one hour on Wolmido

...was more than enough for me.

I took the Line 1 subway over, then grabbed a taxi for the short ride to the shore.

Wolmido is supposedly an island, but I don't recall crossing a bridge over an expanse of water to reach it. It looked like I was passing over solid ground the entire time.

The trip had one frightening moment: about two or three stops away from Inchon Station, a teeny little girl, no more than four or five years old (Western age, not Korean), somehow managed to fall into that narrow space between the subway door and the platform edge while trying to exit the subway. I was out of my seat as soon as I saw the problem, but luckily, her father was right there and managed to extract her without difficulty. The incident reminded me of the old riddle from the Garfield comic strip: How many skinny people can you fit inside a bathtub? I don't know-- they keep slipping down the drain!

Wolmido-- or the part of it I saw during my brief stroll-- is as cheesy and tacky as any Jersey Shore boardwalk. You've got rickety carnival attractions, food stands (the usual Korean street fare), and tons of families walking up and down a boardwalk. You've also got boat tours and ferries; I opted against this. I didn't see any cotton candy vendors, but there were plenty of Frostie/Slurpee and ice cream purveyors. The boardwalk was also overstuffed with hwae (raw fish) restaurants, and all the prices-- from the smallest can of soda on up-- were inflated. The whole place screamed tourist trap.

I didn't see anything like a beach, however, so there was a saddening dearth of midriff, ass, and thigh. If people would like to recommend some quiet port towns to visit over the course of a weekend, please write in. Especially if the town features a lot of exposed flesh.

I doubt I'll ever head back to Wolmido, except maybe to hop on one of the boats. The boardwalk certainly isn't my thing. The whole place was too damn crowded today. Maybe it's nicer in the fall and winter, like a lot of beach towns in the States. I'm an off-season kind of guy: I like ski resorts in the summer (like Taos Ski Valley and that place I went to in Canada, if only I could remember its name) and beach towns in the winter. Both are usually cheaper off-season, too.

And that concludes this session of megablogging. We're back at work as of tomorrow, so once again, blogging output will revert from massively diarrhetic to Hershey Squirt-scale. In all, I have to say I enjoyed this time off. Maybe it's the over-full schedule I've been working; I'm learning to appreciate my free time more, taking time to smell the jjol-myeon (a red-pepper-sauce noodle dish I ate while on Wolmido).

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