Gwangju, South Korea

We arrived in Seoul, South Korea and took a 4hr bus to Gwangju to meet up with Jono’s friends Kerri and Katie who are South Africans teaching English there. Luckily, they picked us up from the bus terminal because not many of the taxi drivers speak English and we had no idea where we were going. We stayed in Kerri’s little apartment for the week and pretty much just chilled and relaxed during the day while she was teaching at her school all day. It was nice to not have to do anything or be anywhere or wake up early for anything, like we had been doing since May! 

South Korea was a lot more affordable and cheaper to get around and eat. Taxis were super cheap to get from Kerri’s house to downtown in 20mins...about 5000won (~R35) We pretty much only went out at night because that’s when the others were free and met up with the English crowd and a bunch of South Africans too. 

One night we found a petting shop where you pay to pet the animals, which were highly dolled up and dyed all sorts of colours etc to try look cuter...we were a tad freaked out. We had some traditional Korean food, consisting of lots of rice, veggies and meat, with some “kimchi” – which is like femented cabbage kind of. 

I’m still not very good at eating with chopsticks, especially when I’m very hungry and can’t grip meat well enough to bite. We also tried some rice wine but that wasn’t too tasty for me either. This one restaurant had a hot plate in the middle of the table and a buffet of raw food, which you then cooked on your table yourself. It was divine and only 10 000won per person (~R70) for all you can eat. 

South Korea felt a bit like a mini-america, in that it had a lot of American clothes, brands, shops (Subway, Starbucks etc) styles and general influence than Japan had. I obviously cannot read Japanese or Korean, but just by looking at it, I noticed the Korean language had a lot more circles and rounder letters, if that makes sense. We also went club hopping and most of them played popular western songs, while one of them played Korean pop (K-pop for short) where Koreans blew whistles to the beat! Karoake booths are also very popular and we went into one for about 30mins, but the music videos were all hilariously made, like Korean soap-operas. 

On our last night, we went out for dinner and then took the night bus back to Seoul airport, arriving at about 6am. We then checked in, bought a bunch of snacks from the 7-eleven and then got on our 5hr flight to Thailand.