"Words have no wings, but they can travel a thousand miles" (Korean Proverb)

Welcome to Flying Words, Jon and Aileen's blog of our adventures in South Korea! We will be in South Korea for a year, starting in mid-July, teaching English in a private school. We just graduated from college this past May, and are looking forward to having some adventures before continuing our education. 
We started this blog to keep all our family and friends updated and to share our photos and stories. We hope this is entertaining for you! We will miss you all, and are very thankful to have the internet to keep us in touch. 


Monday, March 30, 2009

The land before time...

This weekend, again part of my attempt to see everything worth seeing in Korea before I leave, Jon and I ventured south to find some dinosaur footprints. This is something I'd been wanting to do ever since I heard it was possible. I mean, how cool is that, seeing where dinosaurs walked around? So, we did the usual intense navigation of the only semi-helpful Korean tourism websites, and deciphered how to get there. And, as preparation the night before, we watched "The Land Before Time." Such a good movie. :) 
It took a looong time to get there. We took a bus from Jeonju to Jinju (haha), which took 3 1/2 hours of winding through the mountains. Let me tell you, for a country the size of Indiana, it can sure take a while to get though. Stupid mountains. :) Just kidding, I love the mountains. 
Once in Jinju, a bus to Goseong took about an hour, then came the annoying part. We were so ready to get there, and we just needed to take a local bus to the Dinosaur museum/fossil site. So we get on the local bus, and it starts going but the guy takes at least one wrong turn, and then picks up old ladies on the side of the street and goes out of his way to bring them to their houses, or at least their streets. I guarantee this happened, because he would drop them off, then we would back-track and take a different turn. So it took an hour to get there.
FINALLY we were greeted by giant statues of dinosaurs on a hilltop overlooking a beautiful coastline dotted with mountainous islands. ( Sidenote: If I didn't dislike Korea, I would live on the coast here. It's gorgeous, and the mix of mountains and sea I'm looking for.) After kind of deciphering the returning bus schedule (we would have to go to a different city but we were assured we would get back), we ate our lunch of tuna sandwiches and then ventured inside. At that point, we were like "This had better be freakin' amazing for all the time it took to get here!"
The museum was pretty cool, your generic dinosaur museum with skeletons, fossils and a cool animatronics exhibit of fighting dinosaurs. The statues were a bit disturbing, since almost all of the big dinosaurs had little dinosaurs ripping their flesh off in stunning life-like fashion. We actually saw one kid start crying after looking at one of the statues. It was disturbing. 
But the actual footprints were AWESOME! They were on the stone on the coast, which was gorgeous anyway, with rock cliffs and caves along the water's edge. You could see the footprints in a line, so it was like the dino had just walked by. At one place, you could step in them. Which of course, I did, and said "Hey! Look! I'm Litte Foot!" Good thing no one but Jon around me spoke English. I hope. 
  There were also lots of fossils in the space between the rocks, of those...oh, what are they called...things that look like beetles. I dunno. Anyway, let's call them prehistoric beetles. And there was a guy catching sea slugs and selling them (live) to people to eat. Sketch. Yuck. 
Then we walked along the coastline, sometimes on the rocks, exploring tide pools (my fav. pasttime) but then we were forced to walk on a wooden pathway because the other fossil area was protected. There were fossilized ripple marks from the water on the rocks, and more footprints. There was even part where the rock was all strangely bumpy and pitted, that was apparently from a whole bunch of footprints in one place, kind of like when it's muddy and you play soccer. Heehee, dinosaurs playing soccer. :) 
After seeing all the fossils this place had to offer, we made it back to the museum to wait for the bus. We got there 20 minutes before the bus was supposed to come, but after we waited for an hour in the spot the guys at the info booth told us to wait at, there was still no bus. In the meantime, we had been laughing at some policemen up the road who were directing traffic and very bored, because they were dancing to the music from the loudspeakers, and then making faces at/ saluting us. Jon finally asked the people at the info booth what was up, and they were equally confused. They told us to go wait at another bus stop down the road, so we went there. Waited for a while. No bus. Finally, one of the guys from the info booth, who was on his way home, picked us up. He was really nice, and he drove us to the bus station and went inside and helped us buy tickets. 
Of course, once we got to Jinju through the rush hour traffic, we had missed the last bus to Jeonju. So, we got on a bus to Namwon, which is on the way to Jeonju, hoping there'd be a bus from there. Which, luckily, there was. It just took a little time and a lot of buses. But it was worth it. Cuz I found Little Foot. Well, at least, his footprints. But if I follow the footprints......

2 comments:

Lyn said...

I'm glad you found Littlefoot. :) It is so weird that we both ended up blogging about The Land Before Time! :)

Anna said...

yerr weird.....
u shoulda followed them and theyd prob. like end up in an ocean or something and u'd just keep going and be like "must (glub glub glub)...find.. (glub) LITTLE FOOT!!glub glub glub glub