South Korea 11: A rant, the final temple, cliffs, two waterfalls, a botanical garden, and a failed attempt at birding

There are two things I wanted to bring up before going on to this day's activities.  The first is simply that I have been very surprised to find that the obesity rate in South Korea is much, much greater than I have seen in any of the other Asian countries.  It isn't to the levels of the United States, but it is still fairly high.  After I wrote this last sentence, I looked up information regarding obesity in Korea, and in 2015, 40% of men and 26% of women were obese according to BMI, and if measured by waist circumference, it increased up to 55% for men.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5974071/

Related to food, eating has been an absolute nightmare on Jeju.  There are a few factors at work.  With google maps partially banned in the country, you can still often find restaurants by searching.  There are many reviews in English, but for the menu, they only show pictures of a few dishes.  If you use the Korean app Naver to search, you get nearly no reviews and no English.  Google maps sometimes shows restaurant operating hours, but this has proven to be inaccurate.

The second problem is that while I have found a few Korean dishes that I like, when you search for restaurants, many are just labelled "Korean," with no explanation of what that means exactly.  In other words, there is no such thing as the Korean equivalent of the Japanese ramen restaurant, udon restaurant, sushi, etc.  With the limited menu information and wonky times, even when using both apps, finding what kind of restaurants have what food is very, very difficult.

In Taiwan and Hong Kong, we always had the thousands of convenience stores that appear on every corner to fall back on.  Both places had simple pasta dishes and microwaves in the store.  In addition, you could find a wide variety of sandwiches.  On mainland Korea, it is bad, but it is not as bad as Jeju.  On the mainland, I found basic chicken sandwiches as well as even a surprisingly good peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  On Jeju, every single sandwich that they have(and often stores may literally only have one to two total sandwiches on their shelves) has either egg or crab meat.  I eat neither.  There are no pasta dishes.

Ok then, so I guess I will just go to some local restaurants, right?  In our first Jeju location, every single restaurant was seafood only, including the Australian restaurant.  I figured that we would have more luck in this current location, because we are right next door to a big city.  Wrong.  The two restaurants I first found us have been closed both times we went, which were prime Friday and Saturday nights for restaurants.  We passed one restaurant that seemed doable, so we ate there the first night.  The next night, a Saturday, it was mysteriously closed, even though its hours on the door showed that it should be open.  At least they showed the hours on the door because some of the others couldn't be bothered to even list opening hours anywhere!  Today I had to have our hotel call one of the restaurants to verify that it was open.

When you add a picky eater of a son with a non seafood eating person, the result is awful.  I have been eating healthy, otherwise I could of course have gorged myself on desserts that convenience stores have in abundance.  Two full aisles are dedicated to desserts but they can't even stock more than two sandwiches!?

Now that I am done with that, I am now going to talk about yesterday.  We started with a drive to the Yakcheonsa Temple.  It was a nice enough temple with an odd fish hanging near what looks to be a big drum, in one of their towers.  There was also a nice miniature pagoda.




A few minutes away is Jusangjeollidae, a beautiful cliff side with volcanic pillars of rock.



After walking along the cliff for a bit, we left for Cheonjeyeon Falls, two sets of waterfalls with a beautiful bridge between it.  This time I decided to bring my tripod out for the first time, to try slower shutter pictures.  Miles helped me by carrying the tripod.  I thought they came out pretty well.  I ended up skipping walking over the bridge because I was not in the mood to deal with my trouble with heights.



Around the corner was the Yeomiji Botanical Garden.  This garden was mostly inside, and divided into sections on the sides of the circular innards.  There were also some areas outside, but less flowers were blooming there.



The last activity of the day was supposed to be the 1100 Highland Ecological Swamp, a high altitude wetland.  It was sunny all day, but as we neared the wetlands, it became cloudier, and once we got there, a heavy fog and mist overcame the place.  It wasn't worth getting out of the car with such moisture, so we simply went home for the night.