And The World’s Largest Surf Park Goes To… South Korea!

South Korea has long been on the list of countries I’d love to visit, but to which I haven’t yet got around to purchasing tickets.

Korean food is amazing. They can BBQ the hell out of anything, pickle, and blanche and ferment all sorts of delicious little snacks and serve ’em up alongside. Add in the fastest average internet speed in the entire world, the fascinatingly strange phenomenon that is K-Pop, a high standard of living, and you’ve got the recipe for an amazing voyage into an awesome foreign culture.

The fact that Korean is not a tonal language adds to the appeal even more. I’ve proven myself utterly incapable of learning to speak any languages that require a change in tone to convey meaning. Despite, literally, months spent in both Thailand and China I’ve never learned to say anything other than ‘thank you’ in either language. I like to blame it on my hearing problems, but it’s more likely a result of my brain being broken by Western culture. English, passable Spanish, a bit of French, and now my brain is full.

I’m on the fence whether I’d take a surf trip to South Korea. What footage I’ve seen leads me to believe it’s either very cold or not very good. Both terms being subjective and largely a result of my existence on a tropical island that is, more often than not, both warm and good.

But ‘surf trip’ implies that my trip to South Korea would be solely focused on riding waves. Would I, in the future, take a trip to the Korean peninsula to see their culture and decide to go for a surf while I’m there?

It seems more likely now that ground has been broken on what is planned to be the largest surf park in the world.

Clocking in at over forty acres, the Sihueng Surf Park looks like it’s will be massive, luxurious, and fun way to spend your money and time.

The site will feature an artificial beach measuring slightly less than 1 km long, the wave will be designed by Wavegarden and the amenities financed by the Daewon Plus Group, which plans to drop €430 million on the development of a hotel, convention center, marina, and ferris wheel.

In a world of constant access to hardcore pornography and online gaming it’s definitely a little strange to see someone building a ferris wheel. I’d thought our brains’ thrill centers had moved on from that kind of thing. But South Korea is a country that goes wild for choreographed dance numbers, so maybe things run a little different over there. I don’t know.

Celebrate good times, come on.