Mudeung Mountain, Shenandoah River

This week was one filled with many funny encounters with little kids but thankfully, we got some much needed rest on Saturday evening. The two Americans and 3 South Africans who work at Gwangju English Village were so worn out and wasted from the long day of teaching that all of us were joking about the need for a brew. Our Korean coworkers must've been reading our minds because we were surprised with an awesome cake, beer, and champagne to celebrate Teacher's Day (picture forthcoming).

I was so tired that I struggled through eating the equivalent of a piece of cake. The Kiwi was awesome though. Anyway, we spent our Saturday night getting some well-deserved rest. After a lengthy sleep, Christina and I awoke and debated our plans for the weekend. I had a vision of traveling to Seoul and maybe satisfying my need to touch millions of electronics at Techno Mart. After a moment, I realized that a trip to Seoul might need a few minutes of planning. Christina said "abracadabra!" and a moment of religious awakening occurred. We decided to hike at the biggest of Gwangju's mountains, Mt. Mudeung.

After breakfast at The First Alleyway, we took a bus at 11:30 to the area where everyone prepares to hike. There are many trails one can take and we decided to hike to Sae In Bong which was about a 3 or 4 kilometer (1 or 2 miles) walk and 648 meters (2125 Feet) high. So we began our trek but first had to buy some proper hiking gear. Actually, Christina and I just bought a windbreaker to fit in with the locals.

When reading travel books preparing for the trip to Korea, I sensed exaggeration but was wrong. Koreans really have to LOOK like they are hiking and have to dress appropriately. They buy hiking jackets and hiking pants. I saw women wearing multiple hiking scarves in an effort to completely block the sun and men wearing hiking hats. Of course, everyone knows that you have to wear hiking boots! However, I learned that boots will be essential to hiking because my adidas running shoes didn't really cut it amongst the many rocks that we walked over.

Anyway, we began our adventure at noon and took in some of the local scenery.





This is a group of people washing their feet after hiking. The first part of the hike felt like any normal walk we take everyday. There was a bit of an incline but nothing too noticeable. The stream to our right was truly an indicator that today was going to be nature-intensive.

Even though Gwangju has 1.6 million people living here, it doesn't feel like it in our part of town. We live in a quiet part of the city called Pungam. The city still has that feel of a beehive that never stops moving so getting out to Mt. Mudeung was obviously refreshing. We continued walking.







We came to our first tough stretch at about 100 meters. After our first really steep incline, we came to this large set of stairs. Earlier in the day, the nice man at First Alleyway told us that much of the hiking trails only recently had these protective ropes installed to help hikers along the way. Thankfully, we just arrived here a little over a month ago and didn't have the experience of traveling without protection.







Christina and I kept pushing on and forced ourselves to keep moving.








It grew tougher but we reached the top!







Uh.... Or did we??? Oh god, why? We didn't reach the top! Did that mean that we had to keep moving??? We kept moving.







This time we were at the top of Sae In Bong. I sat down and looked around without speaking. Staring into nothing occupied my time while Christina sat near the edge and stared out into the vast mountain range here. Sae In Bong might not have been the highest a human has traveled but I can understand why monks climb mountains and meditate.







Two friends smoking cigarettes and having a drink on a rock at the top.







An old man was sitting behind me having his moment of meditation. So beautiful! This truly is what I want to do now, forever, yesterday! I loved this moment.





Unfortunately, what goes up must come down. And you know what, why did it have to be so damn rocky at the start? This is why Koreans buy hiking boots, I thought. It took us roughly 1 1/2 hours to get up to the top and we spent about an hour at the top just taking it all in thinking about everything in the world.




To get down, seemed like a race. At other times, we were carefully traversing winding and narrow staircases to reach the bottom.

Location:Chungjang-dong,Gwangju,South Korea

Green Tea and MORE Green Tea

Taken from a trail opposite the tea plantation we came for... tee hee

With our extended vacation, we planned on visiting Seoul for the first time. However, those plans fell through and we had to find something else to do here in lovely Gwangju.

Thanks to this week being full of Holidays (May 5th was Children's Day and May 10th is Buddha's Birthday), we were given some time off from our jobs. We only had one work day which many people referred to as a sandwich day since Friday was packed in between days off.

With all this said, we had to make something out of our rare holiday and decided to go to Boseong for its Green Tea Festival. Boseong is apparently the perfect place for Green Tea to grow - according to the pamphlet given to us as we entered the plantation.

Piney.

 This is part of the beautiful array of trees we encountered as we walked into the plantation. The man who established this field planted around 3 million trees here as a "shelterbelt". This tea plantation is known as Daehon Dawon and honestly, it's beautiful. 

I need a duffle bag for my stash of Green Tea. 

But it kept going. Yes, there were these amazing views throughout the whole place but something kept telling me that we had to keep going up. Luckily, we had a path and people to follow. The first picture at the top was from the trail we took by mistake. We had to climbing a pretty large staircase to get there as well so that was discouraging. Digression!


Anyway, we kept moving after taking some pictures. 

Keep moving!

So we kept moving towards the top. In case I didn't show that part yet, here's what we were trying to climb. 

I never felt so high.

Of course this isn't the highest peak in Korea but to me (out of shape), I felt like this was Mt. Everest. This experience truly woke me up as to what needs to happen. I need to do this stuff more because it may have been a grueling experience but truly worth it. I was too tired to take pictures at the top but trust me, it was rough. Here are some pics from the top. 

