Izzy samples some street food at Walmido island
Walmido island street
Some appetizing street food
We booked a Princess tour, Walmido Island and SinPo market, due to leave at 10am, so we headed dockside and boarded our bus. The guide, a young Korean woman, Joy, was generally upbeat and provided lots of information as we made our way to our first stop, a typical Korean 17th century house and garden area, pretty uninspiring as it appeared to be still under construction. During our stroll through the garden area, we amused ourselves by comparing deformities with several other passengers, I was happy to see that in the bent finger department I was pretty far down in the pecking order (I blame Pat for the previous sentence).
Incheon Chinatown street with Izzy at bottom right
Next stop was the waterfront boardwalk at Walmido, with amusement arcades, rides and food concessions. Izzy tried a hotdog on a stick, wrapped in mashed potatoes with diced potatoes stuck to the outside, all deep fried, from the couple of bites I got, it wasn’t too bad, maybe because it had been 3 hours since I’d eaten and I was starving. Next stop, we walked through Chinatown and Japanese town, visiting the museum of architecture.
Ladies in the fish market
I like a nice piece of fish, with some chips
We then moved on to the most interesting stop of the tour, the fish market. The vendors were quite friendly, even knowing that we probably wouldn’t buy anything, we tried our newly learned few words of Korean, “Al mah eh yo” (how much does it cost?) and “An yong has eh yo” (hello). Last stop was SinPo market, above and below ground shopping, average Korean stuff, nothing in the usual tourist vein (tshirts etc). We realised on the way back that SinPo market was quite close to the ship, so it could be walked to easily enough and in fact, while in Chinatown we met Lucerne (86 years old) single lady who had walked there from the ship. Later we had a late lunch with her and she told us she planned to go back in to town again, while we were ready for a sleep.
Pat & Jim standing on a street corner, close to the fish market
We skipped dinner in the restaurant tonight and instead had a snack in the Panorama buffet, then watched the ship negotiate the locks at the exit to Incheon harbour. On our way out we met Ella, youngest passenger on board, she is visiting her grandmother, with her parents, ’til HongKong, grandmother is on the full world cruise and each segment, a different family member group comes on board and the previous set leaves, great idea, I thought. Later, we closed out the evening taking in the caberet show, an English pub style singer, who was quite good and got the crowd going, singing lots of fifties and sixties songs.
Ella with her new slippers
Me as we pass through the lock system at Incheon port
