Traditional Herbs and Herb Hillzzz

In September Jeff’s cousin’s wife, Becky, came to visit us in Daegu! It is always fun to be able to show to friends and family back home what our lives are like here. Daegu was a different Deagu when Becky was here. She came during the IAAF World Championship Games for Track and Field. There were foreigners everywhere! People from all over the world. The entire city was transformed for the games. There were performances downtown every night. Ussain Bolt’s picture in every store window, it was just crazy! More about the games later…

First thing we did was go check out the herbal medicine street and museum in downtown. At Yangyeongsi Market we saw lots of interesting ginseng plants and had the pleasure of tasting ginseng candy. Gotta say, not my favorite but it wasn’t too bad. We wandered into the Herbal Medicine museum which is near the end of the medicine street.

Just grindin' in front of the Herbal Medicine Museum

We explored the Herbal Medicine Museum and they had a lot of interesting displays about differences between Eastern and Western medicine. One diagram in particular was a persons body divided up into the separate systems and when you press a button it changes to look more cohesive. It was showing how in Western medicine people are just looked at the particular system and are not looked as a whole person.

Preparing the foot bath.

We also fell into the tourist trap of getting a foot bath in some special herbal waters annnnnd putting on hanbok.

Jeff and I wearing hanbok.

IAAF Track and Field Championship 2011

Evening was creeping in on us so it was now time for us to make our way to the Track and Field games!

Now, we only had 2 tickets for the games but there were 3 of us, so our plan was to go early and scalp another ticket. Easy, right? No. We showed up and we were so unprepared next to all of these other experienced scalpers. They had pretty signs and knew where to stand to find the people selling them. “A sign!” Everyone is saying on their signs in korean- I want a ticket. I decided to be a little more polite and ASK for a ticket- DING DING DING! A guy walked up to me and right behind him, a police officer! Yelling at us! The scalper guy told the officer that we are his friends and together we walked away. Once he was out of sight we traded our 2 tickets for his 3 tickets in a general seating area. Little did I know that Becky had bought EXCELLENT tickets with a meal bracelet and everything. : / I was sad about that. Nonetheless, we were all together now!

Becky, Jeff and I actually ended up sitting in a really good view of the high jump! It was neat to see so many fantastic athletes in one place, made me really pumped for the next Olympics. 

Of course, who wasn’t excited to watch Ussain Bolt? I couldn’t get a good live picture of him probably because he is so fast! haha I did get a good video of him after he won.

Herb Hillz

Herb Hillz is unlike any ‘amusement park’ I’ve ever been to. It is an herb garden + amusement park + zip lining + nice park to have a walk in all in one. On this day we wanted to zip line. The weather was perfect for soaring from tree to tree.

Becky walking along the floating steps. It was really hard.

Jeff and I had done the second to hardest ropes course, so on this day we decided to do the hard one. It was definitely challenging. There was so much balancing that I didn’t have a whole of time to enjoy the fact that I was up in a tree haha. Also, I was PARANOID about my glasses being knocked off. I came close once…

Standing a top of trees.

ZIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPIDY DOO DA!

Wandering around Herb Hillz you find really unique things. For example…

A hobbit hole.

Adam?

Sopaman.

Herb Hillz was our last outing while Becky was here, we had a lot of fun with her and learned that it would be pretttty difficult to eat out in Korea if we were vegetarians.