A Day in Daejeon

On Friday night we decided to travel 2 hours south of Seoul, to the city of Daejeon. Since it is home to more than 1.4 million people, I'm sure you are already very familiar with this city, and if you're not then I'm afraid you won't learn too much from this blog since we mainly went there for the hotel and the shopping.

We arrived around 10pm and were very happy to see that the area around Daejeon's express bus terminal was surrounded by nice and fancy love motels. There were over a dozen acceptable options, but we went with the I Motel. They were going for an old fashioned/cabin sort of feel for the rooms, which was different, and we liked our room a lot. For $55 CAN there was a whirlpool (of course), 2 computers, a big TV, a sofa and lots of nice little touches like the random mural painted over the bed.

We were also provided with some room service options. Of course, there was food to order but there were also GIRLY options. I could have had any of the following ladies come to my room: Strawberry, Flower, Model, Love, Bang Bang, Tomato, Young, Sense, Sue, OK, or Talent.

I was interested in Sue, but instead we just decided to drink beer and watch Steve Murphy and the CTV News.

The next day, we walked to the nearby Home Plus and got some lunch in the food court. One thing that's great about traveling out of Seoul is how cheap eating out can be sometimes. Check out all the food we were served for $10/CAN. Mel got a cheese oven spaghetti with soup, salad, pork cutlet and radish kimchi and I got ddoekbaegi bulgogi with naengmyeon, rice, kimchi jiggae, kimchi, lettuce wraps and more radish kimchi. Unbelievable quantity and still totally delicious.

We weren't sure where exactly in the city we were, so we checked a map and found that we were a here.

We got a taxi to take us from the area around the bus terminal to the main shopping area called Jungang-no for 5,000 Won. The shopping area was pretty great, and I scored some excellent Engrishy shirts at (where else?) a store called Tomato.

After about an hour of shopping, we decided to actually do some sightseeing. Daejeon offered a few touristy options to choose from, all of which landed rather high on the MEH scale of interest. There was a dam, a science museum, a mountain, or a park to choose from, all of which were just out of the way enough that we only had time to do one. We chose the park.

We caught a bus (number 311 or 313) from Jungang-no to Ppuri Park. It's about a 30 minute ride, with a long, bouncy green bridge marking the entrance.

The park was built to celebrate Korea's family names. If you were to pick up a Canadian phone book you could probably find 100 different family names on any given page, but Korea only has about 250 different surnames registered in the whole country. As a race, Koreans have a very pure bloodline, for example: 21% of Koreans are named Kim and 14% are Lees!

At Ppuri Park, there are 136 statues, each representing a different surname. Some surnames are represented multiple times, because the name is traced back to the clan's hometown as well. The above statue is for the Hamchang Kim's.

This one is for the Jeongju Lee's.

If you were Korean, I think it would be pretty fun to trace your family's history at a park like this. A lot of people were dressed up for their visit, even the little kids were wearing their Sunday best. Alas, there were no Keddy monuments, so we took the occasion to lay in the sun near a pagoda and some fir trees for a while. What a nice afternoon.

There was a monument of the different Zodiac sign characters.

There was also some picnic space in the trees (Koreans prefer the shade to sun). Note the lack of picnic tables. Instead, there are flat surfaces for picnicking so that the family can eat almost like they're sitting on the floor.

Randomly, there was a collection of nearly every street sign known to man next to a field near the entrance. I guess part of the park is being turned into a traffic safety awareness center for children- naturally, since that concept goes hand in hand with tracing your genealogy. It was interesting to note that no matter where you are in the world, the traffic signs are nearly all the same.

We'd hoped to make it to one more destination before going back to Seoul, but it was close to 5pm before we returned to Daejeon Station. Since both the dam and the science museum would soon close, we decided to have supper at a galbi restaurant and then go home. However, upon arriving home, I was made aware that the Daejeon Aquarium has recently acquired a PINK DOLPHIN. Who cares about Ppuri Park??? It's a PINK, freaking, DOLPHIN! So. I have a funny feeling there might be a second, much more interesting post about Daejeon coming in the not too distant future.

What the what?!