Kate's in Korea: A Visit to Cheongju

This weekend the Fulbright Orientation team gave us our first free day. There were two day trips led by Orientation Counselors to nearby areas but being the brave soul I am a few friends and I decided to explore a little on our own (and to be honest the other trips had limited spots and were full). Since Goesan is such a small town there are only two buses. One takes you to Seoul and the other takes you to Cheongju, which is a suburb that is an hour away. I had traveled there to observe an elementary school last week and was shocked to find that suburb meant the size of Detroit. Since Korea's population is so large any area with less than 1 million people is a suburb and may not actually be a suburb of any larger city- it's a city completely unto itself.

Anyways my friends and I had been told verbally about the buses and began trying to find out if there was anything cool to do or hike at the end of this hour bus ride. The only problem was that we had only verbally been told about Cheongju and had never seen the cities name written in English or Korean. And there is a Chungju and a Cheongju within an hour's drive of Goesan. After a ten minute attempt to ask a Korean student which Chungju/Cheongju the bus went to a renewing ETA who was in town to speak to us conversed with the Korean and quickly told us the bus would take us to Cheongju.

And we were off! After the confusion about where we were even traveling to we set our sights low and aspired to simply get lunch in Cheongju. Anything else we managed to do would be a bonus. We set off at noon and by 12:40 a fellow traveler said we were in Cheongju so we promptly got off the bus. Little did we know it was not the main bus terminal but my roommate Rachel speaks Korean very well and was able to find out which direction was downtown.

After a half an hour stroll the eight of us arrived at Dream Plaza, a neat pedestrian walkway that was surrounded by restaurants and shops. Lots of the shops were super familiar and others were just funny Korean attempts at English like Hell the Vintage Shop, Teenie Weeny, and Brick, another vintage shop.

A coffee place

While strolling the streets we also stumbled onto a large market that sold everything you could ever imagine including pig heads, dried silkworm cocoons, live turtles, lots of live small crustaceans, squid, and more.

A park in Cheongju.

We did manage to get some delicious Korean food from an authentic restaurant. It was a family-owned for twenty years and the wife cooked right in front of us. We also got delicious PatBingSue, a traditional summertime dessert that consists of shaved ice, ice cream, moochi, strrawberries and more!