Adventure or Disaster

It's been 5 months of living and working in the ROK and I must admit, it has lost its glitz and glamor. I live here now, so it has just been life as anyone else knows it. I don't spend my weekends at the local tourist attractions anymore. I usually meet up with the girls, go shopping, have coffee, nothing too exciting; ya know, just life. I decided that it was about time that I got back into the swing of things. Korea is bigger than just Seoul, so I decided a weekend trip was the cure for 'just life'. I registered for a trip with a local company that takes weekend trips around Korea.

We were headed to Mt. Taebaek (about 4 hours north of Seoul). The thought of having to be up at 6am on a Saturday morning is not my cup of tea, but it had to be done. I headed to the bus and by 8:30 we had all the passengers and we were off. The schedule was to stop 'mid-day' for lunch and arrive at our first destination around 1:30pm. 1:30 came and went and we had not yet stopped for lunch, nor were we anywhere near our destination! There was a 100km traffic jam and our bus crawled down the highway. Along the way, we did see many sights; mountains, flowers, local crops, and the occasional guy taking a leak on the side of the road.
At 3 we stopped for lunch and at 4:30 we arrived at our destination (8 hours later)!!!! It was quite the long bus ride. And of course no trip would be complete without the few lost souls that join your trip. I know I can be a mean person and I try not to judge people (too harshly), but some of these people....

We got to explore a cave and wore some snazzy helmets - good thing for those helmets, I might have wound up with another scar on my head without it! Somehow I fell behind my friends and ended up walking along with someone who told me all about caves and the formations; lucky me! I know she was just being nice, but I don't care aobut caves and stalgmite formations!!!!
After caving, we went to the hotel and had dinner, then headed to a Korean cinema festival. There was supposed to be English subtitles, but that didn't happen. We were lucky that the movie was easy enough to understand without the subtitles!

The next day was to be jam-packed with that days events and the ones we missed from the day before. So our hike would start at 7am rather than 8! Another early weekend morning wake up call! We were told this hike would be 'not too difficult'. Not too difficult to Koreans does not mean the same thing as not too difficult to Americans, especially me! The hike began and the first 2km were completely uphill. I know this is a mountain, but holy cow!!!!! I quickly fell behind the group, but decided to persevere.
At the 2km mark, there was a temple. I decided to look around for a bit; unfortunately, I should have spent that 30 minutes heading to the top of the mountain. The group was on a tight schedule, and when I was 0.3km from the top, the guides told me I had to turn around and head to the bottom! 0.3km!!!!! I cant believe i didn't make it to the top! It put a damper on the rest of the trip (for me anyway). I was pretty proud of myself and the 7.6km I did hike, but I didn't get to the top! And what's worse is, I saw the picutes some people took at the top and they were so beautiful! Stupid temple!

Next on the schedule was to makeup the events from the day before. We were supposed to go to windmill hill and to the sunflower festival. We headed to windmill hill and were instructed to pile into cars to take us to the windmills. There were about 12 of us that piled into the back of a pickup truck and held on for dear life as we drove through the clouds to get to the windmills. The truck stalled out 3 times on the way to the top (on a one-way road). About 3/4th of the way to the top, they told us we had to get out and walk until the traffic cleared up. We had to walk through the spillway (between the rows and rows of cabbage and the road)! When we finally made it to the top, it was so cloudy that we could not see anything!!! It was kinda fun walking through the clouds though.

When we got to the bus, our tour guide told us that we were going to skip the sunflowers; they weren't really blooming and we needed to head back to Seoul. It only took us 5 hours to get back to Seoul - longer than the 3.5 it was supposed to take, but a lot better than the 8 it took us to get there!

It was nice to get out of the city, but what an interesting trip...
Pictures to come soon.