하이킹, 식사, 탐험, 사랑 I love Korea 하이킹, 식사, 탐험, 사랑

하이킹, 식사, 탐험, 사랑 I love Korea 하이킹, 식사, 탐험, 사랑

Hello again favorite people! I cannot believe I have spent over a week in SOUTH KOREA! It’s breathtakingly beautiful and things have just been so much fun! So Tuesday we finally got our base passes and went through more training. We took fire safety, playground safety, food handling, and child abuse. It was extremely boring and taught by local Koreans in broken English that no one really understood. We have been working crazy hard every night on programming and thinking of things for camp which starts on Monday. We were also able to go to the grocery store and pick up food for the weeks. We have been going in early to the center in the mornings trying to get all our posters painted for the entire summer. The theme this year is “Have a Sweet Summer With Camp Adventure, so we all have secret candy names. I am Miss Smartie, Jesa is Miss Tamale, James is Mr. Twizzler, Devin is Mr. Taffy and Kristin is Miss Starburst. On Thursday we finally got to meet the kids. They had their last day of school, a half day, and were in the center by noon. We just observed and helped out. I was supposed to be working with the fourth and fifth graders this summer, James is in charge of first through third grade and Kristin is in charge of kindergarteners. Devin and Jesa are both working aquatics and day camp so they mainly teach swim lessons. We started off observing and I was in the teen room playing apples to apples with the kids which was decently fun. I decided to try the kinder room and I found poor Kristin at her wits end, she normally works with teenagers so we decided to switch. The kinders are a wild group and are definitely going to be a handful. There are two little girls in particular who refuse to listen and get all the other kids riled up. Devin has also been working with the kinders and he insists that it’s all about breaking them like a horse, I’ll let you know how that works out. We will be eating with the kids each day this year which means baby portions and trying to eat while forcing them to sit and eat, this may be slightly challenging. Thursday night we took a night off from camp and hung out watching hours of television, laughing, and introducing the boys to the hysterical joys of facebook bumper stickers. Friday we spent the morning finishing our posters and the afternoon observing and working with the kids. I am glad to report the kinders are already improving. They just need constant direction and entertaining, which translates to singing songs and having puzzle races and playing games all the time. We got off around 1530 and decided to head into Daegu. I called us two taxi’s at the front desk to wait for us outside of base to take us downtown. However we beat them to the gate and the boys wouldn’t stop walking to wait for the taxi so we ended up just wandering around for a while. There aren’t really sidewalks in a lot of places and you are hugging close to the parked cars on the side of the road as other cars rush by. It was awesome though walking through. There are squids in buckets for sale and fish stands and other fruits and vegetables sitting in baskets on the floor and old ladies sitting there watching over them. We wandered for like an hour (maybe slightly exaggerated), convinced wrongly that we could walk to downtown. Eventually we caved and hailed a taxi and headed downtown. There are five of us and taxi’s can only take four so we have to separate and find two separate taxis which is kind of a pain. So we get downtown and it’s crazy bright lights and colors like you couldn’t even image. By this time it’s around six and people were getting hungry so we decided to pick a restaurant. Jesa and I have been very apprehensive about Korean food considering it is very out of the norm. But we picked a restaurant with non English speaking Koreans and were seated at a table. She began gesturing towards Korean symbols on a wall with prices next to them. We, of course, had picked the restaurant without pictures of the food we were ordering for our first Korean meal. After a good laugh we had James pick a symbol. They removed the cover of the table to reveal a hole in the middle and put in a pot of coals. They began bringing out bowls and bowls of food and a large tray of raw meat. They eat family style in Korea so we each got a small salad bowl and you place things from the other bowls in yours to eat. We began cooking our meat and trying the mystery food at our table. We were the only people in the restaurant so the family literally sat at the table next to us and stared. We had onions in soy sauce, a tofo something, garlic, lettuce, sauces, gingery stuff, more sauce and kimchi. Kimchi is a cabbage that they bury in the ground that has been stuffed with chili powder and a million other things between the leaves. They let it ferment for a few days then dig it back up to eat it. It is spicy!!! I did not enjoy it. Oh and you know how most restaurants in the States have a fork option, we only have a chop stick option. Devin, James, and Kristin our pros and probably had half the food eaten by the time I could successfully pick up one thing. I tried everything on our table and enjoyed one thing. The beef was fun to cook and tasted like the norm probably why I liked it. Needless to say I will try new food but rely on my back up pb and j. after we finished eating a group of Korean men came in fresh out of work and we sat for a while watching them prepare their dinner so we could learn. Our meal was nine thousand won each or around $8.50. We continued our wandering and found the real downtown. It was awesome tall buildings with bright lights and signs and Korean music blaring and insanely skinny Asians. We got some candy from a market and walked and walked and walked. I wish I could drop you off so you could truly see it with your own two eyes. We wandered into a park where the school of music was performing a concert and it was raining so we thought we would enjoy a rest under the tents. James and I were hanging out in the back when suddenly an older man in a wheel chair came up to us and asked if we enjoyed music. After saying yes he escorted us to a tent right next to the stage with fancily dressed men and women, he rolled us up to the front row and introduced us to the president of the school who invited us to sit right behind him. We sat under the tent and photographers came over taking our pictures with all the other people in the tent. It was absolutely ridiculous. I can’t tell you how much attention we get just being Americans. We get stared at by everyone, we get free things all the time, and everyone wants to tell us hello in English. We continued to wander around the city as the rain picked up looking in stores and going in the shopping mall that ran underground under down town. We walked past a Korean movie theater and were tempted to see a movie in Korean and try to figure out what was going on, we ended up deciding to save it for another day. We found a small shop that had buckets of different sweets and filled up our bags and when we handed it to the man he filled it up even more with extra stuff and charged us like two bucks. We headed in around eight pm ready to wake up early the next morning when we would hike around mount Palgong, the tallest peak in Daegu.

