ANDONG

So getting to andong was rather painless. First, i thought we had to go to Seoul to take the bus to Andong, but Jacky was like... "what? that makes no sense, there should be a bus leaving from suwon." so then she gave me the info and so we ended up leaving on DEC25th in the morning to andong from the suwon express bus terminal. The trip was about 3 and a half hrs.

so we got there and of course, no clue on where to go, where we were gonna sleep etc. I had looked up online that there were these traditional Korean houses where one could stay and they were in this one Korean village. So when we got there i decided that it would be easiest to just grab a cab and go to the place to see if there were any vacancies. BAD IDEA! why? .... so we grab the cab and we are riding and riding and riding....and then finally we ask the driver (who spoke of course no Korean) "how far away is this place" and then he says"28km! so then we ended up getting to the village and paying $30.00 for taxi ride (later found out we could have taken the bus for only $1.50)... but hey, that's how you learn right? so we get there and these villages are like no really nice, i mean.... they are Korean people's homes and they kinda rent you the room. but we were not really convinced, plus, it was really far away from downtown. So we ended up walking around the village and going back downtown (this time with the bus) and finding a motel for like $30.00. and it was really nice.

then the next morning we went to see two more places i think and then headed out to kyongju. Andong kinda sucked in that everything was super far away. We originally had planned to see all these cool things and then when we got there and got informed well we realized that everything is super far away. you always have to go back to the central bus station before going to the next tourist attraction (because bus lines are kinda weird)... so this way, each trip to a place took like an hour! 30min down, 30min back. So we really didn't get to see much. In fact, we went to see this one temple, but because of bus schedules, we literally had 20min to see it. Took us 30min to there and then the last bus left in 30min. We had to climb up these mountain to get there and literally in the end had a little less than 10min to kinda look around, take some pics, enjoy the view and run for the bus. note: we could not miss the bus back to downtown because if we did we were going to miss our bus going to kyongju. so that would have been bad. really bad.

on the other hand. there was a cool market in andong that we did enjoy, with some shops for clothes, lots of food, tons of fish, etc etc etc.

btw. with all this commotion we literally were not really very aware of the fact that it was Christmas. This has been, i think the least christmasy Christmas for both of us ever!!!!/// oh well, such is life.