When most of your friends are on an MT and one of your friends is in Busan, you grab the other friend who doesn’t have anything to do and you go on a daytrip to Gapyeong together!

A few days ago, I was having dinner when someone told me about the lighting festival at the Garden of Morning Calm, in Gapyeong. Realizing that everyone else would be busy this weekend, I decided that I would go to the garden – even more perfect since this weekend was the last weekend to go.

Vivian and I left after lunch (chicken delivery from BHC – so much better than Kyochon Chicken) and got on the subway after grabbing Juicy (the juice there is so cheap – real fruits, and a 1L cup is only 2800KRW!).

We took the subway from Sinchon all the way to Cheongpyeong station – that took around 2 hours, and we arrived at around  And we just missed the bus from Cheongpyeong terminal, so we had to wait for the next bus. So we walked around for half an hour.

The websites do have the bus schedules, so try to time it so you don’t miss the bus. You can just get on the bus with a T-Money card, so don’t worry about buying tickets. You can also just look at the front of the bus to see which bus goes to the garden.

Good thing we got back early though, because that meant we got seats on the bus – a whole load of people got on right before the bus let and they had to stand the entire way. There were so many people on the bus that it actually struggled to get up the hill… plus, there were so many cars trying to get up that we eventually just got off and walked the rest of the way up – a short hike, but it wasn’t anything too strenuous.

Before we went into the garden there were some small stores selling food, so we decided to get a hot dog to share. I’ve talked about the hot dogs before, and this time we chose not to get sugar on them. I think this is the last time I’m going to get this though since I’ve already had two…

When we got inside it wasn’t too dark yet, but as it got darker the lights became more pretty. The entire park was a lot bigger than I expected!

It got super cold, but luckily I had heat packs in my bag – 2 for me and 2 for Vivian. My toes, unfortunately, felt like they were going to freeze off.

Unfortunately the last bus left the garden at 8pm, which was too early for us. We ended up taking a taxi back go Cheongpyeong Station, which cost around 15 700KRW for the both of us. There’s a taxi stand at the entrance of the garden, and it says to call the taxi – we kept trying to call but no one picked up! Eventually we asked the people in line in front of us and they told us to just wait. Thankfully a taxi came really soon after that so we didn’t have to wait for a long time.

We got home almost at midnight but the daytrip was totally worth it. It’s similar to the Van Dusen Festival of Lights back in Vancouver, but both Vivian and I have never been to that festival before. I’m sure the lights there are also not as creative as the ones that we saw, so I’m really glad that we got to go to the festival before it ended!