Jeju: The Third and Final days

So the last two days at Jeju were kind of a blur.   So much stuff happened.

 

So on the Third day we started out exploring.  We accidentally found a temple across the street from the nearby minimart and we decided to take a look .  It was very beautiful in there.  They had a great main set of statues.

Then we hung out on the beach and Glen ate his MRE that he had brought just in case.  .  I went swimming briefly on the  main beach for the first time.  I wasn’t preparing for it, so I swam in my shorts.  Went back  to my hotel and got ready to go out.

From there the first place we went was an all organic vegetarian restaurant.   They served up a delicious salary bibimbap.   It was one  of the best bibimbaps I’ve had  in Korea.  Everything was delicious, though I put a bit too much red pepper sauce in it.  The decor in the restaurants.

From there we went on to a lava tube cave.  Which was a delightfully cool tube cave.  It’s a fairly straight run down the side of a mountain made by a tube of lava.  Only the middle section of the tube was open to the public but it was really terrific to see the huge arching ceilings along the whole thing.

From there we went just a short hop to a hedge maze.  In the middle of the  maze is a bell to ring.   Our team had a lot of fun but finished last.  We just kept going in circles.

Next we went for  a nice hike at the Jeomul recreational forest.  In the forest included a really cool nature path, a fresh water spring, a buhddist temple, and  a set of super cool wooden statues.

After that we went to dinner.   I was starving at this point so the very average pork and mackerel tasted incredible.  I’m quite sure though that if I had not been quite so hungry I would have been unimpressed again.

Finally for the Third day, we went to the ghost road and Loveland.  The Ghost Road is a neat optical illusion where it appears as if the road tilts up when in fact its going down hill-and gives the illusion that ghosts are pushing your vehicle forward.

Loveland is hard to describe in words but it’ll have to do because most of the pictures are too NSFW to post here.  It’s an erotic theme park with a great many statues and other works of art throughout the park.  Jeju is the Korean destination for honeymoons so you will see many newlywed couples walking around here.  They’re all outrageous, and absurd to the point of being over the top.

From there we went home and more or less went straight to bed.  Next morning we woke up for some last minute beach shenanigans before we had to check out from the hotel.  People piled seaweed on top of one another in a disgusting game of can-you-top-this?

Lastly we went to a botanical gardens where there were many foreign species of plants growing.  A lot of these were very beautiful and something different from what we had seen on the rest of the island.

And that was all of my Jeju holiday.

Game of Thrones review

Well, that was a wild ride.   This week Game of Thrones, the HBO adaptation of the book by the same name came to an end.   It started out a bit slow, just like the book, but by the end it was quite amazing.

They made some alternations to the book, but most of them seemed pretty well reasoned.  They got rid of a lot of the history of various houses and people’s because it would have been too cumbersome to show on television.

One of two of the characters seemed a bit different than what I expected.   I thought Tywin Lannister would be quite a bit different.  But they nailed my favorites, Jon Snow, Ned Stark, Danerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister were dead on.

The show, because the novel was so deft at this, really does a good job of turning the fantasy conventions on its head.  I mean they killed off like several major characters in the first book.   King Robert dead, Khal Drogo dead, Ned Stark dead and in Robert’s place are five seperate claimants to the throne.

‘Liberty’: The American Revolution review

I really enjoy American history.  I recently watched an old documentary mini-series.  ‘Liberty’: The American Revolution, was a 1997.  PBS made this six-hour part history of the Revolution beginning with the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 till the end of the revolution.   It’s available on Google Video, if you just search for the title.

One of the things that  was really great about the way this series told the story was they took personal writings of people who were involved and had actors read  them in character.  It’s a really enjoyable way to relate primary source information.

I also liked that it  gave the British position a lot of air time.  British soldiers and generals almost as much time as patriot sources.   It’s a different  take than I’ve usually seen.