Tag: travel

Photos: Korea Trip 2016, batch 4

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note] These are unposted photos from 2016, the fourth of four galleries of my first-ever trip to the Motherland, that I took with my mother.

The tour group concluded with a trip to Seoraksan (Mount Seorak) before it was back to Seoul, where my mom and I settled into another AirBnB for the last few days of our trip.

Admittedly, as much as I loved my time in Seoul, I really was feeling like I had begun to see a lot of the city and having done countless hours wandering and seeing shopping center after shopping center, I was ready to go home.

Hilariously, my mom reached out to some other old friends in the area, and extended her own stay for another two weeks, but I was most definitely ready to head back to the states.  It was an unforgettable first-time in Korea, and I have nothing but great memories and appreciation for seeing my culture in its native land.

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Photos: Korea Trip 2016, batch 3

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note] These are unposted photos from 2016, the third of four galleries of my first-ever trip to the Motherland, that I took with my mother.

After a few more days on Jeju Island, the tour brought us back to the mainland where I thought we would just go back to Seoul, but instead we landed in Busan, where we would begin a road trip up the Korean peninsula visiting various towns and cities on the way.

After capitalizing in Busan, finding the League of Legends pop-up store, I caught up with the rest of the tour group and from there it was Geongju, Pohang and Pyeongchang, seeing all sorts of sights from seas of country, to even a brief stop inside a cavern.

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Korea Stories: League of Legends

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of in to League of Legends.

And as much as I’m typically opposed to doing stuff like playing the same game I could play back at home, there was a part of me that was really curious to find out what League would be like in Korea, the region of the world in which the talent is undisputedly the greatest and where the competitive scene is respected and regarded as a legitimate, money-making spectator sport.

I wanted to try playing League of Legends on the Korean server and see what the differences were.  And surely, in the part of the world where League is so highly regarded, I should be able to find some cool League merch, or some professional League gaming team swag, right?

It started out pretty amusingly, when I got to Korea.  Through international roaming, my phone piggybacked onto whatever provider would allow it, and in the case of being in Korea, my phone immediately latched onto an SK Telecom signal.  Now this might seem like no big deal to the vast majority of people, since SK is one of South Korea’s corporate giants that have their fingers in just about every possible business venture from petroleum to telecommunications, but to a League fan, SK is primarily known as the company that owns SKT T1, basically the Chicago Bulls or New York Yankees of the League competitive scene.  SKT has won two of the five world championships (and Korea didn’t play at all in year 1) and are in position to compete for a third, but they are undoubtedly the most prominent team in the entire world, when it comes to League.

Yeah, just connecting to SK Telecom cellular service elicits that much of a response.

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Photos: Korea Trip 2016, batch 2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note] These are unposted photos from 2016, the second of four galleries of my first-ever trip to the Motherland, that I took with my mother.

After several days in Seoul, my mother and I embarked within the country on a tour that she had arranged, where we would take a whirlwind throughout the rest of the country, starting with the “Hawaii of Korea,” Jeju Island… where we were promptly greeted with a seasonal typhoon that blew through the entire island and into the rest of the Motherland.

But afterward, the weather was nothing short of beautiful, and the rest of our time on Jeju was filled with gorgeous sights and naturally, more night shopping.

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Korea Stories: The Tour 😐

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I brought up the idea of going to Korea with my mom, to my mom, initially, the thought was to go see the Korea that my mom grew up in, see the place she called home, any sights and streets that she remembered from her childhood/upbringing, and maybe any restaurants that she might have remembered liking growing up.

It didn’t take long for my mom to dismiss all of that, stating that it had been 38 years, and there was little chance that pretty much anything of her past was still actually in existence.  I had a very 😐 face at this thought, but I understood.

Alternatively, my mom stated that she would, through a travel agent friend of hers, book us a tour package.  I expressed my concern and general disagreement with a tour package, because I typically prefer to not operate on itineraries and schedules, unless like, I’m getting paid to do so.  The freedom to explore and plan my own course is always preferable, but for whatever reason, my mom was insistent on a tour package.  The compromise was that we would have a few days before and after the tour itself to where we could explore Seoul on our own, which satiated my own want and need to explore and wander, so I agreed to do the tour group in the end.

So after four days in Seoul, we flew out to Jeju Island, the first stop on the tour.  I’ll be honest, I didn’t know much anything about Jeju; mythical gf was more knowledgeable about the place, based on the metric butt-ton of Korean dramas she watches, and it’s apparently the de facto romantic destination for Korean couples in them, but otherwise a tropical island getaway destination, often called “the Hawaii of Asia.”

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Photos: Korea Trip 2016, batch 1

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note] These are unposted photos from 2016, the first of four galleries of my first-ever trip to the Motherland, that I took with my mother.

As soon as we landed, we had guidance from some of my mom’s friends from over 38 years ago that they’d been keeping in touch over the internet, and they were lovely people who helped us settle in upon arrival.

Pretty quickly, I learned that Seoul is very much a city actively primarily at night, and it was a wonderful time soaking in and absorbing the culture of my parents, and it was tremendous fun wandering around taking in all the sights and indulging in all sorts of Korean food all over the place.

One of the most satisfying feelings however, was when I decided to branch off and go off on my own, and realized very quickly that even in spite of my elementary proficiency in Korean, I was more than capable of holding my own in Korea, and the apprehension of being on my own in Seoul vanished really fast.

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Visiting the Motherland, 2016

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the greatest travesties in my life is that it took me this long to visit Korea.  Frankly, there’s an overarching travesty that it took me about as long to even cross an ocean in the first place, but the point remains as someone of Korean heritage and to some degree, upbringing, it does seem a little not right that I didn’t once visit Korea once until I was 34 and well into my own as an adult.

Admittedly, the idea of visiting Korea didn’t intrigue me that much growing up.  Being born in the United States as pretty much as American as American can be, this was always home to me.  Neither of my parents really talked much about Korea growing up, nor did they ever really put any ideas in my head of wanting to go.  Maybe we were just so dirt-poor when I was growing up that they didn’t want to make any difficult promises to fulfill.

A long time ago, there was an opportunity to go to Korea on some sort of church group; not that my entire family’s been tremendously religious, but it was an economical means to get there.  I’ve always been kind of nihilistic about religion in the first place, so it didn’t really interest me that much, and at that age, my priorities were vastly more interested in indulging in my no-school summer vacation, playing video games and being a slug at home.  Ultimately, my dad and my sister went, and I’ll always remember just how tan they were when they got home, and there’s a photo of the two of them riding a horse that always stuck with me as symbolic of an opportunity that I probably missed out on because of my youthful stupidity.

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