Our day began like this: on one of the first buses from Aewol-eup to the Jeju City bus terminal. These weren’t the ‘city buses’ we were used to — they were older, had brightly colored curtains and seat covers and reminded me of buses I took a zillion years ago when I first traveled around SE Asia. The bus driver drove like a maniac and there weren’t any available seats. Sly and I stood in the back, swerving and stumbling back and forth as if on a crazy roller coaster. The bus driver narrowly missed hitting a guy as he stepped out onto the street, too preoccupied with his phone to notice a bus barreling by…
Eventually (thankfully) we found seats and about 40 minutes or so later our bus pulled into the Jeju Intercity Bus Terminal. If there was ever any doubt that we were in another country the bus terminal erased it. It’s not like bus terminals in the US are glorious — but this one, like the bus, looked trapped in time, Asia circa 1975 — and was so unlike all the super modern transportation hubs we had passed through in Korea. We were definitely not in Kansas anymore.