Day 91: Ski Trip

This week we had three days off for the lunar new year (called Seollal in Korea), which is, as far as we know, the last non-weekend break we will have until summer. Anyway, we got invited by our friend Brittany to go on a ski trip with some other teachers we hadn't met before.

We took the bus to Busan after work on Friday and stayed in a love motel near where the bus was going to leave at 5:30 the following morning. Love motels are really common here. Their purpose is exactly what you think it is. They're a bit overdone as far as the decorations go--lots of lights and mirrors--but they're relatively cheap, and they're quite clean. Very convenient for what we needed it for. We shared a fairly big room with 4 others. In the (early) morning we got on the bus for Muju, the ski resort. As we drove north, we started to see bigger mountains, and what we were both looking forward to most: SNOW! We were worried we were going to go all winter without it. There wasn't a ton, but it was definitely there.

We got off the bus at the resort and pretty soon we were ready to ski! I (Steven) have only ever been skiing once, and that was in 6th grade, so I started out small. Fortunately, Sarah was patient and tried to help me learn. Slowly I kind of got the hang of it. I eventually got off the bunny hill and to the easiest hill with a chair lift (my first experience with that). Sarah did a few bigger hills without me while I ate lunch and practiced a bit more. I fell a bunch and never quite got it, but it was fun anyways.

That night we went out for dinner with the whole group. There were 9 of us all together and with a group that big, sometimes simple things like dinner become a lot more complicated than they need to be...but we figured it out and the waiter was patient with us.

Korean meals come with all sorts of fun side dishes!

After dinner, we went to a Noraebang, which is the Korean name for karaoke. I actually had a pretty bad sore throat so I wasn't super pumped for it, but I decided to give it a go anyway and let loose with good ol' Livin' on a Prayer. It was actually a lot of fun. After that we went back to the guesthouse and hit the hay. After about 2 hours of sleep the night before plus a full day of skiing and being social, we were pretty wiped out!

We slept in the next morning to find that nobody else was awake yet. We decided to go for a hike since our guesthouse was actually in a national park. We walked up an icy/snowy road through the woods for a long time. It was fairly gradual and followed a really pretty river.

Eventually we got to a temple. The original temple had been built in the 600s, but was burned to the ground in the Korean War. There was this big gate near the site of the old temple:

We climbed up a bunch of stairs to the new temple complex. There were a bunch of buildings. The architecture and the setting were both very beautiful.

The painting on the right of this building was actually quite racist: a bunch of people going to hell, which is guarded by savage-looking black people

Most of the paintings, though, were just plain beautiful.

Behind the temple was a much steeper trail to Hyangjeokbong, which, at 1614m, is the 12th-highest mountain in South Korea. The trail went almost straight up the mountain; switchbacks aren't really a thing here. As we approached the top, we saw a huge crowd of people and discovered that the mountain is only a short hike from the top of the highest ski lift at the resort. We were a bit disappointed that there were so many people there, but we also enjoyed the knowledge that we had earned the incredible views a lot more than the people who took the gondola about 90% of the way up.

The trail to the right of the picture is where we came up

On the far left you can see the buildings at the top of the ski lift, and the slope snaking away from it

A nice Korean guy took our picture. 

One of the buildings and one of the lifts at the top of the ski slope; you can see the top of the mountain we hiked up in the background.

After our hike, we met some of the others at the top of the ski lift for lunch, since there was a restaurant up there. It worked out better than we could have planned! After lunch, went our separate ways for a while. I went with CJ, one of the other teachers, back up the mountain for a bit, as he hadn't seen the top yet. Sarah went with Brittany to a coffee shop for a bit. Later on we went to a great outdoor spa with a couple different hot tubs, a pool, saunas, and even an ice pool. It was quite refreshing.

In the evening, after we had eaten dinner, we headed back to where we needed to catch the shuttle bus that would take us back to our guest house. We ended up on a road parallel to the ski lifts, but significantly farther away from the parking lot where we needed to be. At this point, there were only 5 of us. We decided our best option would be to walk through the snow under the ski lifts back down to the parking lot. CJ went first and took a huge front-flip-tumble through the snow. Once we got to the bottom of the lift, we ran into a group of Koreans who were sledding on the hill with pieces of cardboard, cafeteria trays, and a shovel scoop. They got us to join without any complaint, and we sledded with them for a while. It was probably my favorite part of the whole weekend. It was one of those things that I see on a travel show and think "Wow, that's awesome!"

We didn't do much of anything our last day. Everyone slept way in. Sarah went for a run. I found an American guy in the lobby to watch some of the Super Bowl with. We went to another coffee shop. We had gotten used to the indecision of our big group, so we thought we were just taking a while to decided what to do and we ended up never doing anything. It was okay, though. It was a very relaxing sort of day.

The view from the parking lot where we waited to catch the bus back (our group is in the bottom right)

All in all, it was a good weekend. We did some skiing, some great hiking, met some new people, and saw some snow. Mission accomplished.