동해 | Donghae

Bright and early, first thing, we all got up and had a great little breakfast together. Fresh fruit and lightly toasted bread with cream cheese and a bit of bacon. It was really simple but delicious and relaxing, especially with all that sun coming through the window.

We went to a nearby airfield where an Aerobatics Drill was going to be performed. We took an exciting shortcut through some farmland, bypassing huge queues of traffic, parked up and joined the steady flow of foot traffic heading towards the runway.

The show had just started by the time we got there, and the crowd was pretty big. Thankfully, the show is in the sky, so no worries about not being able to see anything ;p

I always find air shows really impressive. It's impossible enough that we as humans are able to fly around, let alone at those kinds of speeds, in such a tight formation.

The sounds these planes make when they whizz past is more than a little terrifying (you don't so much hear them as you do FEEL them. In your chest.) and makes me wonder how scary it must be to live in one of these countries where fighter jets are soaring around on a regular basis, and they're not just there to make pretty patterns.

But I digress.

강릉 | Gangneung

A few weeks ago, Nick had a tiny kpop event that he'd only been able to get one ticket to, and I was looking for something to do while he was away. It's not often we're apart outside of school so I was trying to find somewhere to go in Seoul that he wasn't keen on.

However, my co-teacher saw me researching a few places and came up with another suggestion. That weekend she would be taking a brief trip to her hometown of Donghae to visit her family and make the most of the fact we had Monday as an official day off. She thought it would be a good chance for me to see a new part of South Korea, and that I should join her.

Cutting things short, I said yes, Nick expressed his wish to also go (the event he needed to attend was on a Sunday, and we'd be leaving on a Friday) so he bundled into the car with us and would leave earlier by bus on the Sunday.

We found out we'd be staying with my co-teacher's brother in Gangneung the first night, 3 or 4 hours drive east of Incheon and about 30 minutes north of Donghae.

Basically her family is a big collection of some of the nicest people I've met (and I've met a LOT of nice people here).

Gangneung is known for its sundubu (silken tofu) so we were treated to a big baekban style meal with what I will tentatively call sundubu jorim because I forgot it's actual name. Similar to a jjigae (stew, usually quite spicy) it's a hotpot of sorts, full of chunks of fish, kimchi, and a load of other vegetables and quite simply tastes incredible even if it is in a sort of "melt your face off" kind of way.