And so begins the monster post. I'm only a couple weeks late on this one! In mid-January, about a week after returning from my all too brief trip to the U.S. for Christmas, I met my fellow Jeju Island teacher and friend Liz for a two and a half week journey to Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia. All of the cheapest flights from Seoul leave first thing in the morning, which leaves poor people like me with one option: sleeping in the airport. Traveling from Jeju can also be quite a task, since Seoul has two airports. The overwhelming majority of the flights between Jeju and Seoul take the weary traveler to Gimpo, the domestic airport. Then it's another forty minutes by metro to Incheon, the international airport, fighting with your bags the entire way. There are many things I like about Seoul, but I absolutely detest the design of its public transportation system, which seems to have been created with the specific goal of frustrating anyone with rolling luggage. It's rife with obstacles on the ground, in front of the escalators, and even at the exit for the airport itself! Fortunately, the airport has a public bath and spa on its bottom floor with a room set aside for sleepers.
Nevertheless, I arrived pretty tired on a Monday morning in Melbourne. We only had a day there, so we made the most of it, exploring the market full of the cheapest fruit I've ever encountered (kiwis for pennies!) and the stopping for dinner in Little Greece. I miss Greek food more than anything else in Korea, so we feasted on lamb gyros and the most delicious feta I've ever tasted. We also did some people watching in one of the many beautiful parks around the city. Sydney was a great place to visit, but Melbourne is the sort of city where I'd like to live. It had such a friendly, relaxed atmosphere. I hope to spend more time there in the future, but we had an overnight bus heading to Sydney to catch in the early evening, so our time was cut short. We arrived in Sydney around eight in the morning and indulged in a full Western-style breakfast, although the bacon was disappointing. After time in Europe and now Australia, I've come to the conclusion that only Americans can really do justice to bacon.
One of our first stops, of course, was the famous Sydney Aquarium.
I can attest that it is extremely difficult to get a serviceable picture of a platypus. They move fast!
Later, I ate one of this fishy's yummy cousins at a restaurant near the ocean.
One of the Aquarium's neatest attractions are sets of tubes placed directly under the largest fish tanks. In each pair, you can look up and see manatees or sharks swimming directly over your head! As you can see from the video, we made it just in time for the sea cow feeding time!
We also squeezed in a tour of the incredible Sydney Art Museum, which boasts an impressive collection of Aboriginal Australian art. We couldn't take pictures, but we saw some incredibly detailed wooden poles that are created to honor the deceased. A tour guide told us that, in order to avoid dishonoring the dead, the artists made the museum's poles from a different kind of wood than is used in traditional Aboriginal ceremonies. The Art Museum is located at the top of the Royal Botanical Gardens, where we had a proper Western-style picnic. Liz desperately misses mangos when she's in Korea, so we split a lot of them on this trip. Later, we took a nighttime stroll to see the Sydney Harbor Bridge and the Opera House all lit up.
We spent the next day on the beach, relaxing and enjoying the warmth. After the cold Seoul weather, Australian summer felt like a dream. We also tried some of the local delicacies that day, including a delectable meat pie and a slice of Lamington, a sponge cake covered in chocolate icing and coconut shavings. I should also mention here that I tried some Vegemite during our complimentary hostel breakfast. It looks like Nutella, but it tastes vile! It's extremely salty. The closest flavor that comes to mind was bile. Tim-tam cookies were much more enjoyable. We actually tried lots of unfamiliar candy bars during our trip, just for fun. I was especially fond of stringy chocolate-covered caramel candy whose name escapes me. Later, we went for a walking tour around the city.
This is one of the preserved examples of the word 'eternity,' which was written hundreds of times around the city decades ago. Supposedly, the person behind this unique gesture was inspired by a sermon at his local church when the pastor said, "Eternity, eternity, I wish that I could sound or shout that word to everyone in the streets of Sydney!" The man took him at his word, and though he could barely write his own name, he wrote the word all over the city. Nowadays, only three of these examples remain.
We saw ibises (?) like this one all over the city!
This building, which still function as a hospital, was built with money collected from rum taxes in the early colonial days, so it was known colloquially as the Rum Hospital.
Rub this boar's snout for good luck!
Australia is likely one of the only countries in the world where you can eat every animal on the coat of arms. Although we didn't indulge in any kangaroo or emu, it's perfectly legal to do so.
