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HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANYTHING CUTER THAN A WOMBAT ON A LEASH???

Why is that wallaby glaring at me??

Various Irwin’s and a croc.

We stopped at the Australia Zoo on the way from Brisbane to Noosa so MEP and Paul could see lots of Aussie animals. I liked the koalas a lot.

We went to the famous bird and croc show in the big arena. It was cheesy but entertaining. Bindi Irwin is a surprisingly bad public speaker though? I would have thought she would be better considering she does it every day…

Anyway the zoo is massive!! They don’t have platypus though. Minus one star.

Great view from our apartment in Noosa too.

Of course I had to go for a swim. The ocean was soooo nice and warm. It was so crowded at the main beach though! Easter weekend was over but I guess a lot of people were sticking around for the week.

Scott and I went for a hike around Noosa National Park. We didn’t see any koalas or whales, but we did see dolphins!

We walked all the way from Noosa Main Beach to Sunshine Beach, had lunch at the RSL and then caught the bus back to town.

We all went on a super cheap sunset river cruise that was actually great. $10! The captain pointed out all sorts of things along the way and we ended up at the lake just in time to see a beautiful sunset over the water. He also got some kites to dive and snatch bits of meat in mid-air. It was relaxing and just great value compared to most touristy things in Australia.

We had a bit of extra time on the last day so we took the scenic route back to the Brisbane Airport via a couple lookouts and a cheesery. WILL U-TURN FOR CHEESE. We all had these extremely intense cheese tarts, which probably took two days to fully digest. So much cheese.

Noosa is nice but maybe a bit too fancy for me. I think there are other places along the Sunshine Coast that aren’t as busy or expensive that would be just as good.

After one last game of Ticket To Ride at the airport, Scott and I flew back to Melbourne, and MEP and Paul flew directly into a hurricane, but we would see them again in a couple weeks.

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A thousand years ago Scott and I went to Wilsons Prom for a weekend.

We drove down on Friday night after work, stopping for dinner in Fish Creek. We wanted to have a quick meal so we’d arrive at the campground before dark but the food took 5ever to come out. Oh well, other than it making a bit difficult to pick out a good campsite (Tidal River Campground is first come first serve) we were fine setting up in the dark because we are Master Campers.

**This just reminded me I need to change the batteries in my headlamp. Thanks guys.

Anyway after setting up we just chilled in our camp chairs and watched the wombats wander around and surprise people. Very entertaining. They are brave wombats!! And so pudgy. :D :D

 

After a delicious camp breakfast of bacon and eggs we set out on a little hike. Check out this wombat hidey hole!! And check out my muscley legs!!

We walked out to Pillar Point Lookout and then down to Squeaky Beach. We ate our sandwiches and decided we wanted to swim but it would be a lot easier if we headed back to the beach near our campsite. It was sunny and nice out, but close to the end of summer so the water wasn’t super warm, but once we got in it was pretty nice. I put my head under and everything.

Later that afternoon we put our shoes back on and drove to the car park for the Mount Oberon “hike”. I put that in quotation marks because it was just a road that goes up up up up up up forever. I did not care for that much up hill. It’s not very scenic until you get to the very very top and then it’s SCENIC AF, as you can tell from that picture. We timed it so that we’d get to the peak at sunset, and succeeded, but unfortunately the sunset was a bit boring that evening. Unlucky because the night before the sunset was spectacular!! (We saw it as we were driving to the campground.) Then we hustled back down the mountain and only had to use our headlamps for the last ten minutes back to the car.

PS that’s Tidal River Campground on the right side of the picture. Scott used extreme zoom on my camera and took a picture of our tent. He debated running up the next morning so I could wave at him from down there and now I have ragret that we didn’t actually do it.

We actually had a really miserable night though. It suddenly got super windy, and sand was blowing everywhere. Our tent has a full fly but somehow sand was flying under the edges and into the tent and EVERYTHING was covered. Our pillows were gritty. Our sleeping bags were gritty. Our lips were gritty. To make it worse, it was super hot but we couldn’t open anything up because we would have been covered with even more sand. So sweaty. I did not sleep very well at all. When we woke up in the morning we had grey faces!!

