Hearing a lot of stories about Jeju Island made me curious about it, and after seeing it online, I knew I had to go there. We never did plan to visit Jeju when we booked this trip to Korea, but after some planning, we decided that we should really squeeze it in. It’s Day 6 of our Korea trip and we woke up really early to catch our 11AM flight to Jeju Island. I had some trouble booking tickets online via Jeju Air since they only accept Korean credit cards, so we ended up with Eastarjet instead. We dragged our luggages down the streets of Hongdae to the subway station, to finally arrive on Gimpo International Airport, about an hour later, to catch our flight to Jeju Island.
Once we have finally landed in Jeju International Airport about an hour later, we took a bunch of brochures and guides, took a taxi outside, showed the taxi driver the address to our hostel in Jeju City, HKJeju Hostel, which we had one of the Korean counter girls from the Gimpo Airport translate and write in Hangul (which was a really good idea, by the way, since he cannot read or understand any English), and after about 10 minutes, finally arrived on our hostel. Check-in was scheduled for 2PM, so we decided to leave our stuff and have lunch since we were very hungry, so we decided to eat on one of the nearby restaurants just a couple of blocks from the hostel.
We headed back to the hostel around 2PM, and after cleaning up, decided to visit one of the most controversial theme parks in Korea, which was the infamous Loveland. Located on the road between Jeju City and Seogwipo, Loveland is Jeju’s most eccentric and internationally infamous attraction and almost a reason in itself to visit Jeju. Jeju Loveland is an outdoor sculpture park which opened in 2004 on Jeju Island in South Korea. The park is focused on a theme of sex, running sex education films, and featuring 140 sculptures representing humans in various sexual positions. It also has other elements such as large phallus statues, stone labia, and hands-on exhibits such as a “masturbation-cycle.” The park’s website describes the location as “a place where love oriented art and eroticism meet.”
This bizarre sex-themed sculpture park was created by graduates of Seoul’s Hongik University. Almost each and every statue and sculpture there is generally shocking and absolutely artistically pornographic (if you wanna call it that way) and it makes for some interesting holiday snaps that you won’t want to show your parents. Well, I had to, I took a pic of each and every one of them. It also has a sex shop, a souvenir shop and a restaurant filled with sex painting and portraits everywhere. What is up with Jeju and their obsession with phallic symbols?
We were there for the entire afternoon, taking pictures and snapshopts of every sculpture and just enjoying the fact that a theme park like that actually existed. Once we have covered the entire place, we decided to head back to the hostel to get some rest. We had dinner later that night and decided to taste one of the island specialties, the black pork, which was seriously delicious.
We then just walked around the area, did a bunch of photo-ops and headed to the Dongmun Market Place. Open since 1945, Dongmun is the best place to go for a taste of the local foodstuffs, like black pork, tangerines, hairtail fish, and abalone. Located at the crossroads of several olle walking trails and next to the lively Tap-dong district, it’s a great place to explore. Audrey was trying to find some kimchi to bring back home and the people were very helpful. Even though some of the stores were already closed, one of the storeowners actually called this lady, who I think was the only one selling kimchi there and told her that we wanted to buy some kimchi. I ended up buying a bunch of the popular local Jeju Orange chocolates, which was one of the island’s specialties.
Walking around Jeju City at night was a great experience. It had the artistic vibe similar to Seoul, but definitely more peaceful and more quiet. Just like Seoul, the place never ran out of photo-worthy shots and is definitely a sweet paradise of its own. We retreated back to our hostel around 10PM to prepare us for a really long day around Jeju the next day.
Follow @iamthegarysia
