(This is the second part of the series about my trip to Korea. You can read Part 1 here).

Sunday, May 11

The trip was roughly 2 hours and 30 minutes, and we arrived at Gwangju’s main train station. The train station is pretty far away from the city center, which explains why, in many of the YouTube videos I saw about Gwangju trips, people took the bus to get there.

Going from the train station to the city center was roughly 1 hour. After having some pastries for breakfast (which was a challenge at 9am, as not much is open before 10am in Korea), we headed to our first destination: the 5.18 Pro-democracy Movement Archives, a UNESCO Memory of the World building that collects and preserves items and records of the May Democratic Uprising that started in Gwangju. The entrance is free, and they offer you an audioguide for the first two floors.

The museum/archive is quite small. Only two floors of exhibitions about the democratic movement itself, and then a few other floors about miscellaneous things and archives for researchers; they even had one about other pro-democracy movements around the world, sponsored by UNESCO. They also had a small section about the Korean pro-democracy movement in the media, where they had a poster of A Taxi Driver — no mention of Youth of May, though.

The special exhibition they had at that moment was actually about Han Kang and one of the stories that inspired Human Acts.

After finishing the exhibition, we walked a couple of blocks and went to Jeonil Building 245. This building, built in the 1960s, was one of the tallest buildings in the city during the democratic movement period. In May 2020, it was inaugurated as a memorial site, as the 245 bullets (hence, its name) found there on the top floor served as proof that the military was involved and opened fire against Gwangju citizens. This memorial building was like nothing I have ever seen regarding memory sites: as the bullets’ impact was used as proof that the military fired from a helicopter (as there were no other tall buildings nearby during that time), many other parts of the building were dedicated to debunk fake news (like, for example, that the pro-democracy activists were North Korean spies, or that the military were victims attacked by these extremist groups). I was very grateful to my friend Jeongyeon, who recommended visiting this building the day before 🙂 I didn’t have it on my radar before that.

After lunch (we had Korean BBQ at a buffet place we didn’t notice was a buffet before being seated there; as you can imagine, we had to eat accordingly), we had to take the bus to Gurye, a small city that’s roughly 2 hours from Gwangju. The bus thing was a little bit “complicated” in a way, as I wanted to buy tickets in advance, but the website to buy bus tickets never worked for me (nor for my Korean friend, who tried to buy them for me the day before as well). But I was told that the demand wasn’t very high, so I should just try to buy them at the station, which is what I did! At Gwangju bus station, they had some machines (where you could change the language to English, very convenient), and I just wrote the destination, and that was all. Our departure was at around 6pm.

We stayed at Hotel Jirisan Haetsal, which I found on Booking. It was probably the nicest hotel on the whole trip. It had an amazing view, and the room was super spacious and clean. The hotel manager (who I believe was also the owner) was also super nice. He told us he had opened the hotel during the pandemic and really struggled for
the first couple of years. He waited for our check-in, which we did very late (around 9pm), prepared some instant ramen for us, and we all talked using a mixture of Korean-English and hand gestures.

Monday, May 12

The next morning, we ate some black sesame porridge, also made by him.

The whole point of going to and staying at Gurye was to go to Saseongam Hermitage, a Buddhist temple. I don’t really remember how I got to know about this temple, I just remember that as soon as I knew about its existence, I added it to the itinerary immediately.

I want to say that we deliberately decided to take the long road and go to the temple on foot, but the truth is, when you search for the route on Naver, it only goes to a certain point by car, and then it shows just walking. After almost 3 hours of hiking, we realized that there was another road, and cars were allowed there. I don’t regret doing the hiking on foot: the sight was beautiful, it was not too hot, and there were a lot of seats where you could stop to get some rest from time to time. But from an efficiency point of view, we still had many days to come and we could’ve saved energy (and time). But anyway! Here are some pictures I took on our way up to the temple.

When we finally arrived at the temple entrance, there was a pit stop with toilets and a store. We bought some lemonade and rested for a bit. After the actual entrance, no more cars were allowed, and that road also involved some hiking.

The pictures really don’t do justice to how beautiful it was. We were in awe the whole time. It wasn’t crowded at all, but we did coincide with a group of students doing a day trip, which we tried to avoid he he.

After 3 hours or so, we managed to see the whole thing and took a cab back to the hotel, as we had to catch another bus, now to Busan. The taxi ride was like 13 Euros, which made me regret again a little bit not taking one on our way there haha.

We arrived in Busan completely jaded. The trip from the bus station to where we were staying for the next two nights (in Haeunde) was over 1 hour on the subway. We only had energy for some convenience store food and then we went to bed.

Tuesday, May 13

As I’m weak, I couldn’t resist another hotteok while we walked around the market in that area. We were lucky because there were only a couple of people queuing at the time; a few minutes later, the queue
was ETERNAL. Apparently that hotteok place appeared in a couple of TV shows in Korea. As a side note, one of the things that called my attention throughout the entire trip was that restaurants and coffee shops and the like always had pictures at the entrance of the TV shows they appeared in, whether they were Korean dramas or normal shows, which I found pretty funny.

Around 1pm, we headed to Blue Line Park. They recommended starting the queue half an hour before your scheduled time, so I thought it was going to be packed, but actually not so much. In general, I found the density of people not to be as bad as I was expecting. But again, try going to a mall in Santiago de Chile the week before Christmas — which moves your standards about how crowded things can be to infinity.

The actual train capsule ride was about 30 minutes and it was suuuuper slow. The train rides above a pedestrian path, and the people walking over there were faster than us haha. I didn’t know that you could also make the ride on foot, which made me regret buying train tickets on the way back, as it was probably just a 20-25 minute walk.

Once we got to Songjeong Station, which is the last station of the capsule train, there was a lighthouse and some stores. We didn’t do much there, besides taking some pictures and buying some souvenirs, and then we went back to the station to wait for the return trip; this time on the beach train, not the capsule train.

We were back in our hotel at around 5pm and we had to make a decision: we really wanted to go to Gamcheon village, but it was getting late. And of course we decided to go anyway, as this was our last full day in Busan (the next day we were taking a train to Daegu at 1pm).

Most of the stores were closed, but we found a cafe with a view and had some lemonade while taking pictures. And perhaps it was better that we visited this place later, as it was not crowded at all.

After walking around Gamcheon, we took the bus back to the hotel, which took around 1 hour 30 minutes.

Wednesday, May 14

We had some time to kill before taking the train to Daegu, so we decided to visit Chinatown (which is right next to the train station) and grab some gimbap at a random shop. I also wanted to visit this key historical landmark: the Chinese dumpling restaurant featured in the movie Oldboy.

I was craving some cold noodles, and some ladies at the market literally carried us to their small restaurant. My mom and I were very impressed by how nice and welcoming the people in Daegu were, compared to Seoul at least.

We encountered some small issues as well, as there are two train stations in Daegu: one called just Daegu and another called one called Dongdaegu, and I had no idea that they were different stations T_T (in my mind it was the equivalent of calling it Berlin Central Station or Berlin Hauptbahnhof, to be honest) so we almost missed the train to Seoul. Luckily we were able to take the train to Dongdaegu and paid literally like 0.50 Euros for the change of departure station. But we aaalmost missed it for like 2 minutes which was super intense/stressful.

Stay tuned for Part 3: Last days in Seoul!