Our breakfast pancakes came out horribly rubbery for some reason and then we felt a few drops of rain so we shook everything out and packed up in record time.

We had planned on doing another hike that day but instead decided to just give up and head home, via a cidery and cheesery.

We went to Gurney’s Cider, which is a family run farm that makes very simple and tasty dry cider. I loved their Scrumpy cider made from foraged apples but it was a bit too pricey for me. I did get a bottle of Wild though.

And we checked out Prom Country Cheese for lunch. We had a massive cheese board. It was intense. It came with a whole bunch of huge pieces of sheep, cow and goat cheese, warm bread and crackers, meat and more. I’m drooling reminiscing about it. Lovely place.

Anyway other than the sand we had a lovely time at the Prom. I would like to go back again next summer, for a bit longer. The beaches there are really great, and wombats are soooo cuuuute. It’s really competitive/expensive to reserve spots there though so dunno. Maybe somewhere else along the coast is better.

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You sick of Korea posts yet? :P Last one.

Scott and I checked out the Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul. It’s a cool set up, they have A LOT of different types of seafood, and you can choose what you want and they will take it to their associated restaurant upstairs who will cook it for you for a couple dollars.

What kind of ray is this?

It was a little overwhelming though, there wasn’t much English inside, and some of the portions were enormous. So we just decided to get some salmon sashimi to go.

Which we ate outside in the sun on the steps of a random building.

Checking out the beach near our hotel in Donghae. The water looked beautiful and clear. I bet the Korean seaside is really nice in the summer.

Variety gimbap in Gangneung. I love how many elements they cram into a roll, even cheese!!

Eating during the Olympics was tricky. We seemed to always be racing to get onto the bus or train that was just about the depart so we ended up missing a lot of meals. And the food that was inside the Olympic venues was cheaper than I expected, but pretty bland. Anyway at least we ended on a pretty good note when we found a nice restaurant to have another dolsot bibimbap, gimbap, and mandu (Korean dumplings) on our last night.

I do regret not eating more seafood while on the seaside though. And we never found the soft tofu local speciality. Doh!

These doughnuts were amazing. Korea knows how to make a good crispy doughnut omg. The market stall was selling doughnuts stuffed with savoury fillings like: kimchi, pizza cheese, red bean, squid, and more. I had a japchae (glass noodles with vegetables) doughnut, and Scott had curry sweet potato. SO GOOD. We also tried hotteok which are like fried doughballs filled with lava caramel and seeds and nuts. Very difficult to eat (I may have had a molten sugar explosion all over my gloves and jacket), but very tasty.

Scott got a red bean fish ice cream from 7-11. It was nice.

Korea seems very… prepared. Our hotel in Seoul came with a fire extinguisher, a flashlight, and a little suitcase with an emergency ladder, and every subway station had these cases with tons of masks. I suppose technically they are still at war…

We stayed in Hongdae for our last night. It is a university area so there are a lot of things around for young people to spend their money, such as: escape rooms, arcades, animal cafes, 85 million coffee shops, phone case shops, karaoke, billiards, smash rooms, etc. And, speciality cafes, like Scott’s dream cafe: Mint Heim. Everything was mint chocolate, aka Scott’s favourite dessert flavour combination. You could even get mint coffee. It was a tough choice, but we decided to try a piece of the mint Nutella cake, and it was good.

Well that does it, I’m all caught up. It was an epic trip. So much fun! It was just so easy to travel there: plenty of English, fantastic transit, quite cheap, amazing food, tons to see. I would return to Korea again for sure, with an extra suitcase and an extra stomach! :D

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AKA Spicy Chicken Stir Fry with a Cheese Moat :D :D

Because obviously when you make a spicy chicken and vegetable stir fry you think “wouldn’t this be better with a crap load of cheese”. Right? Maybe it’s just me. #everythingisbetterwithcheese

Anyway this exists. And it was great. I’m gonna walk you through it.

We ordered chicken galbi for three people. They fire up the burner on the table and bring out a giant pan filled with chicken in gochujang, potatoes, rice cakes, various vegetables, and a exorbitant amount of shredded cheese. We stare at it, unsure if we are supposed to start stirring.

Waiters come over and start stirring our pan every once and a while. We relax as we realize that they will do everything for us, haha. Nibble some banchan.

