Asan City Tour

This Saturday I went on a city tour of Asan, which is the next city west of Cheonan. In Korea it is quite popular to have these city tours...people all get on a bus and just go from place to place in an area and have a person (on a microphone of course HAHA) telling about all of the different areas. It's kind of nice, and it's easy and cheap...so I did that this weekend. Of course, 2 minutes into the tour the woman started talking with her microphone, and pretty much talked the entire time. I'm sure it was some useful info for all the Korean folks, and yes I can understand some Korean thesedays, but it was pretty useless to me. We went to four different spots: The Asan Folk Village, a botanical garden, and old Catholic church built in 1890 and then to the Asan Folk Museum.

I had been to the folk village before, but to a different area, and so this was still a new experience for me. It is cool because at the village, some of the houses are just for tourists, and then some of them people actually live in. I thought that was really cool, and I think it would be fun to live in an old traditional house. Maybe if I'm rich someday, I will buy one! :) The weather was actually really cold in the morning...almost felt like fall, and then by the afternoon the weather was pretty nice. The folk village is a famous area for some traditional Korean movies and Korean TV commercials. So...I took a few pictures of one of the most popular roads there.

The botanical garden was pretty cool too...although the location was RIGHT NEXT TO a dairy, and so since it has been raining a lot, you can imagine the smell was like...ummmm...well, not so nice. Once inside the botanical garden though, it was nice and the smell was gone. There were about 5 or 6 huge buildings that had all kinds of beautiful flowers and plants/trees/shrubs from all over the world. It was really nice, and I really like photographing flowers, plants...so it was cool. The coolest part was lunch though...they sold 꽃비빔밥 (kkot bi bim bap). Bi Bim Bap is kind of like a rice, mushroom, meat mix, it's really delicious. And kkot means flower...so they had this rice dish with flowers in it, and you could eat the flowers. So...it was really beautiful and also delicious :) After eating I went to an area where you could go inside a little area and buy bird feed and the birds would come and eat out of your hands. I thought the botanical garden was really cool.

The third stop was an old Catholic church. It was really cool and unique because it was built in a western style architecture...so it looks different from most buildings in Korea. It was built as I said earlier in 1890, and all around the outside there are statues of Jesus and of course Mary, Joseph, etc. I often see Catholic nuns travelling around on the bus here, but I had no idea that place even existed. It was very cool though, and it was also neat that the sun came out by the afternoon and so I got a few good pics of the church with the sun shining.

The last stop was the Folk Museum...it was OK, it had some really good Korean cultural things, but since I've been here a year, I knew most of them. The best part though was our guide. As I have said before (and I love Koreans, so I'm not being mean here, it just makes me laugh) Koreans love microphones. So...at each stop she got off the bus and even had a little portable microphone with a speaker around her neck, so people could hear her talking. So...in the museum, most people split off and just looked around at their leisure, but I was walking around where our guide was. The funny thing is there were literally 4 of us and her...and she was STILL talking with her microphone. I wanted to get a pic, and should have...HAHA! Anyway...it as a good time, and I had a cool weekend.

I'm excited, my friend Travis (he's from NC, but living in China with his wife) is coming to visit in two weeks, so I get to hang out with him for the weekend. We're planning to go to the DMZ, so I'll try and get some great pics if we go there.