A weekend awaaaayyyy from Mokpo
This past weekend, Ty and I did our PADI Advanced Open Water certification, and returned home to find ourselves feeling like we'd spent a week away.
When I first arrived in Korea, I promised myself to only spend every other weekend in the town where I was living, and the other weekends off exploring. For the most part, it worked. It is easy, however, to get yourself into a rut and to forget that there is still a lot of Korea left to see. It was a weekend of meeting new people (Jackie! What's your blog address??), living new experiences, seeing new things, and generally enjoying ourselves in a new way.
On Friday, we took the KTX up to Seoul. Since we were meeting the dive people at 5am on Saturday morning (ugh), we decided against getting a hotel room and opted for a night in a jimjilbang instead.
The place we chose, the Dragon Spa, was just next to Yongsan Station, and decorated with everything from faux Chinese dragons and bridges to penguins (!) and King Tut masks (!!!). All tackiness aside, it was a pretty neat experience. We wandered around the (clothed) co-ed area in our shorts and t-shirts (provided), sipped a few beers, and tried to figure out how we could possibly even describe this to a person who had never seen one (we decided it was impossible). Anyway, since we were sleeping on the floor of a small heated room (the Green Air Spa) with 30 other people and a TV blaring a comedy show, we only got about 2 hours sleep.
We met up with our group at 5am (yay), and loaded up to head to a place near the north east coast of Korea. This is the part of the country where you're apt to still find barbed wire on the beaches and such, because of its proximity to North Korea.
As we were doing our Advanced O/W (Ty did his Open Water in South Africa 2 years ago, I did mine in Indonesia this year), we had been cramming all our reading in on the train and in the jimjilbang. We had 3 dives scheduled for Saturday, and 2 for Sunday, and we were pretty excited.
We started suiting up in preparation for the 1st dive, and I felt like my mask just wasn't right. As my University roommates can attest, I have a long, narrow head. And, although I was assured that my mask would be okay, I still just felt like it wasn't fitting right. As we descended for the first dive, I could feel the water trickling in, and decided to head up to fix it (since I was so near the surface). Once it seemed okay, I headed down again (with one of the Dive Masters). As we headed down on the rope, another diver was being rushed up to the surface. My DM told me to surface and then headed over to help out the other diver. This guy had not started his day in the best condition, then had been seasick on the boat ride over to the dive site, and then the seal on his mask had cracked underwater, flooding his mask. Poor guy. And so ended my first dive, not with a bang but a whimper... oh, and helping a guy in a wetsuit puke over the side of a boat.
And I got a new mask, which made me happy.
The 2nd and 3rd dives went well ~ we dove over 2 different wrecks. They were recent wrecks (I was kind of hoping for a nuclear sub or a tanker wrecked by Godzilla (we were in the Sea of Japan/East Sea afterall... within spitting distance of both Japan and North Korea), but it was still fun to dive around them. I really liked the 2nd one, which was all covered in algae and stuff. I was a bit disappointed by the lack of sealife. I think I saw about 3 fish the whole trip.
We also got to do some good by participating in a PADI Aware beach clean-up. We spent about an hour picking up garbage, tires and other bits (a table!) from the beach where we'd been diving. I'd like to organize a beach clean-up or two here in Mokpo, since I don't think our work would ever be done.
The next day, we went to Sokcho, to a specialized diver training centre. It was a hellish morning, for although I got all the above-water theory okay (would anyone like me to use a compass to walk them in a triangle? Because you know what? I can!), and knew all my stuff, it was nearly impossible to do anything once we were in the water, in surge, with 300 other divers landing on our heads (or just sort of hanging out in the water - grrrr), a retired military guy yelling at us (that would be our instructor), and equipment that was less than cooperative....
At any rate, we both have our Advanced O/W now, and will continue to dive as much as we can afford to over the next few years. Ty is looking towards going up to Dive Master, but I'm probably going to stick with the basics for now. I just want to go down, float around, look at some fish, tickle a few sharks, come back up, get a tan on the boat, write in my log book and then get ready for the next dive down.
Anyway, Sunday evening, we headed out with Ben (the seasick guy who was, thankfully, no longer seasick) to an awesome Thai restaurant, stuffed ourselves with green curry chicken and sweet and sour pork, then headed back home on the KTX again. We didn't actually make it back to our apartment before 1am (much to the chagrin of Sonagi and Jakob), but somehow, neither of us had the typical Monday morning slothful blues today, but more of a happy post-vacation energy...
In other news, both of our computers are messing up, which means no photos for a while. I can still use my school computer to access e-mail, but you know, I *do* have to work from time to time. The diveshop people were taking tons of photos above and underwater, so I'll post a link to their site once their photos are up.
