tales from Korea

Last year the school’s annual three day trip was cancelled due to the swine flu pandemic. I was looking forward to going on the trip before as it was a good chance to break the ice with the students and have some fun, missing classes for three days is also something I wouldn’t complain about! So this year the chance came around again and the trip was set for three days in April — Monday to Wednesday, and a choice to go with either the new first grade students or the second graders. I wanted to get to know the first year students a little better, especially considering there are probably more better English speakers there then in the second grade. But the first year’s trip destination weren’t going very far, just outside Seoul and not moving around too much making it sound relaxing, if a little boring. The second graders however were heading down pretty far south to a very rural part of Korea called 남원 (Namwon) to see some cultural sites — temples, a castle, a mountain area and the largest steelworks plant in Asia. That tickled my fancy enough to go with the second graders and they signed me up. Funnily enough, they never even asked me at the beginning if I wanted to go, for some reason assuming that I wouldn’t be interested. But they were happy that I was and they made the arrangements quickly to have me come along.

Unfortunately the advantages of going on a trip further away, being able to see places otherwise you may have missed brings one inherit disadvantage, having to sit on a bus for so long. The whole trip was probably more then 50% being on the bus and the rest a mix of rushed site visits, eating and sleeping. I felt like a gleeful tourist the whole time, getting a free trip and seeing some great places, the students on the other hand hated pretty much everything. What can you expect from teenagers though? I never heard so much complaining in my life: “Teacher, my legs hurt”, “Teacher, I’m tired”, “Teacher, I’m bored”, “Teacher, I feel sick”, “Teacher, I hate the bus”, “Teacher, I’m hungry”. I think all that was missing was “Teacher, are we there yet?”. In true Korean ‘balli’ ‘balli’ fashion, as I briefly mentioned above, the visits to the actual sites were really short, maybe about 30 minutes or less at each one. Also the general plan seemed to just let students run loose around the place and not really teach them much. There were tour guides, but it seemed that they didn’t really tell them much besides what time to come back to the bus. I did find it a little strange that we travelled so far to spend such a short amount of time at the locations, but, alas, it was still worth it.

Take a look at some of the photos below, it shows some of the places we went to. I still have to get film developed so I might add more later.

The Taebaek (태백) mountains form the backbone of the Korean peninsula and offer some of the best walking and hiking trails around. We wanted a chance to go skiing again before the season ended and we stumbled upon a new resort opened close to Taebaek city called the O2 Resort… yeah, like the western mobile operator but this has nothing to do with it. The place only opened last year which meant there was probably going to be less people then the overcrowded Muju resort we visited before. We also managed to book a room (albeit for only one night) at the resort itself, overlooking the slopes.

The drive over was long, but not as painful as Muju as it was motorway for the majority, and only regional roads for the last third of the journey. The view on the drive over was like Muju – just wonderful. Beautiful, misty mountains, clean air rushing through the car’s air vents. Unfortunately, the ‘mist’ never seemed to lift and on driving closer to the resort itself the mist turned to a thick fog – visibility was about 30 meters. When we eventually got to the resort itself, visibility was less then 10 meters. Cars travelled at a snails pace to avoid crashing; we found a parking space and had to walk almost blindly but eventually we reached the resort. Conditions were bad, it had been raining heavily the night before meaning icy slopes and even though most of the slopes were open, they strongly recommended we sit it out and hope it clears by tomorrow. It couldn’t be worse really – the worst weather for skiing, pretty disheartening. We stayed in, drank beer and played “The Game of Life” which Sooha loves and brought along. As a side note, I kept suing Jayeon in the game, and she got really annoyed with me and stayed that way for the rest of the night!

The next morning we opened the curtains to check on our wall of fog – visibility had increased and was now about 25 meters or so. It still sucked, and I felt like we should just give up and go back home at the time. You can’t really ski in that condition, it’s too dangerous. But, Jayeon’s mom convinced us that we should go anyway since we came all the way. The resort was booked up so we had to leave and find another place first before heading to the slopes. We checked into this dinky and high-tech (If quite bizarre) motel; the options for staying were 1. Room with no beds or 2. Room with one bed and the Internet. We chose the second option of course. It was a small room with one huge queen sized bed, a massive 42″ LCD TV, a Dell computer and monitor, a fridge and a strange bathroom with no lock and it was very open to look in on. Also, the ceiling had a kind of plastic reflective quality to it through a section near the end of the bed (Not exactly a mirror but you could tell that this room was designed for a more, ahm, intimate setting). We got kitted out and headed to the slopes! Take a look at this map:

