Jeju Island, Korea by Nina Forsberg 1 Look on a map and you will find a fairly large island south of the Korean peninsula called Jeju Island. If you are at the southern tip of Korea, you can take a seven hour boat ride through choppy waters to get there, or you can take a short airplane ride. Many Koreans think it is the most beautiful part of Korea, and so it is a popular location. About 550,000 people live on Jeju. For one year, I also lived there as an English teacher at a middle school, and I learned a little about why Jeju’s culture and nature are distinct from the mainland. 2 Jeju is famously known as the island of manys, especially rocks and wind. The “rock” part comes from Jeju’s unusual volcanic formations. Occupying the center of the island is Korea’s highest mountain, Mount Halla, an inactive volcano. There are also more than 300 small, secondary volcanoes scattered all over the landscape. 3 Though I never noticed this personally, I was often told that people from Jeju speak more loudly than other Koreans. It is an extremely windy place and so the Jeju people who were farmers had to speak loudly over the winds to hear one another while working in the fields. Their speech is also unique because of a Mongolian-influenced dialect. Jeju was used for a time by Mongolian forces for horse raising, and the Mongolian language became entangled with Korean. Even today, a person from Seoul, Korea’s capital, may sometimes have a hard time understanding a friend from Jeju! A Jeju person may say moosa? if they want to ask “why?” while a person from Seoul would say wayo? 4 Many Jeju men are squid fishermen who are out at sea, while women often work hard outdoors as divers or farmers in the fields. 5 For me, two of the most memorable foods of Jeju Island were the delicious squid brought in daily by the fishermen and the tangerines that grow abundantly all over Jeju. Sometimes I would see squid drying in the sun like clothes on a clothesline, and my host family showed me how to grill this dried squid over a little