Kathryn (my girlfriend, for those who are out of the loop) and I recently took a train-trip to Daejeon (South Korea's third largest city) to see what we could find and experience. We hopped on the KTX, which is Korea's speed train that connects the countries largest cities and major tourist destinations, around 8:30am Saturday morning and arrived in Daejeon at 10:30am. We instantly hit the jackpot as we approached the information desk at the train station as the woman behind the counter could understand and speak English quite well and she was excited to tell these two ignorant foreigners all that her beloved city had to offer.
We took the woman's advice and spent Saturday afternoon by first taking a city bus tour and then checking out the Daejeon Expo. We really enjoyed our time at the interactive science museum and made plans to come back the next morning to take in the planetarium and biosphere. We woke up fairly early Sunday morning and decided to go check out Daejeon's World Cup soccer stadium which was only a 5 minute cab ride from our hotel. The outside of the stadium was nothing spectacular and we were beginning to feel a little disappointed when we realized one of the entrance gates was open. So, after looking at one another briefly and shrugging our shoulders simultaneously as if to say "what the heck?" we walked in and quickly found our way inside the stadium and down onto the field! Apparently Daejeon's pro soccer team had a game the day before and some townspeople were inside cleaning up the celebratory toilet paper and what not. We walked around on the grass (if you've ever been to Korea you know that grass is all but extinct in the country) and took some photos pretending to be Korean soccer stars. Then, as planned we experienced the planetarium and biosphere. Both were really cool. But, the highlight of the trip was our 4 hour adventure in ZooLand. We were absolutely blown away by the unique animal cages (some of which allowed Jaguars to walk directly over our heads and allowed small monkeys to walk tight-rope style accross a rope from one cage to another)but most of all we loved the safari. We hopped on a small bus with about 30 Koreans and rode into a special section of the zoo/theme park. Before we knew it, we were surrounded by bears. Then a few minutes later we drove into the tiger section of the safari experience. Followed by the African sections where we literally got within 3 feet of a dozen male lions with nothing separating us but the thin glass of the safari bus windows. It was awesome! Our trip to Daejeon was a resounding success!
