Jebudo Trip

Last Friday we went to an island off the west cost called Jebudo. It's the
red spot in the inset on the map below.

The island is know for two things: the shallow water surrounding it and excellent fresh roasted seafood. We went there for the food. We picked a restaurant with a patio overlooking the beach. The weather was hazy and grey, so there wasn't much to look at.

But, the food was excellent. We sat around a grill inset in the table and everything cooked in front of us. We picked the cooked seafood directly from the grill, pulled it from it's shell, and popped it in our mouths. We had fresh shrimp, clams, muscles, and oysters. Yum!

It was hot and dangerous, though. We were sitting inches away from three giant, burning charcoal bricks in muggy August weather. I was sopped with sweat. But, of more concern were the tiny sparks that would pop off the shells, smack us in the hands and face and burn our skin. I was worried someone was going to loose an eye. We got cotton gloves to protect our hands. But, the shells were unbearably hot if you picked them up even with the gloves and they made my hands sweat. Grandma didn't seem to mind. She's wearing one of the gloves in the picture below.

 

I might have benefited from the gloves. Not to protect myself from the shells, but to drink soju with. I placed my shot glass too close to the grill and burnt my fingers and lips trying to drink. The glass was so hot.

We soldered on though, doing our duty, eating our fill. The shrimp were most popular. We ate three orders of the size in the picture above. Mom especially enjoyed them.

We ate like kings. Later, they brought us out some kalguksu, a thick soup with seafood and fat wheat noodles. My stomach was bursting, but the soju buzz I had going numbed the pain and I ate on. They gave us a small plastic bucket for the trash. We filled it half full of shells from the all the seafood we ate.

After lunch, we went down to the beach. This brings us to the second thing Jebudo is famous for: the shallow waters surrounding the island. The seabed runs away from the island at such a slight incline that the beach grows by half a mile at low tide.

The bridge running out to the island is set up from the seafloor on four foot concrete pillions. At low tide the sea barely visible on the horizon from the bridge. However, at high tide the bridge is totally submerged. There are gates at each end of the bride that close when the bridge becomes impassible. There is a sign outside the gate house that lists the latest island departure time. It was 7:45 p.m. on the day we went. Meaning, if we didn't leave the island before that time, we would be stuck there overnight until the tide went out and the bridge reemerged from the water. Trippy, huh?

You can get a sense for how shallow the seabed is in this picture. The ocean is just barely visible in the distance.

We walked around on the beach for a short time to speed digestion. It was just long enough to watch Cash, my in-law's newest dog, run around after Yeppie and sniff her butt. Cash is male and hasn't been fixed yet and Yeppie is female. It's funny to see, partly because Cash is half Yeppie's size and couldn't do anything if he got a chance and partly because Yeppie has no interest in him, seems to dislike him.

With that, we got in the car and I slept all the way home with images of butt sniffing dog's dancing in my soju-pickled brain.