Let's go get lost, let's go get lost.... (Roadtrip Part 1)

Happy Birthday Bhudda!

Last Friday was Bhudda's birthday, and as such, we all got a nice three-day weekend.  Ever since I took possession of the nun-mobile, Amsbry and I have been planning to take a roadtrip over this weekend.  We left Thursday right after school. Amsbry took the train up to Gimcheon, about half way between our two cities, and I met her there. Then we started driving southwest, toward the tea region and Jirisan National Park.

Early into our adventure we realized that the combination of our paper map and a Korean language GPS system might not be sufficient for keeping us on the correct route. Luckily, because of US military presence, many of the road signs in Korea are also written in English. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are intuitive or even correct half of the time.  We spent the first four hours of our trip mostly driving in circles and eventually decided to stop in a random town to sleep for the night and wait for daylight to tackle the next leg of the journey.  We found the most neon and obnoxious "love motel" possible to crash for the night.  Love motels are pretty much as sketchy as they sound. You can rent them by the hour, but unlike in the States where this probably means you're taking a prostitute there, in Korea it is often married couples who use the love motels. This is because Korean houses are built with very little privacy, and often extended families will live together under one roof. The ability to have a little alone time at home is quite limited.

This particular love motel was possibly the best I've seen yet. We walked in, and blue lights automatically turned on, as well as the giant big screen t.v.  There was a mirror on the wall and the ceiling of the bed, and a pink crushed velvet sofa in the corner. Possibly the best part of the room, though, was the shower! Showers in Korea suck. They're just a little sprayer hanging on the wall haphazardly in the bathroom. But this shower had a giant shower head at the top and also the little jets of water that spray from the sides. It was the best shower I've taken in over 3 months!

The next morning we consulted our map and determined the best route out of town. Unfortunately, we assumed we were in Hamyang, but we were really about 30 km away in Geochang.  So, we ended up lost in the middle of nowhere. Again. Once we finally got our bearings, we headed south into Jirisan National Park.  Jirisan has some of the highest mountains in Korea, pristine rivers (like, you could actually swim in them without contracting some type of disease!) and lots of back-country roads (of which I'm assuming we covered about 80%).  We hadn't seen anything but tiny villages in at least a few hours, and we didn't eat anything but a small yogurt for breakfast, so we decided to stop in the next village for lunch. We found a restaurant with the familar pictures of beef on the windows and assumed they'd have Korean BBQ.  They didn't. In fact, we didn't recognize anything on the menu, so we just asked for two orders of whatever.  Bad decision. They brought us a dish that Amsbry and I have named dog stew.  Now, I'm not certain it was dog, but it sure as hell wasn't beef!  We both wolfed down our rice, tried to fill up on kimchi, paid the bill and bailed.

Jirisan

We climbed further into the mountains, and still felt a mix between extreme hunger and wanting to vomit.  We pulled over at yet another restaurant, hoping to find something edible. To our relief, the woman brought us a menu with pictures! We pointed at the potato pancake things that we both really like, but they were out of them. Damn! So the woman pointed to some dish we didn't know. We assumed it would be similar to the potato pancake and said yes. Strike two for lunch. She brought us creepy jiggly brown tofu covered in weird pickled greens.

At this point the gas tank was running low, our stomachs were still empty, and we felt like we were making no real progress toward our destination town in the south. A nice Korean girl who spoke English went over our map with us, and told us we needed to turn around and go back down the mountain and take a different highway. I'm starting to realize that it's probably a good thing we have a three-day weekend to make this trip.

In the late evening we finally made it to our destination: Hadong. It's a city that resembles every other city in Korea. Too much neon, two-story white brick buildings, narrow streets. But it has the distinct advantage of sitting on a beautiful river. We decided to drive out of the city and up the river a ways to find a hotel for the night. We finally came across a little abandoned place with a completely empty parking lot and figured there would be some vacancy. When we pulled up, the owners were sitting outside drinking beer and eating chicken. They seemed completely shocked to see us. Maybe because we were the only waygooks (foreigners) I'd seen in awhile so I'm assuming they didn't see us often. Or maybe they just didn't see ANYONE often.  We asked about a room, and the woman eagerly escorted us upstairs to show us around. The room was pretty basic, but the owners were so friendly and we were tired of driving so we decided to stay.

When we came back downstairs the owners had pulled up two more chairs and started feeding us chicken and beer. The man was like a chopstick Jedi master, eating chicken on the bone with complete ease. Amsbry and I, on the other hand, were far less talented.  We were possibly the most entertaining thing to hit this hotel in months. Our pitiful Korean and his complete lack of English made the conversation limited, but as the beers emptied the charades got more expressive we actually seemed to communicate quite well. After eating and chatting for awhile, we decided to grab a bottle of soju and head down to the river to enjoy the beautiful evening.

When we returned, the completely vacant hotel we'd left behind had suddenly exploded with people!  The parking lot was packed. People were standing around outside laughing and drinking, and they all seemed relatively familiar with one another.  Amsbry and I were sort of shocked. We asked the owner if it was his family or something. He laughed and said no.  So we sat down and drank another round of soju with the new guests. Amsbry and I were a little bit tipsy at this point. There was one man, dressed in all white with a long white beard like Confucious who was sitting next to me. And although he shook his head and kept indicating he couldn't speak English, he would giggle every time he overheard funny things that Amsbry and I said to one another. It wasn't a coincidence. I could tell he could understand us perfectly. And so I was annoyed that he was lying to us about his English abilities. I told him flat-out that I knew he could understand us. In a matter of minutes after that, we were told the party was over and we had to go to our room now. It was only 10:00. It seemed so strange to us.

At this point the owner was acting a little weird. It may have been because he was drunk, or it may have been Amsbry and I getting paranoid for some reason. They walked us up to our room and told us "You stay in bed. You only stay one night" and shut the door. What? Then a few minutes later the owner came with one more bottle of beer and some sliced tomatoes and reminded us once again to stay in our room. We were really weirded out at this point. We decided to test the waters and see if we were just being paranoid. I went down stairs to fill my water bottle. I was immediately yelled at and told to get back in my room. Okay, we're not being paranoid. We're somehow prisoners in our hotel room. I ran back upstairs to Amsbry and our imaginations started reeling about what might be going down at our isolated hotel.

We ended up naming this the Bates Motel

Was Confucious some kind of drug lord using the hotel for his smuggling activities? Was the hotel some sort of brothel? Looking back we realized that all of the guests we'd seen outside had been male. WTF was going on here?  We ran through a million possible scenarios in our heads. We were getting ourselves pretty worked up at this point. We'd decided not to touch the food or beer in case it was poisoned, and we even considered jumping out our second-story window and running away. In the end, we opted for sleeping in our clothes and being ready to escape if necessary. It was probably the most sane idea overall :)