Mountain Adventures

Last week, I discovered that Koreans have a strange hobby for a country of people who love the city: they like to hike. And you would never know it from looking at the land, but there are a lot of mountain trails near my house. Last Thursday I went hiking after school with Aftan, who is the athletic director and the second youngest here after me. Meet Aftan... and ignore the fact that we both look scary in this picture.

We started off from a paved bike path that goes through several farms, but we kept seeing these small dirt paths go off into the woods every so often. So we decided to have an adventure and take one. It was a dirt path a little narrower than we are, and significantly steeper than the bike trail. We went up past more farms and burial grounds until we got to the top of a mountain. The path forked every so often, so we kept picking the one that looked the coolest. As soon as the sun was starting to set, we made it to a brightly-painted lookout tower on top of the mountain, overlooking the town and the air force base. We kept on going along the top of the mountain, but when it kept getting darker and darker, we started trying to find a path down the mountain other than the way we came. We weren't sure we could find our way back in the dark since the trail was so small and we had randomly chosen our path. When we saw a sign at a split in the road, we picked the direction that pointed toward a college Aftan was familiar with, but after that the path split a few more times. We were getting kind of freaked out... picture climbing Sharp Top in the dark, lost, and with the hugest spiders in the world in the trees above your head. Well students, we're missing two teachers today because they're still wandering around in the mountains... But eventually one of the paths lead to the bottom of the mountain a little bit outside of town, where Aftan knew where we were so we could get back home. I'm not sure how many miles we walked but it took over 3 hours.

Saturday afternoon I went back by myself to try to find the lookout tower again and take pictures. I found out the trails are on Boraksan mountain, and it's some kind of park. It was pretty crowded on Saturday, though from the stares I get I don't guess many white people go there. Overnight, the temperature outside suddenly dropped like 40 degrees and everyone pulled out their parkas. It's not too bad in the daytime... maybe around 50. But the Koreans think it's nice so they are spending a lot of time outside.

It is also time to harvest the rice. First we saw people doing it by hand in the fields by school, but then they got out the big machines. If you ever wanted to know what harvesting rice looked like, here are a couple pictures.

On Sunday, I went to church in Seoul with the Spaldings. A lot of the people from SYME go there. I really enjoyed it... it is another small church, but very good and there are a lot more Koreans there than at the 2 English churches here in Songtan. But it is still a long way every week (it took a little less than an hour driving, but about 1.5 hours back on the subway), so I don't know yet what I will end up doing. I really have 3 choices and all of them seem to be great churches. After church, I rode back on the subway with the Hawkins, and we stopped for lunch in Suwon. It was great to see everyone again. All righty... until next time...