Goodbye Winter

The weather has been so great lately, nice and warm, don't even really need a jacket during the days. It is, however, yellow dust season, which I'm not sure I understand but apparently it's dust that blows over from China. Personally I think it might just be pollen and typical hay fever and Korea is just trying to pass the blame onto another country for nature's problems.

Anyhow on the weekend we went to Gyeoraksan National Park for some mountain climbing and it was great because it was actually the Cherry Blossom Festival because all of the trees are in bloom and it was quite beautiful. We weren't, however, prepared for the instensiveness that was the mountain, we got caught up in the tourist moment and forgot about the endurance mountains can sometimes take. This mountain took us five hours to climb! We got to the peak in just under two hours and then discovered that to complete the trail we actually had to go up and down three peaks in total. By the time we reached the third peak night fall was setting in and we were starving for some Indian food that we had planned on afterwards. The entire way down was all rock and my joints were killing me by the time we reached the bottom. We made it to the Indian restaurant by about nine o'clock and were turned away because they had had a busy night and didn't have food left. We were heartbroken, but hungry, so we went and devoured some Chinese food, which was a close second to Indian.

Even though the mountain was pretty intense I was disappointed with my exhaustion afterwards, so I decided that I was going to start doing the mountains in my neighorhood on a more regular basis. So each morning I've been out there hiking up and it's been a great change from the gym, plus I think I'm even getting a little bit of a tan on my face, which is great being that there are no tanning beds here. This coming weekend we are going to a different national park, in a different province and going to tackle the mountain there, which is supposed to be a good hike and there is a suspension bridge which I'm excited about because we had planned to go to it way back in November but never did because it was so far away. Plus I only have six weeks left here so we are trying to make the most of them so hopefully I will have some entertaining things to write about in the coming weeks, besides drinking and poker!