Archive for the ‘ Places and sightseeing ’ Category
“Ibiza, but with American soldiers” was how one friend described the Boryeong Mud Festival on Korea’s western coast this week. I’m sure most of you will have seen SKY1 shows on BSKYB about drunken shenanigans in the Mediterranean. The difference being, supposedly, that Boryeong had, largely, replaced British and Irish holidaymakers with some of the [ READ MORE ]
Built in 2001 at a cost of 60 billion Korean won, the Munhak Stadium is one of the most impressive sporting arenas in South Korea. The stadium is home to the SK Wyverns baseball club in Incheon, just west of Seoul. It stands next to the equally beautiful Munhak Soccer Stadium, where Park Ji-Sung exploded [ READ MORE ]
The De-Milatarized Zone buffering North and South Korea lies just 25km away from one of the most heavily populated cities of the developed world. I’m on a bus headed there. Barb-wire fences run along the highway between Seoul and the DMZ. Rifle-armed soldiers man lookout points every few hundred metres. This stretch of road runs parallel to the massive [ READ MORE ]
First off, Stu and I would like to apologise for the lack of articles on this site over the weekend. We have, throughout the short life span of the website, been prone to spells of absence, but, this time, we have a legitimate reason. On Saturday, we finally visited the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which, as [ READ MORE ]
Korea is the land of a thousand islands, dinosaur footprints and one of the world’s best preserved ecological parks. The rolling hills and mountains formed over thousands of years makes the peninsula a geography teacher’s dream. Off the south-western coast lies the Natural World Hritage Site and volcanic island, Jeju. Most of the beauty is confined [ READ MORE ]
Visitors to Istanbul, or any Muslim-majority city, will tell you that arguably the most striking feature on the skyline is the vast number of minarets that shoot up needle like from the domed-roofed Mosques. It’s a glorious, if slightly intimidating, sight, especially as nightfall descends. In Korea, there’s nothing as marvellous, although the fluorescent red crosses [ READ MORE ]
Unjusa is the land of 1000 buddha statues and 1000 pagoda structures. It is also the site of the famous and very large “lying down Buddha”. Legend has it that workers of this unfinished statue were called back to heaven by the cock of a rooster before it could be erected. I’m not so sure about [ READ MORE ]