Mountain Climbing and Tea Making

So, we made it through our first week of school!  We have settled into our apartment, and we are starting to get the hang of things at school.

We went on our first trip this past weekend with a travel group called Discover Korea.  Even though we have only been here a week, it was nice to get out of the city and breathe some fresh air!

We left Friday night and took a bus to a little town in the mountains.  We stayed at a minbak, which is a cheap place to sleep!  We crammed 9 people to a room, where we slept on a heated floor.  Not my idea of comfort, but it was definitely an experience.

We woke up early and headed toward the mountain.  It took us about 6 hours to climb up three peaks of Naejangsan Mountain and back down again!  I could definitely feel the burn after that, but it was well worth it!  Although it was foggy, the view was amazing.  The leaves were starting to change, so the trees were beautiful.  

Koreans were having picnics everywhere on the mountain.  They ALL involved alcohol!  They love their booze.

I climbed that!  If you know me and my fear of heights, you know that this was a BIG deal.  You can't see it here, but there is one spot where you have to walk across a little bridge that is hundreds of feet off the ground!

Lanterns at the Naejang

san Temple

You could write a wish to Buddha on these slates.

Saturday afternoon we headed to Nagan folk village.  This was an old village where the people lived like Koreans did 100 years ago.  They had straw roof homes for us to stay in.  We slept on the heated floor again, but this one was much nicer.  The villagers did have electricity and running water, but they did their dishes outside and lived a very simple life.  The men worked in the garden or repairing their roof all day, while the women cooked and cleaned.

The cute little Korean lady we stayed with.

Kimchi pots!

Happy birthday Soju for Jeff!

Sunday morning we left the folk village and headed to a tea plantation called Bosung Tea Making Farm House.  It was a pretty small plantation, but they were famous for their tea.  A box of tea sold for $1300 in China!  They are the only tea plantation in the world that uses gold dust to make their tea.  

We provided free labor for them.  No, not really, they let us take home all the flowers we picked to make our own tea.

This was a $20 cup of tea.  I had four, since they were free for us!

Me, Jeff, Megan and our tea biscuits.

After leaving this tea plantation, we went to a huge green tea plantation called Bohyang Dawon Green Tea Field.  We had green tea lunch and green tea ice cream here.

We had an awesome trip and learned a lot over the weekend.  Here are a few things we learned:

1.  Koreans love to share with foreigners.  They would chase us down the mountain to make sure we got
     one of their oranges, crackers, rice wine, etc.

2.  Koreans like to take pictures of foreigners.  We were in the background of many photos that were set
     up, specifically, with us in the background.  We were in the convenience store and a girl was
     snapping photos of us with her cell phone.

3.  Koreans love their alcohol, especially the men.  Any night of the week you will see business men out
     to dinner with many empty bottles of Soju on their table.  They also smell of alcohol pretty bad.

4.  You will get a million side dishes with every meal, and kimchi is always one of them.

5.  You can have a full meal just by taking samples at the grocery store.  They are also "all you can eat."

6.  Koreans are very flexible.  They can sit on the floor cross-legged for hours at dinner.  My legs fall
     asleep after 2 minutes.

I'm sure we will continue to learn a lot more over the next year.  I'll keep you posted.