Johnnie and Angela: Donghae

Last month I took a trip with a friend to Ulleungdo Island off the east coast of South Korea. It was a great adventure to a beautiful place. I haven't blogged about it yet because I took many photos on the island with the intent of stitching them together to create panoramas and wide angle views. We recently switched from a PC to an iMac so I've been without Photoshop for six months (I know, how did I survive?!) Now that we have Photoshop again (yay!), I can finally stitch together those photos and show the world :)

To start our trip, we drove across the country (literally) to get to the east coast. We chose to take the scenic backroads instead of the highways which added a few hours but was well worth it. South Korea is a gorgeous country with high mountains, lush forests, abundant farmland, a rugged coastline, and over 4,000 islands off its shore. It was raining all day while we drove and continued to rain throughout most of our trip.

We arrived in the evening at the coastal town of Donghae. This is where we would catch a ferry the next morning to Ulleungdo Island. We stayed at the Hotel New Donghae which was nice, clean, and relatively inexpensive. The "Grand Open" banner is for the restaurant inside; Koreans always leave off the "ing" from Opening.

Before catching the ferry the next morning, we drove through Donghae to explore and stopped on a street lined with seafood stores and a large fish market. It was early morning so we saw fishermen resetting their nets and vendors arranging their displays of freshly caught fish, crabs, octopus, and shellfish.

There were dozens of stores by the fish market that were filled with every type of dried seafood and seaweed you can imagine. It's hard to imagine that people actually eat all of that stuff - or how they eat some of it!

Dried squid anyone?