Final Jeju pictures and trotters in Busan

We arrived safely in Busan after our one hour flight from Jeju. Our Busan hotel is modern, with a steam sauna and heated, computerized  toilet with a bidet function in the bathroom and more significantly, a bed to sleep on. I'm certainly not complaining about our ondol room in Jeju, I chose to sleep for a week on the traditional Korean mat on the heated floor. Our hotel there, Hotel Dae Dong, actually had only five of those traditional rooms with the remainder being modern with beds. In addition to the experience of the ondol room, we really enjoyed chatting for the week with Eunhee Park and her brother, Jinseok. Eunhee had worked at several museums in the United States and developed ViaArt in Jeju, arranging art exhibits. ViaArt's space was adjacent to the hotel lobby.

 

The hotel had numerous paintings and lava rock displays. Eunhee said that the rock sculptures come from her father's collection and the paintings are either one's he had or ones she liked.  The hotel did an excellent job highlighting the features of Jeju. The painting above is of Hallasan, the mountain and UNESCO World Heritage sight that we did not climb while here.

I really liked the displays of the lava rocks, as here in the lobby. Sometimes, Eunhee's parents would staff the lobby, always smiling and greeting us. They actually had the hotel for several decades but are now mostly retired, leaving the operation to Eunhee and Jinseok. A very pleasant stay for us indeed.

Before we left Jeju, we decided to have the full restaurant experience of the island's signature dish, black pig, so we found a restaurant in Black Pig Street, easy to do because every building on the street is a restaurant. This picture doesn't show the multitude of sides and the soup we had, but it's a good picture of the pork as it grills at out table, surrounded by mushrooms, potato, onion and kimchee on the grill also.

In addition to the black pig and lava rock, Jeju is known for its citrus, specifically these tangerines, although all variety of orange citrus filled the Dongmun market. 

Every market sells every kind of kimchee: cabbage, radish, bean sprout, and many kinds we weren't sure of. Dongmun market didn't have just one or two vendors whose goods were displayed like this, it had dozens, just like the dozens of citrus vendors and fish vendors, and pork vendors, etc.

In Busan, after checking into our hotel, we went in search of the market area, which we found and it is huge! We also found Bupyeong-dong - Pigs' Feet Alley. That is what it is called on the map. The speciality of restaurants on that street is jokbal, translated on the menu as "pig trotters." So, we had pig trotters, above, for dinner last night. Tender pork meat, served thinly sliced and cold, with lettuce leaves and the multitude of sides to make your Korean burrito-like dinner. This pork had a milder, less intense flavor than our previous pork meal on Jeju, but still quite good and I'm glad we had our trotters.