COVID travel
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Artful Seoul: More Sites in the City and Around (Part 2)
In this winter season, many museums and similar sites are closed due to the current coronavirus restrictions. The South Korean government has been pretty organized about how it sets restrictions when COVID numbers start to rise. Consequently, as soon as business re-open, we know we’d better get our visits in before they may be closed again! Fortunately, I was able to visit several art exhibits with friends before the current closures began. You may have read about my visits to the very cool exhibits at Museum SAN (Space, Art, Nature) and teamLab: LIFE in Part 1 of this post. As promised, here is Part 2 of our artful adventures in…
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The Ultimate Day Tourist: Gapyeong Rail Park, Nami Island, and The Garden of Morning Calm
Some tourist traps are so compulsory to visit that you have to fall in, even if you know it’s a trap! The Gapyeong area northeast of Seoul is filled with such attractions. For anyone visiting South Korea for a short vacation, there’s probably no reason to prioritize visiting this area. However, if you stay in Seoul for any length of time, you’re unlikely to escape going at least once. It is a very photogenic area to visit in the fall, and we wished we’d been able to visit in October when the leaves were at their peak. We decided to visit three of the top Gapyeong attractions in one day,…
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Have Yourself a Merry, Distanced Christmas!
Learning how another culture celebrates a big holiday such as Christmas is one of the most exciting and also one of the more challenging elements of living in a different country. Somehow, in years past the chemist and I always have managed to be with at least most of our families at Christmas. Ah, memories of Christmases pre-social distancing! This year, the presence of COVID and the need to quarantine when traveling made it impossible to consider returning to the U.S. for the holidays. Not to mention, even if we were in the U.S. we would be staying put at home, as we know many of you are doing. We…
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What’s happening with COVID-19 in South Korea? The December Edition.
Around the world, an estimated 71,536,243 people now have been diagnosed with COVID-19. More than 1,603,500 have died. These are the reported numbers and are believed to be an underestimate. Sadly, the United States continues to have a very high proportion of the world’s cases. We last posted about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on South Korea at the end of August. At that time, we reported that when we arrived in South Korea (ROK) on July 31, the count of new COVID cases for the day was 36. On August 14, our first day out of quarantine, that number was 103. On August 27, it was 441, the…
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Trail Challenges at Seoraksan National Park
Our last post detailed our experience of the most accessible trails from the Seoraksan National Park entrance near Sokcho. In this post, we tackle a couple of the more challenging courses. Don’t worry though. As with any good hike, there are tasty food and beverages at the end! Ulsanbawi Course Ulsanbawi arguably is the most famous peak at Seoraksan National Park. Its iconic rocky ridge can be seen for miles around. Day-trippers travel nearly three hours from Seoul just to complete this hike. Unfortunately, because of the heavy monsoon rains this year and the COVID pandemic, we needed to make significant modifications to our hike. The usual place to begin…
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Seoraksan National Park: Best Adventures for the Whole Family
Seoraksan National Park is such a popular spot that we lost count of the number of people who recommended we visit there in the autumn. A Korean friend described the park to us as having “the most typical” mountains for a quintessential Korean hiking experience. Never ones for passing up a good travel recommendation, we took the 2.5 hour bus ride from Seoul to South Korea’s northeast coast. Although the park covers more than 150 square miles, its most popular hikes have trailheads at the park’s main entrance, Sogongwon Park. Sokcho is the city closest to this entrance, and local buses from Sokcho drop passengers off at Sogongwon Park. There’s…
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What is Chuseok? How We Spent Our Autumn Holiday
Chuseok (추석), which literally translates to “Autumn Eve,” is often described as Korea’s Thanksgiving holiday. It is also called Hangawi (한가위), “the great middle of autumn.” A three-day holiday celebrated in September or October each year according to the lunar calendar, Chuseok is one of the two most important holidays of the year and is celebrated in both North and South Korea. (Lunar New Year is the other large, family holiday.) This year, the holiday was a little different as the government raised the level of social distancing guidelines, encouraging Koreans to stay home rather than risk spreading COVID-19 by visiting family around the country. Important Chuseok Traditions Like Thanksgiving,…
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Top 10 Most Surprising Things About South Korea
Just as with any major life event, we approached our Seoul adventure with a certain set of expectations. Because we are planners, we did a lot of research about what to expect and how to acclimate to life here. We are also seasoned travelers and were prepared to experience those things you can’t plan for. We learned when we lived in Canada that even moving to a neighboring country comes with its share of complications. Indeed, every time we have traveled overseas something unexpected has happened. Plan as much as you like, but there will always be surprises! Here are some of the things – both pleasant and unpleasant –…
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Anmyeondo Island: A Walk Under the Trees
For our first day in Anmyeondo, we explored the island’s beautiful beaches. On the second day, we wandered in some of its quiet green spaces. I was a little concerned that we had left almost a whole day to seeing the Anmyeondo Island Recreational Forest, as I couldn’t find much about it when researching before this trip. As far as I knew, it was going to be really lame and not worth seeing. This concern intensified when we couldn’t get a bus or a taxi from the hotel on Sunday morning and walked a very sunny 45 minutes to get there, partly along the side of a highway. Well, I…
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Anmyeondo Island: Trekking on the Road of Sunset
Exploring Seoul has nearly endless possibilities and will keep us occupied for a long time to come. However, we are also ready to spread our wings a little more and venture to some sites outside of the city. Our first trip outside of Seoul was a weekend visit to Anmyeondo Island on South Korea’s west coast, south of Seoul in Chungcheongnam-do Province. I found very little information about traveling to and within Anmyeondo, so this whole trip was a bit of a mystery all the way through. Our post is in two parts because given the dearth of online information about visiting the area, I am going to give more…