Look at the amount of cheese they gave us and wonder if we’ve made a terrible mistake.

When the food is mostly cooked they pour the cheese into the cheese moat.

Stir stir. Melt melt. Bubble bubble.

Is it ready yet??

It’s ready!!! Dig in.

Grab bits of chicken and/or veg and scoop up some cheese and shovel it all into your mouth. Yummmm.

Finish the stir fry and ask for one serving of rice. Waiter comes over and scrapes out the extra bits of food and cheese, then adds rice to the pan.

He does some elaborate scraping and stirring for a few minutes.

And smoothing.

Aww. “For Family” the waiter says.

Take selfies with your Japanese table buddies!

Roll home.

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Another day, more Seoul-searching. Sunny, but coooooold.

At a design plaza/museum. We went hard in the gift shop, everything was so cool/cute.

That whole long building is a shopping mall!!! And it went off equally far in the opposite direction! There were so many malls omg. The shopping in Seoul was crazy, but we couldn’t really buy much clothes because we are too fat in Korea. We did have to get snowpants and mine are size XXL and they’re almost too small. :((( Maybe there is a whole mall for people that are Big & Tall but we didn’t look for it tbh.

We went to a Trick Eye Museum that was… weird. You could download an app and then when you pointed the camera at the different scenes it added stuff, aka augmented reality.

You could also go into an ice museum with a slide, and get your face printed onto a latte.

It would have been fine for $5 like the kimchi museum but unfortunately it was $15. I don’t really recommend it.

Oppa Gangnam Style!

We also checked out Insadong, Lotte World, many super hipster cafes that Jinnie recommended, underground malls, Hongdae, a lemur cafe (but left immediately because there was a kangaroo in a tiny cage and it made us all very sad), and many many other things. The entire trip we were either exploring, watching Olympics, stuffing our faces, or sleeping. LOL. I walked average 20k steps a day. Not bad.

OK so apparently Rosemarie is like an expert of Korean food, and she had a food bucket list a mile long. Since she had less time in Korea than us we let her make all the food decisions while we were together. She did a great job serving as Minister For Food.

Here are a few things that we loved:

BBQ was obviously a must-eat. We found this place in Hongdae that was All You Can Eat for like $12. We cooked up all sorts of vegetables and meats and wrapped them in lettuce and dipped in the salty oil and the peanutty sauce. Yum. We all liked the marinated beef the most, nice and tender with a good sauce.

A very good selection of banchan. Peanuts, fish, anchovies, eggs, mushrooms, pickled veggies, kimchi. Banchan comes free and unlimited with every meal, but usually we only got 3-4 things, not 8!

We stayed in Myeongdong, which was a very busy shopping area (especially beauty shops!) with tons of restaurants and street vendors. There was always lots to see and do and eat in Myeongdong and it was very central for transit too. A+ Would Myeongdong again.

Those were subway station doughnuts and they were amazing. Very crispy with vanilla custard, sweet potato, and red bean fillings. Scott walked 1 hr each way to go back for more doughnuts later in the week.

Raw beef bibimbap in stone pot. The pot was flipping hot so when you stir it around (after adding heaps of gochujang of course) it cooks the beef a bit, and the rice on the bottom gets crunchy. We ate variations of this a lot, which is good since it’s full of vegetables and relatively healthy.

This was another of Rosemarie’s must-eats… Korean seafood pancake. It brought back memories of when our parents took us to a Korean restaurant in NYC in approximately 2002 and we got traumatized by the still-moving seafood stew and acted like brats and wouldn’t eat anything except for the plain bits of the Korean pancake on the side. Thankfully we have become more adventurous eaters since then, and enjoyed the whole pancake this time.

She also made us try a mango mountain (one of those giganto desserts with shaved ice and all sorts of toppings like mango and cheesecake and ice cream), which Scott and I liked but Rose didn’t (she said it didn’t have good texture and was too cold). And she introduced us to one of those bbq places with a cheese moat (yes you read that right, and yes that is getting its own blog post coming up next) which was obviously amazing.

Then she had to go back to work in Japan. :( Sister time over. But oh man we love travelling with Rosemarie. Our collaborations of research and interests always end up being so much fun. Next time Japan? Or Vietnam?