Visiting Chungju

26 Nov 2008
Posted by Jordan
Jordan's picture

This last weekend we decided to go visit Matthew Fisher in Chungju, instead of cleaning our apartment, or buying bookshelves for our apartment... or setting up picture frames in our apartment. Or crafting floral arrangements for our apartment. The trip started out a bit, well, painfully, as the stomach issues which I had been dealing with the night before (I'm not sure my system agrees with any amount of Soju, as both times I've had it I've felt ill the next day) cropped up as soon as we got on the bus, but all things ended well.

Chungju Visit

As you can see on the map we traveled northeast, traversing about half of the width of Korea, and roughly a third of the length. The bus trip took about 5 hours total, which included many stops and a short layover; a straight shot by car would probably be under two hours if you didn't hit traffic in the cities. We returned by train in about 4 hours, with two layovers. Both trips were about 18,000 Won a person, which, with the currency doing so poorly at the moment, translates into $12.50 USD.

Photos from our trip can be seen in the slide show below, or by visiting our flickr album.

We got in Saturday afternoon and spent the night at Matthew's, on our camping mats. Chungju is beautiful (nestled by mountains on all sides), so we had a nice walk around the place. One of the highlights of the trip was getting to play board games and drink gingerale with a couple of Matthew's expatriot friends (one of whom is of course named Matt); I had been on boardgame withdrawal for several weeks.

Anyway, here's a little video from our walk. The free exercise equipment appears to be a standard Korea lakeside feature.

Thanks!

You've done a great job of capturing the feel of my city (although it's a pity that the mountains become largely invisible thanks to Youtube's video resolution... which is not your fault). But why do I sound like I'm sick every time I utter one of my half-formed pompous phrases? I know your own voice is supposed to sound weird to you, but really.

At any rate, your visit was definitely the highlight of my week. Thank you for stopping by (and going into Pizza Hut with me, even though Jordan was sick)!

And just so our viewers know, I'm not actually trying to leave Jordan and Marisa behind in the downtown area---it's just that we were running slightly late for their train.

PS: Did that TV cable work out?


Edit:

...And now you've put up an extremely cool slideshow with pictures of the mountains and waterfowl and angels and everything, so please disregard my plaintive whines in the previous post and go check out Jordan pumping iron. (Within the constraints of the little cage that prevents him from stealing the barbell, of course.)

Also, that picture of Donguri on your Flikr album is incredibly cute.


Cute

We are all about incredibly cute. It's our number one.