If this fountain looks familiar, it's probably because you've seen The Matrix. This is the fountain that the woman in the red dress walks in front of to distract Nero. Many movies are filmed in Sydney because it's relatively cheap to get filming permits and block off sections of the city.
It's possible to climb the Sydney Harbor Bridge, but it's expensive and you need to sign up months in advance. It's also not cheap to tour the Sydney Opera House. To save money, we went inside to use the bathroom, which is allowed free of charge, and enjoyed the far more famous exterior.
We needed to save some money because we paid to pet this koala! I can definitively say that they are very soft animals. We saw lots of native animals at the Wildlife Center.
Kookaburra
Wallaby
Lazy kangaroo!
On my last day in Sydney, Liz left early in the morning to spend a day at the reef in Cannes and I went to the New Year's Festival in Chinatown and got a jump start on Auckland. Chinatown had lots of stalls selling yummy food and some very impressive performances.
One of my first stops in Auckland was the art museum.
These flowers were created by a Korean artist!
We also couldn't miss the National Museum in Auckland, which is huge and has tons of artifacts belonging to the Maori and other Pacific tribes.
They even have an entire Maori building in the place!
I had planned to take a day trip to go caving in Waitomo to go caving, but I didn't plan far enough ahead, and unfortunately I couldn't get an appointment. So I took the money I'd budgeted for my day trip and jumped off a building. Sky Tower in Auckland advertises a controlled base jump 630 feet off the building, and it seemed like a great way to try bungee jumping sans whiplash. Strangely, I wasn't even nervous. It was several seconds of sheer exhilaration.
Not included in my pictures, unfortunately, is Christchurch. We took a short flight there to attend the World Buskers Festival, but I forgot my camera in the hostel, so I don't have photographic evidence. Christchurch was a bit of a shock, though. It's been almost a year since the earthquake, but the city is still demolishing destroyed buildings. Entire streets are blocked off. Most of the city's tourist attractions are closed down indefinitely. It's certainly humbling to see how quickly a disaster like this can break a once-thriving city. But we were there to see buskers, which is British slang for street performers. We saw everything from acrobats to trapeze artists to living statues to some amazing comedians. In such trying times, it's heartening that so many talented performers are coming from around the world to attract tourists and bring some much-needed funds to the city.
Our trip concluded in Kuala Lumpur. We we were first planning for our trip, we hadn't really considered adding a stop in Malaysia, but the discount airline we were traveling with had connections through there. It seemed a great chance to save some money on our tickets and see another country by stopping there for a few days. We were staying at a very cheap and very comfortable hostel right next to Little India, so we had a steady supply of amazing Indian food during our brief time in Malaysia.
Again, I have fewer pictures here, but there's a good reason for that. After two weeks of hectic travel, the inability to stay out late at night for safety's sake, and the cheap prices for beauty treatments throughout the city, we spent a lot more time indoors for those couple days. We spent the equivalent of about $12 for an incredible hour-long massage from a blind masseuse that further discouraged us from spending too much time engaging in Kuala Lumpur's main attraction: shopping. We got manicures, pedicures, and I even got my eyebrows threaded for about $2. Since I'd had a good experience at Dr. Fish in Seoul, I did venture into the city center to have some more fish nibble on my feet and see the famous Petronas Towers.
I couldn't spend all my time in Malaysia being pampered, though, so I made a day trip to a Hindu temple just outside the city.
Just like in Korea, you must take off your shoes before entering a temple, but taking pictures is permissible. I've become accustomed to wearing special little socks with my flats, but I guess they aren't as popular in Malaysia as they are in Korea. A couple people at the people panicked and pointed at my feet before realizing that I was wearing socks. The temple is adjacent to a pond of holy water.
But the real draw is this giant statue of one of the Hindu gods.
That, and the monkeys. They are quite the scavengers, and since the stairs leading to the main temple inside a sacred cave are filled with them, it's possible to get quite close to the little thieves.
I can only assume he was some sort of holy man judging from his raised hand with the scary-long fingernails and the men who followed him up the stairs to the cave, wiping the sweat from his chest.
And so concludes that adventure! Happy Valentine's Day for those in the United States. Koreans celebrate Valentine's Day as the time for girlfriends to give their boyfriends chocolate. A month later, the boyfriends reciprocate with candy on a separate holiday called White Day. Even the single people get a holiday, called Black Day, when you meet your friends for a delicious black noodle called jajongmyon. A trip to Busan is tentatively scheduled for next month, so check back for more updates in the future!