So High.

Behind those mountains is Deukryang Bay. Something says we'll be back here.

Personally, the tea plantation is far prettier from below than above. From the looks of the tourist pamphlet, there's loads to do around Boseong. Anybody wanting a good day-trip should travel to this area because it's serves a great example as one of Korea's many beautiful places. 


-Carl

Location:Pungam-dong,Gwangju,South Korea

Dust in the wind and food

One of the "Eight Views of Gwangju Reservoir"

As we get closer to summer, I'm starting to notice the beautiful scenery appearing around Gwangju. We hiked a bit up a mountain nearby and were able to take some decent pictures from there.

The Guus Hiddink Stadium in the background.Another shot from above the Lake. This road will eventually lead to Downtown Gwangju.

Compared to the beginning of April, this city definitely looks like Summer is approaching. However, there is one last thing to experience before the heat arrives.

Dust! Lots of Dust!

Satellite photo of the dust cloud of 2006

Today was supposed to be a very dusty day but I didn't really notice a difference in air quality. Gwangju seems to have very clean air compared to other metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, we wore masks for most of the day until we realized it wasn't dangerous to breathe without protection.

Preparing for the worst. All we need now is a bomb shelter full of food.

So outside of working, we've done lots of exploring and have successfully made a few ex-pat friends. It's good to meet up with people and talk about stuff you have in common.

As far as food goes, I think I've found my favorite restaurant for the moment. It's a Shabu-Shabu place in Lotte Mart's Food Court.

I can't get enough of this stuff.

Lots of food put into bowl of broth = awesome

Take the cooked beef and veggies and place them onto your rice paper.

Roll into a ball and you have a rice burrito full of amazingness.

As of this post, I'm putting that restaurant down as my favorite. We had an amazing there today and spent a little more than usual (about 25 bucks for this). It's totally worth it and considering we don't pay for lunch during the week (our school covers that), this is a splurge that we can handle. One thing about Korea is that if you take more people to these types of meals, the cost per person decreases. So if you want Shabu Shabu and want to save money, bring a few friends and you get a cheaper yet amazing meal.

One Week Down and Many More to Go!

Originally posted April 18, 2011


(Above: Christina and I enjoying the beautiful Gwangju Reservoir)

As of today, I believe we are one week into this experiment in Korea. This is also the first day that I'm using my wireless keyboard for the iPad so it's taking a moment for me to get used to the Mac-style of functioning. To start, it's definitely been an interesting first week here in Korea. Gwangju is a beautiful city with very clean air and at the time of writing, I haven't personally witnessed any rain. If you want to time visiting Korea, visit the southern provinces during April's second week because the cherry blossoms are in bloom and spring has just arrived. We were told that the first week was definitely colder.
The day after we arrived was my introduction to Gwangju FC. They play in the city's World Cup stadium that was built as one of the many to help Korea co-host the 2002 Soccer World Cup.


(Photo taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/21118392@N03/2053864045/)

It's a beautiful structure and I'll have pictures posted of it when I visit the stadium for their next home match. This week they were away and I haven't checked the scores yet to know what happened. The team lives in an apartment near ours and it's always cool to see them out in our neighborhood.

I have to say that it's sad to think that this is their first year as a club. That stadium seems to be used for a variety of reasons (today there was a marathon held there) but I feel that it was a white elephant. It's a 44,000 seater stadium and I attended a match with roughly 2,000 other people. The match ended 0-0 but was filled with many near-misses on both sides. I said to a Korean gentleman that this must be an exciting season (since it's the first) because nobody knows what to expect from this team! As I write this, two players just walked into the coffee shop where I'm sitting. I can tell because of the blue training pants they are wearing even though they aren't wearing the blue jackets with "Gwangju FC" printed on the back.

I do feel like this is a great opportunity for me to figure out how to teach children and adolescents the language that I've grown up speaking. Some may think that's easy but it's very tough when you have a big group of kids who are just staring at you as if in a Quantum Physics class being taught in Farsi. This is a very fulfilling job though because I truly appreciate the innocence of these kids. Korean children seem to school for much longer in a day than American children. If you are a teacher working in America, convince your students that they will have to school in Korea if they misbehave. We live across the street from a large public school and the kids are there until 8 in the evening. However, I can't really criticize because it's not my culture. I remember anxiously awaiting the final bells at 3 when I was in school and I couldn't imagine attending for 5 hours past that.

One thing you can't ask for is the dedication of my company's president to make us feel accommodated. They provide us with daily transport to work (definitely cheaper than a bus or taxi!) and we had a picnic at a temple this Friday. The scenes were truly amazing and I should have some pictures fairly soon. They even brought some amazing food! It was a great experience and truly gave me a fine impression of the lengths they travel to please us.

Finally, I just want to say that I'm very happy here and think that this place will actually whip me into shape. I think my first foot blister has developed from all the walking and I have to say it's well deserved. Outside of walking around the reservoir almost daily and many trips around our part of Gwangju (we live in Pungam dong), my feet will get a much-needed rest this evening. I hope this blog serves its purpose and that I continue to write here. I haven't even expressed all of my thoughts or feelings on this past week because so much has happened.

For now, Anyong Gah Seh Yo! (I think that's the correct romanization of "good-bye")

-Carl