When I first arrived in Korea, I promised myself to only spend every other weekend in the town where I was living, and the other weekends off exploring. For the most part, it worked. It is easy, however, to get yourself into a rut and to forget that there is still a lot of Korea left to see. It was a weekend of meeting new people (Jackie! What's your blog address??), living new experiences, seeing new things, and generally enjoying ourselves in a new way.
On Friday, we took the KTX up to Seoul. Since we were meeting the dive people at 5am on Saturday morning (ugh), we decided against getting a hotel room and opted for a night in a jimjilbang instead.
The place we chose, the Dragon Spa, was just next to Yongsan Station, and decorated with everything from faux Chinese dragons and bridges to penguins (!) and King Tut masks (!!!). All tackiness aside, it was a pretty neat experience. We wandered around the (clothed) co-ed area in our shorts and t-shirts (provided), sipped a few beers, and tried to figure out how we could possibly even describe this to a person who had never seen one (we decided it was impossible). Anyway, since we were sleeping on the floor of a small heated room (the Green Air Spa) with 30 other people and a TV blaring a comedy show, we only got about 2 hours sleep.
We met up with our group at 5am (yay), and loaded up to head to a place near the north east coast of Korea. This is the part of the country where you're apt to still find barbed wire on the beaches and such, because of its proximity to North Korea.
As we were doing our Advanced O/W (Ty did his Open Water in South Africa 2 years ago, I did mine in Indonesia this year), we had been cramming all our reading in on the train and in the jimjilbang. We had 3 dives scheduled for Saturday, and 2 for Sunday, and we were pretty excited.
We started suiting up in preparation for the 1st dive, and I felt like my mask just wasn't right. As my University roommates can attest, I have a long, narrow head. And, although I was assured that my mask would be okay, I still just felt like it wasn't fitting right. As we descended for the first dive, I could feel the water trickling in, and decided to head up to fix it (since I was so near the surface). Once it seemed okay, I headed down again (with one of the Dive Masters). As we headed down on the rope, another diver was being rushed up to the surface. My DM told me to surface and then headed over to help out the other diver. This guy had not started his day in the best condition, then had been seasick on the boat ride over to the dive site, and then the seal on his mask had cracked underwater, flooding his mask. Poor guy. And so ended my first dive, not with a bang but a whimper... oh, and helping a guy in a wetsuit puke over the side of a boat.
And I got a new mask, which made me happy.
The 2nd and 3rd dives went well ~ we dove over 2 different wrecks. They were recent wrecks (I was kind of hoping for a nuclear sub or a tanker wrecked by Godzilla (we were in the Sea of Japan/East Sea afterall... within spitting distance of both Japan and North Korea), but it was still fun to dive around them. I really liked the 2nd one, which was all covered in algae and stuff. I was a bit disappointed by the lack of sealife. I think I saw about 3 fish the whole trip.
We also got to do some good by participating in a PADI Aware beach clean-up. We spent about an hour picking up garbage, tires and other bits (a table!) from the beach where we'd been diving. I'd like to organize a beach clean-up or two here in Mokpo, since I don't think our work would ever be done.
The next day, we went to Sokcho, to a specialized diver training centre. It was a hellish morning, for although I got all the above-water theory okay (would anyone like me to use a compass to walk them in a triangle? Because you know what? I can!), and knew all my stuff, it was nearly impossible to do anything once we were in the water, in surge, with 300 other divers landing on our heads (or just sort of hanging out in the water - grrrr), a retired military guy yelling at us (that would be our instructor), and equipment that was less than cooperative....
At any rate, we both have our Advanced O/W now, and will continue to dive as much as we can afford to over the next few years. Ty is looking towards going up to Dive Master, but I'm probably going to stick with the basics for now. I just want to go down, float around, look at some fish, tickle a few sharks, come back up, get a tan on the boat, write in my log book and then get ready for the next dive down.
Anyway, Sunday evening, we headed out with Ben (the seasick guy who was, thankfully, no longer seasick) to an awesome Thai restaurant, stuffed ourselves with green curry chicken and sweet and sour pork, then headed back home on the KTX again. We didn't actually make it back to our apartment before 1am (much to the chagrin of Sonagi and Jakob), but somehow, neither of us had the typical Monday morning slothful blues today, but more of a happy post-vacation energy...
In other news, both of our computers are messing up, which means no photos for a while. I can still use my school computer to access e-mail, but you know, I *do* have to work from time to time. The diveshop people were taking tons of photos above and underwater, so I'll post a link to their site once their photos are up.
posted by Ms Parker at
3:14 PM
2 Comments:
Well. I just read a pretty good excuse for your not answering the phone yesterday morning. Nice to see that you had a fun and constructive weekend. How's the "b"-word coming along?
By
Anonymous, at 7:27 PM
Hello. Your blog came up while I was browsing. You're Tyrones girlfriend :) We went to school together. Anyway, I thought I'd leave a comment, just so you don't think I'm some strange stalkerish type person.
I'm enjoying the read.
Take care
By
Katie, at 4:00 AM
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