Exactly one year ago, my family took a very important trip. We went to South Korea. We also couldn’t help but add Singapore and Japan to the list (which were AMAZING), but let’s face it. Korea was where it was at on a very personal level. If you’re new to the blog, let me quickly catch you up. My brother and I were adopted from South Korea when we were only a handful of months old. We’ve been raised as Aussies and until 2014, we’d never been back to Korea before. The opportunity came up (after years of talking about it) because everyone in the family was free to do…
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Where I’m from.
This post has been inspired by Fat Mum Slim’s September Photo a Day challenge x When people ask me where I’m from, it often means “Why are you an Asian looking person living in Australia? How did you get here?” I’m fairly happy to answer that I’m adopted and that I’ve been in Australia all my life – it’s pretty much all I’ve known! Earlier this year, I got to visit my birth country (South Korea) for the first time. The photo above is a shot I took at night time on the beach of Busan, the city I was born in. While it brought up a lot of…
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Orange…and black.
This post was inspired by Fat Mum Slim’s Photo a Day challenge x These are the hats Mr Unprepared bought while we were overseas. The top one is from Japan and the bottom one is from Korea. Both countries are absolutely mad for baseball. Both have teams called the Giants. Both teams wear the colours orange and black, which is quite a striking combination. Haha striking. Baseball. Get it? Unintentional puns are my specialty. We’d watched a travel doco about South Korea before our trip and it had featured a bit about the baseball culture there. We’d learnt that the team for my birth city was the Busan Giants and…
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Trees are green.
I have a problem. I really like trees. I don’t know how this happened. I mean, I care about the environment but I’m not exactly into botany. I don’t know the names of trees. I can’t even keep them alive if I’m really honest with myself. I don’t even spend all of my spare time looking at them. It is a little bit of an obsession that has crept up on me. I think I just really like the colour green. Which helps. So you can imagine my joy when we were in South Korea and Japan (and even Singapore). Trees. Everywhere. Beautiful trees. If you were to ask me…
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Busan: The city I was born in.
So I have already blogged about all of my mixed up feelings about visiting the place I was born (before being adopted and becoming the superstar that I am today đ ), but now I will show you what it is like from more of a tourism point of view. Honestly, I loved where we were staying – right on the beach. It’s a really popular destination within Korea (and even for people from the US and other parts of the world). We were there right before the peak summer season and it seemed like the perfect time. When I’d heard that Busan was known for its beach, seafood and…
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Gyeongpo: a nice surprise.
For many years, when I thought of South Korea, I didn’t think of beautiful beaches. I thought of cold winters with snow and an ‘inland’ kind of feel. I wasn’t very educated on my birth country, mostly by stubborn choice (such a rebel), because I wanted to just get on with being an Aussie and no-one was gonna stop me! How wrong I was (well there is snow and every country has an ‘inland’ bit but I had no idea how much more the place has to offer). While we were away, we visited Gyeongpo. It is a place known for its beach and a beautiful lake (the water looks like…
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South Korea: Unification Park, Gangneung.
While we were in South Korea, one of the places that the guys really wanted to visit was the Unification Park in Gangneung. You can read about it below. Basically, it was a centre created so that people could be educated about an attempted infiltration by the North Koreans in 1996 and how the South Koreans had managed to thwart the attempt. The park was set in a beautiful place. The water sparkled the most amazing blue-green and as the sun was shining the day we visited, it was just stunning…even with all of the concrete and barbed wire designed to stop any more North Korean invasions. I imagine…
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Korean snacks are weird and wonderful.
 My happy tourist face in Insadong, Seoul. One thing that gave us a laugh in Korea was the great variety of creative street stall snacks. One favourite over there is a tube like ice-cream. It’s some kind of waffle-y cone with soft serve inserted at both ends and besides the fact that it looks ridiculous, it is frickin’ practical! Doesn’t drip. Ever. Which makes me suspicious about the ingredients that go into the ‘cone’, but then you are overcome with the joy of having a funny shaped ice-cream that doesn’t drip and you forget all of your worries. DOESN’T DRIP. LOOKS FUNNY. Who cares if it might sit in my…
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Toddler + Train = ?
The infamous slow Korail trains. While in Korea and Japan, our mode of transport between cities and towns was trains. We had decided that without vehicles of our own, trains would be a good way to see the countryside, have our own seats and also some aisle space for the Little Mister to walk up and down if he got particularly restless. It was also fairly affordable (although tickets for the bullet trains (‘shinkansen’) in Japan were kind of pricey they were worth it). The Little Mister could travel for free (without a seat) or we could pay for a full ticket so he could have a seat of…
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Pororo Theme Park…and trying to find nappies.
A few days into our time in Seoul at the beginning of the holiday, we started to feel that the Little Mister needed to have some fun of his own. He hadn’t had much ability to run around and just be a toddler. He had sat in his stroller, been passed between adults and had indulged us in seeing a bunch of grown up stuff. We were feeling a little bit guilty and as we were just starting to get a feel for the trip, we weren’t perhaps feeling safe enough to give him too much physical freedom in certain places yet. Also, the weather had not been so kind…