Roadtrip continues: Gwangju, South Korea

We had an early start and flew back to Busan from Jeju on a Sunday morning. Korean Air had the most amazing safety procedures video with the group SuperM performing some dance moves and telling us how to behave ourselves. Works for me - and also reminds me of the Air New Zealand's Lord of the Rings safety protocoll video.

At Busan airport we found our car quite easily, paid for the multiple day parking and immediately hopped on and started driving. We had many places pinned on the map that we could've visited today on the way to our next hotel but together we decided to take it easy and not do any sight seeing today. This means we skipped for example the Boseong Green Tea Fields and Jirisan National Park.

It was clear we were exhausted though, since all of us took a few hour nap immediately after getting to our hotel in Gwangju.

We didn't have much planned for Gwangju as it was supposed to be just a pit stop on our way to Jeonju. Throughout the journey we had been kidding on the fact that how come we didn't see many people anywhere. According to quick googling, South Korea has approximately 55 million people and it is a third of the size of Finland (which has 5,5 million people). So we were expecting a lot of people everywhere all the time but so far we had not seen rush hours or big flocks of people. Gwangju was the first place for that.

Maybe it was because it was a Sunday evening, day after the Chuseok celebration and everyone had Monday off because of it,

but the city was buzzing with people.

We went to get dinner, K BBQ, and decided to have a some sort of a night out. (Sidenote: I am planning on doing a complete post about all the food we ate in Korea, so you'll see lots and lots of food pics on that one.) We went to another place for drinks and dessert and ordered some fruits, flavored soju and a very popular Jim Beam high ball drink. All of this was done without any contact with waitpeople by making the order from a tablet on your table. It was amazing.

Then we had a great idea to fill a bucket list task and go to a local karaoke room. I had read about different karaoke rooms and how we should distinguish on where to go and where not to go, but apparently my research still wasn't the best. We stepped inside a karaoke room, paid for an hour and started to search for songs. "Let it go" from the Frozen movie was the first one that I recognised and I put it on, and Jenni and Essi took the first round. Unfortunately, we were greeted with a music video that was definitely not suitable for the song we were just singing. On the second try we got to see a live performance of Psy's Gangnam Style, which was great, and I think there was also another concert live we watched and sang to, but otherwise we managed to always get a very... not suited mv for the songs.

Maybe we could've switched it from some settings or maybe it just was one of those rooms, but in the end we decided to leave after a few songs. My Korean wasn't good enough to understand the settings. The song book on the other hand was amazing! It was filled with mostly popular Korean songs but also with some hits in English. There were a lot of options you could also search for from the program.

In conclusion, not the best choice of local norebangs (karaoke rooms) for us, but an experience nevertheless.

After that we wanted to mend our mistake and grab one more drink on a different area. We lined up for a new restaurant, bought drinks and a dish to share and finished our evening.

The next morning was a bit slow, but we were in no hurry. We went for breakfast, packed our bags and started driving to Jeonju. On the way we wanted to stop to visit the Bamboo Theme Park but it was closed. As we nearly reached our Jeonju hanok destination, we realised that something was left in the hotel room at Gwangju, turned our car around and drove back to get it. Without a huge break in driving we drove back to Jeonju and managed to check in our beautiful Hanok stay at 6 pm.

More about the Hanok stay and the wonderful Jeonju Hanok village on the next post!