Gyeongpo Beach

Day 3 Korea.  Sept 16, 2016

Woke up early at 6:20 a.m. to get ready with ample time to spare.  Packed our stuff since we were going to be checking out of this hanok and headed to the breakfast hall at 8:30 a.m. to eat.

Morning photo in front of our hanok on the last day

I love this photo. It shows all of the shoes left outside since no shoes are allowed indoors. I love how all the shoes are all so clean and colourful!

We chose a western style table to eat.  Breakfast consisted of soft tofu, rice, banchan of fish, kimchi, eggplant, beansprouts, pickles.  It was a great breakfast!

Traditional Food Experience Hall ~ this restaurant serves traditional Korean dishes cooked according to family recipes handed down in Seongyojang for over 300 years!

(Traditional Food Experience Hall: this restaurant serves traditional Korean dishes cooked according to family recipes handed down in Seongyojang for over 300 years.  It was built in 2006 as part of the tour resource development project, along with the Korea Traditional Culture Experience Hall.)

This breakfast was so satisfying. I was so full and couldn’t even finish the tofu or the rice. The kimchi was amazingly delicious! I loved the eggplant as well. 🙂

We checked out of the Seongyojang, took a photo of the nice lady who helped us out the past two days and then took a taxi to Goodstay Soo Motel which apparently was just a short drive away.

Taking a photo in front of the entrance of our Seongyojang before leaving

Posing in front of the place we stayed overnight for two nights

🙂

Posers inside 😉

This was the only thing used to lock up the room! #oldstyle

We checked in, saw the huge hotel rooms with a great view of the ocean, and then the friends arranged to have a taxi come be our personal driver for half a day.

This room was gigantic!!

The view outside Goodstay Soo Motel

You could see the ocean!

We rode in two taxi’s.  It dropped us off at the Jumunjin Dried Fish Market where we talked to several fishermen and settled/tried to bargain for a seafood lunch.  I don’t know the names of the fish we got but we got one regular fish, a flatfish olive flounder, two abalones, and a scallop.

Jumunjin Dried Fish Market street

Inside one of the fish markets where we ate lunch

We ended up choosing this one to eat at even though there were many others inside the complex

We settled in on a floor table and then enjoyed our lunch.  It was substantial with the fish soup (no spice this time), sashimi fish, sashimi abalone, and scallops too.  The fish soup was indeed fresh!  We started off with a seaweed soup.

Watching this lady prepare the seawood soup for us

Seaweed soup and banchan! :9

Olive flounder sashimi!

Fresh fish soup! We asked for no spice since we had already tried the spicy version on Day 2

Soju to enjoy the meal 😛

Our spread of food for lunch; another amazing local Korean feast!

Looking back, the guy kind of ripped us off since it didn’t make sense to bill us for five people’s worth of seafood.  It should have been priced per item per pound and then an additional small fee added for the soup + banchan + rice.  Ah well.

Before we hopped back onto the waiting taxis, we strolled to one of the shops at the Jumunjin Dried Fish Market.  The entire street was lined with dried seafood products hanging out in full display.  I saw some dried hammerhead sharks, lots of varieties of small fish, and more.  We tried a tea called Maesil Tea from one of the shops which tasted very good.

This shop, among others at the fish market, sold so many types of dried fish and seafood products!

Dried hammerhead sharks!!

We hopped onto the taxi, reached the Gangneung Unification Park, took a few REALLY quick photos outside, and left (since it wasn’t worth it to get off to see it).

Gangneung Unification Park

Next up, we reached a temple and took some photos and a look around.

Korean temple; not sure what the name was

We climbed up a slope and saw some gorgeous temples

Beautiful dragons on the ceiling of a temple roof

The third stop was the Haslla Art World.  There was a large couple sculpture standing at the entrance of the museum which looked nice.  Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we didn’t actually get to admit inside to see everything.

Haslla Art World entrance

Large elephants outside Haslla Art World

Haslla Art World details

Saw these outside the museum. It would have been nice to check the inside

The last pit stop was at the windmills.  There was a bridge, train, and gigantic windmills. It was cute but I didn’t get the significance behind it.

Time Machine train & Giant Windwill

By this point, it was already 3:30 p.m. and we had to head back to the hotel as our agreement with the taxis was only for service until 4 p.m.

Back at Goodstay Soo Motel, our friends opted to take a nap and rest before dinner while my mom and I decided to stroll Gyeongpo Beach.

Calm Gyeongpo Beach

There was a long boardwalk along the beach too. We went as far as we could before turning back. It was a nice walk!

Wow, it was a really nice beach — a sandbank between Gangneung Lake and the ocean. Since it was Chuseok holiday in Korea, there were lots of people and families milling about, especially near the water park.  We strolled the entire boardwalk, took photos with a tree sculpture, and got lucky with a swing set to enjoy.  It was the perfect weather out and just a tad gloomy.

Gyeongpo Beach Central Square

So picturesque. And the moment we saw those swings, we knew we wanted to get on one!

By 7 p.m., we returned back to the motel to rendezvous our friends and walked outside in search of dinner.  Our hotel was located right off the boardwalk and the street was full of seafood restaurants!

There were a ton of patio restaurants with customers seen enjoying seafood in the open air.  We settled on the restaurant with the most water tanks out front (and four crabs on its signage).

Seafood feast for dinner!

For dinner, we had barbecue scallops, clams, and shrimp.  It was an open fire grill so you had to be careful because when the clams started to open up and sizzle — the hot steam could splash you.

Clams, shrimps, cheese with ketchup sauce all on the grill!

Yum. This was amazing

It took a while for some of the scallops to be ready

The scallops, clams, and shrimp indeed were so fresh and tasted “sweet”.  There was a ketchup cheese sauce too that went well with the seafood.

❤

The banchan included imitation crab meat, corn and macaroni salad, seaweed, and squid.

After the barbecuing, we filled the rest of our stomachs with another fish soup.  This fish broth was also refreshing and fresh, but wasn’t too dissimilar to the one we had in the afternoon for lunch.

We had another round of fish soup; so far we had been indulging in fresh fish soup every day!

What this restaurant looked like from the outside

After dinner, we walked out onto the boardwalk and there were lots of families enjoying their Chuseok festival by lighting fireworks and sending sky lanterns into the air.  I watched from afar and lived vicariously through them — I’ve flown a sky lantern before for a friend’s birthday celebration but since then wouldn’t voluntarily send another one up into the sky because of its hazards to the environment.

Celebrating Chuseok festival with fireworks

So many people were trying to send off sky lanterns into the night!

It was a beautiful night and it was fun watching some families succeed with sending their sky lanterns off while others were not so successful.

It was a good Day 3 in Korea but definitely not as action-packed as the first two days. Tomorrow, we leave Gangneung for good and head to Seoul! 🙂

Saw this cute little caricature on the sewer!

Goodstay Soo Motel entrance

[View my posts about Day 1, Day 2, Day 4, Day 5, and Day 6 of my trip to Korea in 2016 too! :)]