2016 was a good year to teach in Korea.
Why? Well, there's a couple of national holidays that fell on a Friday or a Monday.
Meaning, three day weekends.
Yaaaay.
There are some things to consider when taking a trip within Korea, specially on a national holiday.
1) Everybody is going to be traveling. Everybody.
There will be a massive migration out of Seoul and into the rest of the country. Chances
are that if you don't plan ahead, things will be booked; hostels, pensions, buses, you name
it.
2) When, and if you find somewhere free to stay, there is a huge chance that you won't find a
quiet place - no matter where you go.
3) Most Koreans are used to the crowds. Personal space is nonexistent and your bubble
won't be acknowledged.
Logically speaking, I should have known all three of these points before this last weekend. I should've known.
I started researching places to go about three to maybe four weeks ago. And I couldn't find a single place to stay... everything was sold out or stupidly expensive. I was starting to think that I had waited too long to actually score anything for this precious three day weekend. But thankfully, I found a place on a city close by to one of the national parks that was on my Korean bucket list.
Taean National Park is a little bit over two hours away from Seoul, and it's got around 26 beaches and a bunch of beautiful eco trails. Coworkers said it was beautiful, and I really wanted to be able to get to it before it got too cold. However, nothing was open for that city, but I did find a nice and affordable place to stay in a city 20 minutes east from Taean.
Seosan is - in my own personal standards - a pretty big city with a population of over 140,ooo people. However, in compare-everything-to-Seoul-standards, BOY what a difference.
Getting off the bus (after a little bit over an hour stuck in traffic; like I said, mass migration) and walking through the city... let me see if I can encompass the shock...
- Half of the shops were closed, maybe even more than half the shops. In the middle of the day.
- There were no people. Literally. The streets were quiet, and they stayed quiet. Of course you had the odd old lady turning into the street here and there, or the couple sitting under some shade, but the lack of people was mind blowing. It was perfect.
We didn't explore much Seosan, since not much came up while researching this place. We stopped at Seosan to sleep, but our main destination was Taean. We stayed at a cheap hotel, and the young man working in that hotel (Seosan Hotel) was one of the friendliest, nicest persons I have met while being here. He was hospitable, he wanted to help and he went out of his way to make sure that we were exactly where we wanted to be. Honestly, you don't find that in a busy, each man for himself city like Seoul. Not to say that they aren't friendly, just to say that no one really seems to have the time to help.
Aside from walking around Seosan for a few and the hotel, nothing much to say about the city, except that the quiet and the peace it gave me was one of the best things about this weekend.
Taean was a completely different story.The park was beautiful and I really enjoyed the sea breeze and the trails. Oh, gosh the trails. The trees were so beautiful, and again - they really give you the possibility of escape and just be alone in the midst of it all. And they were everywhere. The beaches were insanely overcrowded: tents were set up all over the beaches, all over the camps, and an overwhelming amount of pensions were set throughout the entire beach side.
Now, you ought to know by now, I am not a fan of crowds.
I am also not a fan of heat. None whatsoever.
And it was hot.
If it had been just a couple of thousand degrees cooler, I would have been happy getting lost in those trails and just walking throughout the entire coast. Because surprisingly... you could get lost. You could feel alone in those trails. I could have been okay with the crowds, but the heat. The heat just killed me. In fact, the heat has been killing me all summer.
Would I go back to Taean National Park? If the weather was cooler, absolutely. It is close enough to Seoul to make it a decent day trip. Would I return to Seosan? Probably not, but I would urge anyone who would ever find themselves in that little city to stay at the Seosan Hotel and meet Chan (spelling could be embarrassingly incorrect).
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