Jeju: An early anniversary

By: Stephanie

The Hawaii of Korea, or so it is deemed by many Koreans. I’m not quite sure as to the validity of that statement because the only time I have been to Hawaii was when I was 5. But I can say that it is similar geographically. It is an island off the Southern tip of Korea just like Hawaii is in relation to the US. Ok, maybe that’s not even a correlation because Hawaii is more West than South…Oh well. It has palm trees like Hawaii, but I believe they are not native to Jeju. I heard they were imported….It is a beautiful island with rocky coasts. We didn’t get to see that much of it because we were only there for two full days. The beaches weren’t much to speak of…Ok it’s not even close to Hawaii, but it still has its charms.

We got in at night and took a bus to our hotel. The hotel is amazing. If you haven’t checked out our flickr site I’d advise you to do so. The elevators were sweet and fast!! But maybe that’s because the elevators in our apartment building move at snail speed…

Our room was bigger than our apartment and the bathroom was fully tiled in granite with two showers and a heated toilet seat. Pretty sweet if you ask me. The hotel is posh. It was pricey, but then again everywhere else was fully booked and, hey, we were celebrating our anniversary gosh darnit! (two months early…..but that’s our prerogative)

The first day we went down to the beach and tooled around and just hung out and played cards at the Hotel. Every night but one we went to the “Western style” restaurant, Peninsula, and it was phenomenal! The second night we were there, we tried the Holland style restaurant that was in the windmill. Yeah……The atmosphere was cool, but when you order cheese fondue and get American craft cheese melted in a bowl it just doesn’t quite meet the lowest of expectations. It was abysmal so we went over to the Peninsula to nurse our inflicted stomachs.

The second day we rented scooters and rode around the Southern part of the island. It was a blast! You can see some of our pictures. I know…I am really cool. They had this random fake ship on the coast and there were random life-size figurines littering the grass around the ship as well.. It looked like Disney sneezed and its entrails landed half way around the world.

It was a great four-day weekend of relaxing and performing death-defying stunts on our tiny little scooters. And the plane trip was only one hour!