A Little Train Travel

A few weeks ago, some of my friends and I decided to go on a tour of the countryside. There is this guy who puts together trips for foreigners and he advertises them on facebook. When I went to the Bull Fight Festival, it was with his tour group. One of the trips that popped up on my newsfeed that sounded pretty awesome was something called the Wine Train Tour.

I started to check it out, and this train is a normal commuter train between Seoul and Busan (basically the northern part of the country to the southern part), but there are a few special cars attached to the end. There was a ginseng car, a white wine car and a red wine car. We were booked on the red wine car, I think.

The basic idea is you get on this train that's all decked out with wine themed decorations, and they do a wine tasting on the way to this winery in southern Korea. After we got to the winery, there was lunch and a wine spa treatment, then we went to a traditional music performance. On the train on the way back, they also gave us some more wine.

Korea is not known for it's great wine, so I definitely wasn't blown away on this trip, but it was definitely nice to get out of the city a little bit and try something new! The people on the train were really friendly, and I walked away with some new acquaintances!

I had two travel companions -- Steph

and Rachel!

They served some snacks with the initial wine tasting. It wasn't quite your normal snack selection for this kind of event. There were orange slices, some sort of strange fake cheese bread, saltine and ritz crackers, and small squares of American cheese, still in their plastic wrappers. 

Instead of normal seats, there were these velvet-esque sofas with tables set up. 

We rode past lots of rice paddies, but its too early in the season to clearly see the rice shoots. 

At lunch, there were four different kinds of wine you could sample. The wine was kept in these giant oak barrels with a spout on them, and you could fill up the tiny bottles to share with your table. 

These were like hot tubs, only they were filled with the liquid that's leftover from making wine instead of water. It felt lovely!

These were the overflow foot baths. 

The tour guide told us that if our legs didn't turn a little red from the wine soaking, we should immediately go to the hospital. Thankfully, we were all safe and red. 

There was a wine cannon!

and some baby pianos. 

There is a $50,000 bottle of wine in that locker. I love wine, but I can't imagine paying that much for a single bottle. 

They had these really cool tea pots, but they were like $150 each. So I contented myself with a picture of a tea pot instead of an actual tea pot. 

"It's time to get drink.
So as not to be the martyred
slaves of time,
Get drunk:
Get drunk without stopping!
On wine,
on poetry,
or on virtue as you wish."

Aside from the obvious moral problems with this, it was pretty funny. It was hanging above one of the walkways to the cellar.

At the musical instrument museum, there was a GIANT drum. Like, it was 20 feet tall and weighed 6 tons kind of giant drum. 

There was this statue of a really famous ancient musician, but I don't remember what he was famous for. I guess it's true what they say -- life imitates art ;)