Gkotji Beach

I can't believe it, but the school month of May is finished already--Monday will be June 1st, marking one month left in Korea. So much has happened since the last thing I blogged about, so I will be attempting to do bite-size posts over the next few days, just to share a little bit.

Back in April, my co-teacher Lily (her English name) offered to take Brenden, our friend Heather, and me to her favorite beach in our area, Gkotji. So one Saturday afternoon when Heather was visiting from Incheon, we headed to the beach. It's not your typical SoCal suntan, surf, or play volleyball kind of beach, and parts were a bit rocky--however, it had some really cool features, namely, two rocky islands just off the coast. These rocky islands (see just below) are called the Grandfather and Grandmother Islands, and the legend goes that the grandfather was a sailor who got trapped at sea. His wife, the grandmother, eventually turned to stone from waiting so long, and when the grandfather finally returned and saw his wife had turned to stone, he turned to stone also. In our case, we arrived at low tide, which had receded pretty far and created a lot of tide pools and allowed us to walk across the rocks to the islands.


So we had a great time walking around the islands, exploring the tide pools, and of course, we ran into a group of foreigners working in Taean (a smaller town about 15-20 minute away from Seosan), so we chatted with them for a few minutes (here, all foreigners say hi to each other, even if we've never met before, although we obviously don't do this in Seoul).

We noticed a lot of locals crouching down around the tide pools, and it turns out they were scraping oysters and other small sea creatures off the rocks and out of the pools. These friendly Koreans offered us a sample:


After Gkotji Beach, Lily took us on another adventure, but that's a post for another day.

- Carissa