Daejeon

The next few days were just about chilling out. We saw bits and pieces of Daejeon and panicked a bit when none of the atms took our cards. Kelly-Anne told us that her card hadn't worked in the local atms either and she had to go into Daejeon centre to find an atm. We headed to the atm that she recommended and that didn't work either. Finally we found an atm that said it was a global atm and that accepted our cards. Seems it's quite rare outside the big city centres to get that type of atm. On Wednesday Kelly-Anne and he co teacher had arranged a trip for the three of us (Kelly-Anne, Brian and me) to head to a tea plantation. We headed out to a small little town on the train from a smaller station in Daejeon. We headed to a town called Beosong. There we got very confused about where to get the bus and ended in a pretty abandoned bus stop. So we grabbed a taxi out to the famous green tea plantation. First thing we did was find out that the first day of a two week green tea festival was underway. We headed to the main buildings (avoiding the museum) and saw a bunch of Korean tourists processing green tea. They were drying leaves, filling bags and picking out bits and pieces. We wander in among everyone to get an idea of what was going on as all the signs were in Korean. While we were doing this one of the organisers brought us over some tea which was really good. After that Kelly-Anne was a but worried we would only get to see pictures of the plantation and not get to go out to it. We headed to the information point for the festival where we got a map and a really tasty potato. We still have no idea why they handed us a potato but it was so good. We couldn't even find anywhere you could buy more cause we really liked them. An English speaking guy told us where to go to get to the plantation itself. We headed over, at the start we only saw bamboo and trimmed trees but eventually we got to the actually tea plantation. On the way we came to the realisation we were the only Westerners at this whole event. Kids and even adults kept saying high to us and giggling. We had a good time though and enjoyed the novelty of it all. The plantation had some amazing views of the tea fields and their unusual lines. There were also a few cherry blossoms out. At the end of the day Kelly-Anne phoned her co teacher Jin and she called the lift she had organised for us out to a traditional Korean guest house. There we slept on a heated floor in thick blankets as we were so exhausted. We also got a chance to talk away about everything going on and in the morning we headed back.