Seongeup Folk Village, Bibimbap & Yongduam @ Jeju-do

Date of Visited: 14th September 2011

Previous post was about the first two out of 5 places that we informed our taxi driver where we wanna go in Jeju Island was Seopjikoji and Seongsang Ilchulbong - click here. Hereby, I share another two places and the final one will be in another post because the latter one will contaminate with tons of "interesting" photos I believe.

3. Seongeup Folk Village

If you want to know the unique culture and tradition of Jeju Island, Seongeup Folk Village is the one best place to be. Although it is just a small and tiny town, but it holds a vast amount of cultural heritage and still preserve the ancient Korean traditions. The distance from Seongsang Ilchulbong to Seongeup Folk Village took almost an hour.

There is no admission fee required. By the time we reached there, there is no one around except us. This gave us a pretty good chance to walk around on our own and took as many photos we want. 

The village contains about 3,000 thatched roof houses with stone and clay walls where it showcases the living lifestyle of the villagers. There might be some villagers have added modern amenities such as colour television, telephone and yet they prefer to maintain that ancient architecture of the buildings where they stay. 

One of the prime feature of this village is the stone walls which made from black lava rock.

Besides residential houses, this folk village also include Confucian shrines and schools and ancient government offices.

The way the villagers place these fences do have meaning behind, it's not for fun. One bar up means "will be back in a while", two bars mean "went out for whole day" whereas three bars mean "gone for travelling". Interesting right?

One of the thing that I missed out from here is the rare black haired pig and it believed to be very nutritious. Nope, I was not planning to eat them, just wondering how they look like but I guess they do look the same as the normal pig, right? Just different in colour. After visited 3 places, our stomach starts to growling and that's the sign for lunch time. We informed our taxi driver that we would love to have bibimbap instead of Chinese foods.

We tagged along the taxi driver to have lunch with us cause like what I mentioned before in my previous post, some of the taxi driver in Jeju Island did requested to provide lunch for them. By the way, I am not a big fan of Korean foods but when we're travel abroad, we should at least try out at lease once their foods.

4. Yongduam

From the eastern side of Jeju Island, now we heading to north side of Jeju-do. The distance took less an hour and you don't have worry about the congested traffic jam cause it never happens in Jeju Island. Therefore, some of my friends who went Jeju Island before, said they would love to visit Jeju Island again and plan to stay here for the rest of their whole life when they old. Now let's get back to Yongduam and why it is so special about

Created by strong winds and waves for more than thousands of years, Yongduam is actually a large volcanic rock formation shaped like a dragon's head. Literally in Korean, Yong means dragon and the rock formation resembles a dragon rising from the sea into the sky and that's how the dragon's head rock has been so named after this rock.

As this rock has become one of the symbol of Jeju-do, therefore it has attract lots of tourist to visit this spot. Walking through this rock pathway might be dangerous especially when the place became crowded. So, wear proper shoe when visit this place.

If you dislike walking down the rock pathway, standing on the hill and taking this emerald-blue ocean would be enough.

At here, we spotted lots of dried squid and you can even eat these raw octopus alive if you want to. But for a person who has weak heart and stomach like me, definitely a big NO for that.

[Credit To: Official Site of Korea Tourism Org, Gregwee.blogspot.com, Travel,mapsofworld.com,