Oh, It's O World!

(Katherine ): Again we are getting really complacent on the blog writing, so I thought I would write a quick post about last weekend. I feel like I shouldn't write anything unless it's monumental, but then nothing would get written, so here goes!

I was sick last week. I had the dreaded yellow dust/cold/sore throat/head death lurgy that seems to be going around everyone at the moment. I even had a day off school! (Which in Korea is a big no-no as they crawl into work even on their deathbeds). Luckily, I'm not Korean, so I spent a day in bed watching new shitty BBC3 show 'the Lock-up'. Where do they get these ideas from?!

Anyway, I digress... so last weekend, I was sick and didn't want to go anywhere, but as we had a limited time to do things before I left to go back to the UK (which I'm now not even doing anyway, but there you go) we decided to add another theme park/zoo to our list of attended theme parks/zoos in Korea! This weeks offering (following Lotte World the week before) was 'O World' (formerly Daejeon Zoo) in, you've guessed it, Daejeon!

magical!

I was not looking forward to it as I was sick, but I went anyway, cos I'm not a moaner/complainer or anything! ;) But it was actually a really fun day! I  had to sit down a lot cos of my lurgy, but it didn't spoil the day! The park consists of an amusement park, safari, zoo and flower park. Weirdly, the good old Koreans are obsessed with these flower gardens and apparently pack into them in their thousands on nice days! Why anyone would want to spend a day wandering around and being shoved about by Koreans whilst looking at flowers, when they could be going on rides or looking at exotic animals is beyond me, but there you go! At least it meant the amusement park/zoo was dead!

ooh magical flower land - yeah right!

                                         

The amusement park was really good, we went on a children's rollercoaster 3 times, lots of other rides and I was even brave enough to do a tower ride (which I DO NOT DO), the only disappointment was the crappy log flume, that we had to queue for half an hour for and was crap! Absolutely no theming/covering of the ride and you could see the cogs of the log flume creaking in action - it was very disturbing!

Katherine, wet after the 'so not worth it' log flume

Katherine's favourite Korean rollercoaster (joint with Lotte World's Comet Express)

The park also gave us an all access pass to Ariel's Grotto (sort of!). You may remember that one of my highlights of the disney trip in February was getting to meet the lovely Ariel at Disney Sea and sharing our tales of life. Unfortunately, this grotto was just a tacky Korean rip off (though I still loved it!). In Korea, there are clearly no copyright laws and there are some amazingly obvious rip offs here and no one cares! I'm sure theres a long winded blog post in me about it so will save that for another time! Anyway, at O World I got my picture taken in this shell with a poorly drawn Ariel, score!

Katherine in Ariel's 'Grotto'

The safari was also really good, we didn't have to queue and lions, tigers, bears,zebras, and elephants were all coming up to our bus and being nosy - I love safaris and have many a happy memory of Knowsley Safari Park as a child, so this great for me! Plus, we didn't have to worry about monkeys ripping off our windscreen wipers! The only bad thing about the safari was that the small Korean child in front of us seemed to think we were the exhibits, and not the animals outside! She spent the whole time just staring at us (especially Greg) as if we were aliens and then stuck her tongue out at him at the end! Luckily we gave her some abuse in English and she went on her way (cos she was pushed off in her pram, not cos of our insults unfortunately!).

Safari Lion

Greg liked the indoor animal bit because he got to be eaten by some fish (see below).. I was too freaked out to do it (even though I have done it before, I think I was put off by the dirty Korean water). So he got nibbled to death while I took photos. You can't really see the fish as they were all underneath his hands - but they were there!


Greg being eaten by fish!


The amusing highlight of the day for me happened in the zoo. The zoo is Korea's 2nd largest and is a million times better than Jeonju Zoo, where all the animals are cooped up in tiny cages covered in shit, with no water - I swear that zoo was the worst place ever- and the animals are free to roam, we saw more lions and tigers, camels, monkeys, seals, penguins, bears etc. However, this was not the highlight. The highlight was a monkey wanking itself off in full view of us! It was soo funny and weird, and he was a total exhibitionist! My biggest regret in life to date is that Greg did not take a photo quick enough because it was comedy/blog gold! Edit - he did (see below), amazing - it's like a David Attenborough show!! It even pulled 'you know what' out of it's bits and it was one of those moments where you want to look away but can't!! Anyway, a good zoo time was had by all!

Ooh, I was wrong - we did get the monkey having a wank!


We went away from 'O World' happy and had tea at Bennigans (which Greg treated me too, yay!) and some weirdo American girl randomly harrassed us in the street, but luckily we managed to lose her - everyone here is odd - am I odd?! Yes, I think so.....

We also hit homeplus and I got some more malted wheats, but guttingly they had no ham sandwiches for our lunches so I've had to have jam all this week :( Anyway, despite illness it was a good weekend! Unfortunately, Greg is ill now and we are going to Seoulland (another themepark/zoo) this weekend, so hopefully we will still be able to have a good time - no doubt an update will be had on here at some stage!!

Happy O World-ers