Korea Day 6 - The Birds

We were leaving Ulleungdo later in the day but first we wanted to take a tour around the island. We had tried to go on one the previous day but it was apparently run mostly in the morning. I say apparently since almost no one on the island spoke any English so there was a lot of pointing involved in any communication we had to do. The boat for the tour was fairly big with an inside area without any real chairs and an outside deck. I spent the whole time on the deck but it looked like there were a lot of Korean people just happy to hang out on the floor in the enclosed area. They sold some types of snacks on the ship which seemed to be less for people and more for the flock of seagulls that followed the boat. Maybe I had accidentally gotten on the seagull feeding cruise instead of the sightseeing one since that's all people seemed to be doing. I immediately disliked this since I was sure people were going to get pooped on by the birds. And sure enough after not too long people started getting hit. Even that wouldn't have been so bad had I not spent the whole time sure that sooner or later I was going to get hit by the birds as well. There were also some people taking pictures, though I think most of the people looked at the birds a hell of a lot more than they looked at the scenery.

One man though had a video camera on a tripod and seemed to be literally recording every second of the voyage around the island for what I believe must be his entry to the worst vacation movie ever contest. The island itself was very pretty basically being a few peaks covered in trees rising out of the water. There was also a smaller flat island off the coast which was some sort of nature preserve, though it didn't seem like much lived there. By far the most interesting thing to happen on the trip was what one guy kept trying to do to the birds. He would hold up a very small piece of food with one hand, and when a seagull would try to fly down and get it he would attempt to grab it with his free hand. The first few times this didn't work so well and I became convinced that he really couldn't do it. But finally he grabbed just at the right moment and snagged a bird right out of the air. He held it for a moment by its wings as the terrified bird squawked and tried to bite him. He held it up to show it proudly to the amazed crowd as a smiled happy with his victory over the bird. After a moment he threw it back where it continued to fly. Later in the trip he managed to do it again, and this time I was watching him and managed to get some pictures.

After we got off the boat I was mostly just grateful that the seagulls had missed me. We went back to the hotel to get our stuff and we couldn't find anyone else around. We looked for a while for someone to give the key to, we had already payed yesterday. We finally just left the key in the room and closed the door. We got on the boat back for the mainland and I don't know if it was just luck or what but I wasn't nearly as sick this time. When we got back we just went to stay in the same hotel as before. We were able to accomplish it this time without wrestling the old man. We went out and found a restaurant that actually had a picture menu for once. The problem was the food we both ordered was unbelievable spicy. That was compounded by the fact that the beer they had was terrible and they didn't seem to have any rice. We were both quite hungry so we basically just sat their for an hour and really slowly and painfully ate our way through it.