We hit up the easiest Dream 1 slope first just to get warmed up and check the visibility. The ride down was easy and a good way to warm up but the visibility itself was pretty poor. Everyone had to ski (Or snowboard) down at a snails pace and try to avoid the icy patches. We went up and down completing the dream circuit a couple of times before taking a break for lunch. During the lunch time, it started snowing – the fog (essentially the cloud holding the snow) was finally bailing its load. Almost instantly you could see the difference, visibility increased to about 200 meters. We went out again and this time took a gondala up to the top of the mountian to try the intermediate Head and Happy slope. It was glorious – the freshly laid snow covered most of the ice and finally we could see! You could see far enough ahead of you now to ski a lot faster, the course is a bit more challenging and was faster and more fun to fly down. Also, my skiing has developed quite a bit – I’ve stopped ‘A’ skiing altogether and parallel ski almost all of the way down, with better control over turning and braking. I loved straight skiing down the last part of the slope, it’s a bit scary but I must reach speeds of maybe 60 km/h – great fun!

The resort itself (of what we saw) is absolutely outstanding. It’s only a year old, the facilities and slopes are top notch. I advise anyone in Korea who wants to go skiing to hit up this resort next season as it’s bound to begin getting swamped in the next few years. As Jayeon said “Its not that famous yet but once Koreans start to learn about it they’ll come here in droves”.

After the skiing we also did a 10k hike through the mountains, beautiful scenery and a great walk.

Overall if you’re a fan of great scenery, getting out into nature and want to ski at a top resort – head over to Taebaek 태백!

It’s nice to be finished up at university, and our planned trip to Praha (Prague – Czech Republic) was a good opportunity for a bit of a break. The trip was really great, but mostly for unexpected reasons – the guesthouse we stayed in turned out to be almost more enjoyable then our main touristy objectives in visiting the city. Unfortunately Praha was raining pretty heavily for most of the time and we ended up feeling pretty miserable, squelching through the rain, cold and damp for most of the day. Besides the terrible weather, though, Praha is a wonderful place that I’d definitely recommend visiting.

The Praha OK guesthouse is situated in a normal, almost suburban style house – keeping with the Korean style of making you feel at home while staying there, they include three meals and clothes washing. On arrival we were greeted by the older co-owner of the guesthouse, who welcomed us, showed us our beds (separate for men and women) and provided us with a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee. He prepared lunch for us right away, and we sat down to a wonderful meal. I was really surprised, even though I knew breakfast, lunch and dinner were included in the stay price, the meals were quite elaborate and delicious; I would have paid good money to get a meal like it in a normal restaurant. After lunch JaYeon and I headed out to explore the city and on arriving back to the guesthouse we were greeted by a few others who had also arrived, all very surprised at my apparent good attempts at Korean. We all sat down to dinner and afterwards relaxed around on the couches chatting and discussing various things, but decided to head to bed early as we were very tired from getting up early that morning to catch our flight.

The last day was the best during our stay, on the first night Jun-Min, the younger co-owner and I were discussing various aspects of Korean and Irish culture, we were brought onto the topic of Korean Soju which I have had once before in India. He said to me we have to drink some together, but JaYeon said Soju is very expensive so she doesn’t think we will get around to doing it. During the meal on the last night of our stay, a wonderful table presented us – everyone had their own side dishes of homemade kimchi, paste for Samgapsal and another side dish of which I can’t remember. We also had our plate of sliced carrot strips and cucumber, not to mention the sticky rice and seaweed soup. I really like Samgapsal, but still haven’t got use to the idea (or sensation) of stuffing your mouth in one go with a mound of lettuce, pork belly, spicy sauce and rice. Glasses of wine were poured (and broken), and suddenly a large two-litre bottle of Soju was taken out by Jun-Min! He poured everyone a glass and we started to tuck in. It was a beautiful meal and we had great fun, with Korean and English being spoken and everyone laughing, eating and drinking crazily. I forgot for a while about the etiquette requiring a host to always fill up an empty glass; I must have drank about 10 or more shots… with many “Keonbae’s!!” in-between. It was a great experience – you would expect this with a close group of friends, but here staying in a guesthouse they treated us like we were really their friends, and the other Korean’s stated they felt very comfortable eating and talking with me. My small bit of Korean language but large interest in Korean culture appears to be paving the way to learning and sharing more with them.

The Praha OK guesthouse is located about 15 minutes north west of Praha centre, and costs €15 per night.