We wake up at 7 and have another hotel breakfast buffet at 7:45. It’s more Korean this time (fish, fermented greens, soup), but luckily there is also bread and confiture for the kids.
First, we go to the 310.00 square meters Juknokwom bamboo forest at the edge of Gwangju. It’s lush and green, there are nice walking paths, pavilions and bamboo hammocks and even a children’s playground. To be honest, we walk together for five minutes, and then the children see the playground and don’t want to hike further. It’s also their holiday, so Tim explores the forest on his own.
Next on our schedule was the Jeungisma Buddhist Temple, but as we can only park 3KM from the Temple entrance and we don’t feel like hiking with two hungry kids, we decide to skip it and go for lunch next door instead. It’s the first time this trip we go to a restaurant we pinned before. Usually, we just have lunch at a place that’s there when we’re hungry (far too often a highway restaurant😉), food is not our priority.
It’s a vegan buffet restaurant, opening at 11:30, but when we enter the parking at 11:15, there is already a huge line. By accident, we wanted to have lunch in the most popular place of Southern Korea. And soon we understand why, for 6,5€ you can eat endless veggies, noodles, tofu, tempura, soup, rice, etc. Unfortunately, our biggest tofu lover is asleep and not waking up until we finished lunch. What a bad timing, as he could use some other food than his usual bread, banana and tomato.
Fully fed, we set course to the Gwangju National Museum, which has many ceramics and cultural artefacts from the region on display. We also find out that there are also keyhole tombs in Korea and even better, they are two just 15 min away. We missed them in Japan, where they are called kofun. Here in Korea they are called janggobun. Since Japanese-Korean relationships are still tense, there is a lot of debate about the racial identity of the people buried in these tombs and whether they are “Korean” or “Japanese”.
The museum also has a children museum, which turns out to be fantastic, with a virtual and interactive trampoline game, virtual and interactive pottery, a slide, a corner to make your own badge, a ship children can steer themselves over sea, and so on and so forth. The problem arises that Cleo and Zeno never want to leave. Tim’s strategy is to just leave, thinking that the children will follow. Olga’s strategy is to have 10 last time slide rides, trampoline jumps and boat games, and then catches the children to walk back to the car.
Next is the Gwangju Museum of Art which promotes local artists and also has a children museum, resulting in Tim exploring the local art culture, and Olga, Zeno and Cleo colouring and having pillow fights.
We end our programme with the Wolgyedong Janggobun. While Tim makes nice drone shots, Cleo, Zeno and Olga enjoy eating a kilo of strawberries bought at a street vendor, hoping they won’t get sick as happened when eating unwashed strawberries in Uzbekistan.
We have dinner in a sushi restaurant and enjoy the change of tastes after all the fermented food, bimbimbab and noodles of the past weeks. Tim and Cleo do some grocery shopping as we’ll be in an apartment again tomorrow, and they buy some vegetables (tomatoes, bell pepper and banana) for €30…
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