Day 2 Ferry + Korean stopover
I woke up a little bit worse for wear this morning but not as bad as I deserved. A small headache nothing else. I'm often surprised at how competent drunk James is. I can get back to a hotel room or an apartment and find my bed and put on sleeping gear all without losing a wallet or phone or keys.
I woke up a bit before we docked in Dongdae (South Korea). The ship would be docked for about 6-8 hours before heading to Russia.
The morning was beautiful as we cruised into the dock at Dongdae. We had the choice to either stay on the ship all day or disembark for a couple of hours. So I chose to disembark and be one of those tourists I despised in Sakaiminato. Ah well.
Most of the Koreans were leaving the ship here to go wherever they were going but everyone I had met was getting off the ship for at least a little bit.
So we had to go through the stupid customs process for a matter of a hour stopover. Thankfully it was very brief and painless.
I spent the stopover walking around with Farooq the American guy from my dorm room.
The town itself was tiny and very uninteresting. Very much a country town. It was also Sunday and it made finding anything open quite hard. Pretty well everything was shut but we did find a small vegetable market, a convenience store and eventually a couple of restaurants by the train station that were open (but doing very little business).
I think we made one restaurant's day when we walked in for lunch. I think Farooq just ordered his favourite Korean dish and I'm not convinced it was on the menu but the lady made it. While we were sitting there another 3 or 4 people from the ship stumbled on the restaurant and walked in to eat. Most of them ordered the same thing as us so I wonder if that will be on the menu soon. As much as I loved Japanese food I had missed the wonders of the Korean side dishes. Nothing like ordering your meal and having 3 or 4 or 8 small dishes appear alongside for seasoning.
Lunch chewed up our remaining time in town so we headed back to the ship to get new boarding passes and go through customs again. A brief and quite uninteresting stopover but a chance to get off the ship was welcome. My hangover was still lingering and the Korean heat didn't help.
We had to change rooms when we got back on the ship and the new room was not as good. Same number of beds crammed into a room about half the size with slightly smaller bunks. The room started a smell a bit later in the day so I'm thinking the collection of shoes on the floor was not doing us any favours.
We traded the previous lot of Koreans for some more Korean people and a bunch of Russians.
The rest of the day was basically spent lazing around talking to various groups of people. Farooq seems to have a talent for meeting people. I feel like he met nearly everyone on the ship. He was the only guy who wasn't white or Asian (Pakistani heritage) so that might have had something to do with it but he's an affable guy and loves to have a chat.
Had a big conversation with a Russian guy from T-stan (Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Trumpistan - I don't remember) who I gather was a university lecturer. He had some English but it was quite limited. It was good enough for the 3 of us to have a wide ranging conversation with a bit of help from google translate.
The Koreans had a little impromptu dance party and karaoke session on deck which was fun. They were having a great time and managed to convinced one of the Russian guys to dance for a bit.
Did dinner in the restaurant again and it was again rather uninspiring with much the same food as last night. Farooq and I ate with the older Japanese guy from the previous room. Turns out he survived the bombing of Hiroshima. Interesting guy who is retired now and travelling heaps.
I had always thought the "drunk russian" thing was a bit of a stereotype and wouldn't be entirely true. How wrong I was. We had a few minor drunk Russian incidents.
The first was during out chat with T-stan guy. There was a big Russian guy who was pretty tanked who came up to us during our conversation and shook everyone's hand but Farooq's. He didn't speak any English and just sat there staring at Farooq for a while until T-stan got him believing that Farooq was American. Finally the shook hands which Russian guy turned into a bit of an arm wrestle and then he tried kick one of Farooq's legs out from under him. Not the nicest guy in the world he wandered off a little after that.
The next one was when I found a drunk Russian passed out in my bunk. I had to wake the guy up (took a bit) and he then found his own bunk and poured himself into it. I'm just glad I didn't find any puke in the bed.
A bit after that a guy came in and started arguing with the guy in the bunk above me. There was a bit of yelling and a bit of punching and he came in and out a couple of times. Eventually they both took off and continued drinking elsewhere I guess.
Add this to the general amount of uncleanliness left in the men's room and I'm pretty convinced the drunk Russian thing is an actual thing.
I did get to sleep eventually but I don't think it settled down til about 3am. My worst night in a dorm environment so far.
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