Day 7 -- Jeju

Original itinerary had a full day in Jeju. The daily schedule had only half day. Scuttlebutt was that a scheduling screw-up for dock space was responsible, and upon our return to ship at noon there was a large cruise ship waiting for us to depart. The island is supposed to be beautiful, with a volcano in the middle, interesting caves and volcanic lava formations, and fantastic beaches. Unfortunately we didn’t see any of that. We spent all our time in Jeju city or Jeju-si as the call it. For a short visit to the town we just walked and shopped. The island has a population of 500,000 and Jeju city 400,000. It is not a particularly impressive place – mostly modern and grey with a lot of hotels and shops over- and underground. The most interesting place was probably a huge market with isles and isles of all kinds of fish and other sea creatures and also with stalls filled with local oranges and tangerines and orange-filled chocolates, which are a local specialty. We also stopped in a shop of a local artist where Bo bought a little statue made of lava rock. The ship was supposed to depart at 1 pm, but there must have been some sort of an issue because we didn’t leave until about 2 pm and in between local immigration car came twice and between their visits another unmarked car came and there seemed to be a heated argument between a person in that car and a crew member. We’ll try to get to the bottom of it. We should also mention that the composition of our dining table keeps changing. We now have Goru, the Japanese-American artist who was born in Tokyo, but now lives in Palm Springs; a young couple from New Jersey – Isabel (originally from Costa Rica) and her husband Faro; a young Japanese woman from Tokyo; Kathy from Glasgow who takes about 5-6 cruises per year and this is her 13th time in Japan – her goal is to visit 100 countries and she’s visited 80 so far; Kate from Vancouver joined our table last night, but before we had a couple from New Zealand, and two different couples from Australia…