Thursday, October 7, 2010

We're Going to Disneyland!

Well, not really. Last weekend we took off to Yongin, a suburb of Seoul, to experience Everland: Korea's watered down version of Disneyworld.

Our director likes to get involved in "helping" us and told us that the best way to get there was to take the train (for 2 hours) to Cheongnyangni Station in Seoul, take a 45 minute subway ride to Gangnam, then take a 45 minute bus ride to Everland on a shuttle. We decided to ignore his advice and took a direct bus from Chuncheon to Yongin. It took only 2 hours and we didn't have to do any waiting around for trains and buses.

We had to get up super early to make it to the bus at 7 am. Michael and I are not morning people and this was quite the hassle. There are actually taxis out and about in Chuncheon at 6 in the morning! Once on the bus, we slept a bit, ate some food, and played with our respective "toys" for a while (Michael: Ipod, Lisa: Kindle) and then we made it. We took a taxi to the park, which took about 10 minutes and we got to the park about 10 minutes before it opened at 9:30.

The park attendants were all wearing Halloween themed costumes. Dorky hats, old-fashioned Harry Potter - looking outfits and such...



The park was nice and empty so early in the morning. I just recently learned that Michael doesn't do spinning rides, so we really didn't do much in terms of rides. We went on "Columbus Adventure" which most people just call a Viking Ship. We also hit up their knockoff of It's A Small World from Disney, which was named something similar. It was pretty terrible.








The highlight of Everland for us was the animal portion. There were monkeys, tigers, fish, otters, penguins, you name it... I felt mixed emotions about some of the habitats that were too small or didn't look like they were managed properly. There was also a spot that had puppies. They had two poodles, a bulldog, a dachshund, and a shih-tzu. I wished I could have that employees job - she held puppies all day!


We finished up the wandering of Everland by about 12:30 and decided to get food. We ended up at a Burger Cafe that looked reminicent of a fifties era diner. Definitely not a fifties era diner. We both kinda wished we had waited to go to Lotteria at the bus station - and we don't like Lotteria.

We took the 2:30 bus home and that was that! I'm glad we didn't actually pay for tickets, although we spent $70 on transportation alone, so we probably should have just skipped it. Anyway, a Korean experience!

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