po-'hang time' episode 1

Editor's note: this is "part one" in a three part series. It's that gripping.

When we found out a month or so back that we would have a nice little vacation at the start of August, we were pretty psyched. Not because we were on the brink of some teaching-induced meltdown (as Alex may have led you to believe ...), but more because we hadn't had the opportunity to do much traveling in Korea, minus our foray to spy on the North Koreans and our trip to Mudfest, of course.

We had many ideas of where we could go and how we would spend 5 days in a row with no teaching, but as we attempted to plan our trip it got more and more difficult. See, the time we had off coincided with the vacation of every other person in Korea, and booking accomodations was proving to be difficult in itself. First, we were thinking Busan, but after being rejected by multiple hotels that were full and triple the regular price we decided to get some help from one of our Korean co-teachers. Mina, one of the teachers at our school, became our official travel agent. She brought brochures of beaches all over Korea and we somewhat arbitrarily chose one of the pages based on the pictures (as the pamphlets were conviently in Korean) and decided to go there. We settled on Pohang, the largest beach town on the east coast, which also happened to be home to POSCO, the biggest steel manufacturer in Asia. I think it made Alex feel at home since she lives close enough to steel town back home. Either way, the prices were about five times cheaper and they had all we really wanted: a beach.

I did some more research and found some other good stuff to do in Pohang and we were rarin' to go. My sister would also be joining us as she had just arrived for a 2 week visit. Fresh off a trip to Mexico, I knew she would be eager to hit the sunny beaches of Pohang.
So we got Mina to book us some bus tickets, cuz it's easier than doing things ourselves, and we packed our bags for our next adventure.

She told us to call her if we ran into any problems in our cross-country journey, but we weren't too worried. Although, lately we've had some minor issues with taking buses places (like when our names were nowhere to be found on the bus list for the Jisan Valley Rock Festival ... but, with Mark and Bridget's expertise it was miraculously resolved: through kindness and free bus tickets). I had my fingers crossed for no such issues with our trip to Pohang, but things have a funny way of not working out smoothly when you really want them to ...


to be continued ...

- mark