Everland

It has been a long time since I last wrote. I originally started the last post on Thursday as a reminder, but then stopped short and finished on Sunday.

I haven't been to an amusement park since I went to Lotte World back in February. Additionally, Everland is considered to be the best amusement park in Korea. I will just say this now...I went two weeks in a row.

The first time: Because I am American, I have grown used to conversations going like this:
"Let's get together in like two weeks." "Yes, that sounds fun. I'll call you." I think this generally means a suggestion to be handled in the future. I don't think this is traditionally a solid plan. But, to Koreans, that is very literal. That means that you will get called the night before the two week mark to confirm that the plans will proceed. With that in mind, I had that exact conversation roughly three weeks ago with a Korean friend. Three days before the two week mark, when I asked her if she had plans for the weekend, she said "Everland on Saturday. Do you remember?"

I had completely forgotten, but was thankfully free.

The plan was to meet two friends in Suwon at 2PM on Sunday. I thought 2PM was awfully late to get started and it was. According to my friend, Jin-Na, the best way to get to Suwon was to take the subway (1.5 hours), meet them at 2PM and then take a bus to Everland (1 hour). It is pretty far away for Korea, figuring that it took me four hours by bus to go down the whole country.

So we met up and proceeded to Everland. We arrived at 3PM...those people who know me can understand how excited I was to be at an amusement park, and subsequently, how surprised my Korean friends were at my childlike trance.

There isn't too much I can say about Everland as an amusement park because the rides were pretty standard. There were a couple roller coasters and the normal rides that most amusement parks have. I was quickly drained of energy by the evening. Don't get me wrong, it was amazingly fun, but it is hard to write about amusement park rides.

Two things worth mentioning:
1) I think the normal policy in America is that if a friend works someplace, special treatment is generally forbidden. A friend of mine used to work at Subway and he would give me free sandwiches if nobody else was working. But if his boss or coworkers saw him, he would likely have been disciplined. I feel that Korea is the opposite. Jin-Na's sister worked at a popcorn stand and gave us free popcorn. Jin-Na's sister's friend worked at this restaurant and we received a heavily discounted meal (mine was free), and that was done by her boss. Her sister's friend brought us sodas before we even ordered our food. Finally, because of our connections, the chef made me my own specialized vegetarian dish...and then we got free cake.
2) I've been joking with my friends here about how weird it will be to go home. We all feel that we will have heavy cultural shock on returning home. As evidence of this, most the restaurants at Everland had dishes for about $8. When I saw the price, I felt it was too expensive to eat there. I am also giving up tipping.

The subway usually stops between 11PM and 1AM, with different times on weekends, and I have yet to confirm any precise time. Therefore, we had to leave the park at 9:30PM to make sure that I could get back without needing a cab. They suggested I take a bus that would take me, literally, a half-hour away from Ewha. So I figured that the bus would be like an hour and a half, to equal the time it took me to get to Suwon and then from Suwon to Everland. How wrong I was -- the bus was only 35 minutes. Why couldn't she have told me that and we could just have met outside Everland? It was also about half the cost to just use the bus.

Because I didn't get to ride everything, I was itching to go back. I asked my best friend here, Ashley, if she and her roommate wanted to come Saturday morning (May 31st) and spend the whole day there. They were both in. We got started a little later than I wanted, but made it to Everland around 1PM. I felt my inner child reemerge from his cave. We had a great time, but we were pretty tired by 8PM. Korean weather has started to turn awful. Although I am unsure how hot it is, the humidity creates a general malaise. Walking up a flight of stairs on a humid day makes most people wipe sweat off their foreheads. I am unaccustomed to looking outside at the clouds and looking for a white shirt to hide my eventual sweat.

Before I left the USA, I met with some people that gave me advice on Korea. They half-jokingly said that Koreans do everything opposite as Americans. For instance, the emergency phone number in Korea is 119 (I think. It may be 199. I should know this...). The afternoon at Everland was fairly mild compared to what I expected on a Saturday afternoon. There were no lines longer than about 20 minutes and the most popular ride was only about 50 minutes. We naturally assumed that as the day wore on, people would probably start heading home, or be riding less when it approached dinner time. Therefore, we delayed riding the biggest roller coaster because we wanted to wait for a time when the line was only 20 minutes long. For some reason, that doesn't happen in Korea. As the day continued, more people came in. At dinner time, the roller coaster's line was the longest of the day and there were no seats in the several dining areas. I was flabbergasted! Why would there be more people coming into the park at 8PM than at 3PM, when most rides closed at 10PM? I still don't know.

When I was there the first time, because I was with Koreans, no strangers conversed with me. When I went the second time and was with foreigners, kids would talk to us directly (in English) or would talk about us to their friends or parents. It was really funny to have this little 7 year old kid walk by, holding his mother's hand, and say in Korean "Mommy, that is a foreigner." We all understood him and waved, saying hello in Korean. That reminds me, when kids are busy with something and see us, they will often stop and stare. For instance, when this other kid was crying in Everland, she stopped crying and just stared at us.

Back to reverse culture shock. One of the few things I found to eat without meat was a chicken salad, where I could easily pick the chicken out. I grumbled as I paid about $6.50 and $2.00 for my drink. My salad had a good pineapple-mustard dressing...but...it wasn't spicy at all. I couldn't understand why it tasted good, but at the same time, made me wishing it had something more to it. I reached the same conclusion that I have the last 5 times I had mild food...food tastes weird if it isn't burning my tongue.



This is near the entrance of Everland. Lotte World is owned and managed by a food company called Lotte. Lotte makes ice cream, soda, snacks, chips and many other things...I think they also make milk. Everland is owned by Samsung, but surprisingly, the Samsung name isn't written anywhere.










In the European part of the park. The girl in the middle is Ashley and the girl on the right is Chiara. Chiara is Italian and expressed her frustration that Europe looks nothing like the section of the park. This was followed by her point that Europe has many different countries and cultures. I took advantage of that and mentioned how the flowers looked exactly like Europe, the giant bees were similar to the ones in Europe, and the classical Greek statutes were in Oslo, London and Paris.






This little store sold bright children's clothes. There are even toys above the name, including a teddy bear.













Everland has an animal section where they have tigers, polar bears (a little sad because it was in an outside enclosure), camels, bats and so forth...and they also seem to have Jackass Penguins. The Korean actually is pronounced Ja-Ka-Ss-Paeng-gwin...this is not a mistranslation.