South Korea Photos
Below are some select sets of pictures taken on a 2-week trip to South Korea. The trip began on Jeju Island, off the south coast of S. Korea, for a conference on microfluidics (MicroTAS 2009). I hung out with a lot of people from UC Irvine and UNIST, saw old friends, and made some new connections.
The trip continued in Seoul where my friend and labmate Robin & I met up with Pouria. We did a ton of stuff, and had an incredible trip. Seoul was amazing, and you should go. We toured the DMZ, went to markets, went hiking, ate Korean BBQ, drank hof (beer) and soju, went to a bathhouse, crashed with some amazing CouchSurfer hosts, and had a great time.
There are a lot of pictures on Pouria’s Site, and he is slowly blogging about his Korean experience here too. I stole some of his pictures to post here, and Robin will probably upload some of his photos to this site as well. Hope you enjoy the photos.
The island was beautiful, and I had a great time. We toured a wonderful Buddhist temple, hiked to a waterfall, drank pure water (and soju) from the Hallasan Mountain, ate Jeju Black Pig, and went to the conference too. Thanks to all of the folks at UNIST for a great time!
After Jeju we headed to Seoul. Seoul was an amazing city - large and over-populated, but clean and easy to get around. The food was great, the people very nice, and we had a lot of things that just worked out well in our favor. Can’t wait to go back!
Geongbukgung was our first tourist stop in Seoul. This is the largest and oldest palace in Korea, and it was colorful and ornate - lots of Buddhist influences throughout the design. Lots of Koreans were there too.
Jeong-Il from UNIST was our tour guide for a day (she was awesome!). We went to an art commune village place and walked around. We found this crazy kids village, and then ate BBQ pork ribs while staring at North Korea.
Robin’s cousin took us hiking in the mountains, and we got an incredible bird’s eye view of Seoul. Then we ate some BBQ bird for lunch, and ended the day in a bathhouse (we sat in saunas and hot tubs, ate ice cream, watched movies, and took naps).
Another tourist destination (I guess) was the Joint Security Area of the DMZ between N. and S. Korea. This area was tense, but we got to see N. Korea and some N. Korean soldiers. Lots of propaganda coming from both sides. And our bus almost crashed.
South Korea
