I don’t remember exactly how the fellow Drexel kids and I decided to go to Wolmido Island, but we initially knew that we all wanted to go somewhere that we haven’t yet been to. Incheon is a big city right outside of Seoul that none of us had seen and the obvious first go to in Incheon seemed to be Wolmido Island for us. I can’t really tell you what it’s famous for, because I went in knowing nothing about Wolmido but I do remember hearing about it once or twice.
So the first thing we got to doing was lunch! Incheon had a Chinatown and I believe I’ve only ever seen only one other Chinatown in Korea before, although I don’t remember where I saw it. I thought it was interesting how Korea also adopted this idea of having a Chinatown in cities! We’re walking into the Chinatown entrance and almost immediately saw a line outside of a restaurant. One thing that I’ve learned in Seoul is that when there’s a line outside of an establishment you should probably queue up as well. Their food/drink/dessert always seems to end up being worth it. So we got in line at this Chinese restaurant and end up eating black bean noodles and Korea’s version of sweet and sour pork. I’ve had a lot of Chinese food in Seoul, but these noodles were very good! They were the perfect thickness and chewy level!
We then moved on to the actual island of Wolmido and we opted to take this elevated little pod/train that would hit all of the major sightseeing activities on the island. The island is actually extremely small and one could walk across it in under or around an hour. So we took the pod and we saw these huge containers with an interesting design on them but we had no idea what they actually held:
I must say that it seems like Korea is really into the travelling pod bus culture for touristy areas, as this was my third time riding in an elevated pod-train like thing. Not that this is a bad thing, of course. I believe we got off at the amusement park area first and enjoyed a few carnival rides. I also want to point out bars of soap on a stick in bathrooms. Korea has really made me appreciate bars of soap again and have also made me realize that there’s nothing wrong with a public bar of soap.
A good chunk of Wolmido Island is a park with trails and historical markers/sites. So we spent the better part of the day in nature and realized that Wolmido Island was the site of an important battle during the Korean War. The island was really very pretty and relatively quiet and peaceful. We wondered if we had missed out on many attractions that would have been open, but shut down due to Covid. All in all, it was a nice and quiet sight-seeing day!