We met at eight am Saturday morning after enjoying our free continental breakfast. Getting around Korean is not nearly as easy as it seems unless you are willing to pay for a taxi, which is basically five dollars. So the plan was to walk to the subway, subway to bus terminal, and bus to the mountain. Easier said than done, the subway was apparently a fifteen minute walk from base. Our directions from the Korean concierge were “walk to big road, LEFT there.” Not much help. So we followed those directions which got us no where so we asked friendly people for help and eventually found our subway. Buying a ticket in a subway with only Korean characters is also challenging. The English button wouldn’t work so we had to ask a friendly lady for help. (Oh and I keep saying we but really I am always the one stuck asking strangers for help.) We spent the next twenty minutes wandering around a three block radius looking for the correct terminal. Third time’s the charm and we found a regular bus stop on a side street. There were a lot of Koreans in hiking gear (expensive hiking gear) so we knew we were in the right place. I was trying to verify we were heading to the right place and started an argument between old men that were pointing to different places on the bus schedule. We got on the right bus and enjoyed standing in our crowded space and being stared at for a half hour, I felt like I was in Italy again. So we begin our hike in the beautiful mountains. We began by hiking up a regular road with tractiony things because it was soo steep. We found the first temple. It was three gorgeous palaces all brightly colored with the typical Asian roof and golden Buddha’s. We had a choice to make, left or right, the right looked woodsier so we continued that way. The paths were steeper and boulder filled than anything we had ever backpacked before. The Koreans do not believe in switchbacks they go straight up. We were all sweating and breathing heavily as these old Koreans hiked right on by. The mountains are a very spiritual place for a lot of Buddhists and they would often stop to pray at different beautiful spots. We found the second temple after like an hour and spent a lot of time looking out over the valley and listening to the sound of chanting monks. We decided to walk on determined to reach the peak which lies at 1193 meters. So we walked on up, and up, and up! The peak of the mountain was something else. You always hear about these huge stone Buddha’s literally on top of a mountain with people praying around it and fruit offerings at the base of the Buddha, and I have officially witnessed it. You continue climbing to the sound of a hundred people chanting and you emerge literally in the clouds. There is a huge stone Buddha surrounded by candles and in front of it our Koreans on mats with prayers beads chanting in unison. You look out and all you see is white until you walk to the edge and the clouds clear up a bit. I remember learning about Buddhism in high school but it is totally different to authentically experience it. We ran into a group of high school boys who knew hardly any English but still managed to communicate the following message. “You are smoking hot, I love you I love you I love you, very hot!” we were the only Americans I had seen all day and stood out a lot. Two old ladies came up to us girls and gave us each a piece of candy, double whammy. We decided it was time to hike down and discovered the path of over a thousand stairs. (when we were picking our route the first time this was the other option, and thank goodness we didn’t select it) These stairs were steep and short, perfect for little feet, but a struggle for everyone else. Going down so many stairs will really kill your calves. So finally, after a long trek, we made it back to the first temple then had to walk down the steep traction ramps we had to walk up, more painful trust me. We hopped back on the bus and headed back into Daegu. We arrived back at the subway station and even though everyone was exhausted we decided to subway to the Daegu arboretum.

