey I have bad news we need to discuss. It has to do with the hat that you bought me and I love. And my losing it on the subway. And me feeling really terrible about wanting another one sent and I'll pay you back for it. But we'll talk about that another time. 

To end, I'll just add that Tylor's enthusiasm about weird Korean things that we've all gotten used to already is a bit hilarious to us. Here's a few pictures of him being over-excited by statues. Laters.