This once trash filled space has been transformed into a beautiful garden. We walked a long way to get there from the subway station, devin, james, and I playing the yellow game the whole time. It probably wasn’t worth the long walk but they did have a bamboo garden which was really cool to see. So we walked back to the subway station, subwayed back to our first stop then took the twenty minute walk back to base. My dogs were barking so we decided to stop at a restaurant right outside of base for a meal similar to the night before only this time with rice and pork. This one tasted a little better but I am still not a huge Korean food fan. That night we got popsicles at the Korean seven eleven and fell asleep nice and early.

Sunday morning Jesa and I got up and went to nine am mass. She is Lutheran and I am catholic so we decided we would try to switch off every other weekend. The church was pretty basic; we had to do the embarrassing thing at the end when if you’re new you stand up and introduce yourself in front of everybody. But then we did get a nice Korean holy family stone carving so it was all worth it in the end. After mass we came back and changed and jesa, devin, and I headed off to Aspen park, the mountains we see out of our windows and are like a mile away. We took a taxi and were once again faced with a hiking fork, or more like 5 option fork. Devin decided we should take the least travelled one to get a more authentic experience and off we were. About forty-five minutes in we realized we were no longer on a path and were basically free climbing on our hands and knees up the side of the mountains, but like the troopers we are we pushed on and made it to the top in about an hour and a half. We found a road at the top and rested, we decided to stick to main trails from now on. It had beautiful views of all of daegu, sadly it was slightly cloudy. We came across a group of four old Korean men who waved us over and asked us to sit with them with very broken English. They gave us fruit, its yellow and I don’t know what it is called, and gave us their ice sugarless coffee. They asked, “country country” and “age age” and we answered them and they answered with the ages from 65-70! And they were hiking up in the mountains, incredible. We sat for a while longer than said our good-byes and traveled on. We eventually started walking back down through a boulder stream which was a lot of fun, debating everything the whole way down. We came across a ton of unsafe playground equipment and bridges that were labeled on the map as an amusement park. These bridges had little rope nets and dangled over boulders. Then the playground equipment was super tall up and you had to climb ropes and hanging ladders to get to the top. We walked back into town and hailed a cab back to base when jesa realized her base pass was in the hotel room so I had to walk back to the hotel get her id and walk it back. (it felt familiar) Then we ate subway and spent the evening getting ready for camp, watched television and attempted to plan some of our traveling. This week will be a busy one with camp but I am sure we will do something awesome on the weekend to make it all worth it.

So for now anyong-haseyo (good-bye)

Elizabeth