So this post is about last weekend, and since this weekend is rapidly approaching, we thought we'd post now, so we didn't get too far behind.
The delay is mostly because we had to wait until we resized and uploaded the pictures we're about to share with you lovely people.
Anyway, moving on. Friday night was pretty routine. We went out with the other foreigners for a few drinks and had a fair bit of fun.
Saturday was when the adventures really started. Due to whatever holiday caused it to be a long weekend, there was a big to do at the park near our place. We went for a bit of a walk to see what was going on, and there was a stage set up and a bunch of seats on the lawn. The first act was unusual in that I have never seen 75-100 people entertained by small children skipping rope to English songs for at least half an hour. After returning from our walk to find these small children STILL skipping, we noticed that the next act involved these adorable children practicing sword form on the the grass nearby before their big performance started.
About 10 minutes later, the skippers left and the tiny swordsmen stepped on the stage. They had a much shorter performance than the skippers, but were quite good, managing to stay mostly together throughout their demonstration:
Once the tiny ones were finished, there was a group of adults who were demonstrating next. That was super cool. Almost all of their forms demonstrations ended with them slicing to bits either a bamboo stick about 3-4 inches thick, or a 6-10 inch-thick bundle of straw, with their various weapons. They also had a pair of archers who would stand with their backs to the target (in this case a picture of a tiger's head) and then spin around together and fire, never missing, which was important.
This guy:
...who doesn't necessarily seem all that impressive in this picture, was actually able, as a part of his form, stab his katana right through the centre of the bamboo staff with one hand, which is much more difficult than it might seem to some of you. Really impressive.
These guys were also really quite impressive. Big long-staff battle axe things (anyone out there help me out with the correct name for this weapon?) and much jumping around and spinning before finally slicing to bits their own hunk of straw. Quite neat. The guy on the end must have been super-important or something cause he had to cut three clumps, instead of just one.
So, after the stabbing coolness had ended the music volume increased and it was difficult to hear ourselves think even in our apartment as the music was so loud.
Why stay in Cheongju and suffer from very bad English music when you can take a bus to Seoul to eat dinner?
And in half an hour we were on our way in exceptionally comfortable, pseudo-airline seats as
shown below:
One of the first things that we noticed as we entered the Seoul subway system was a rather large warning sign above a glass cabinet-type thing.
In case you can't quite make out the creepiness of it all, it's a sign giving instructions on how to use the emergency gas masks that they have generously supplied. Observe a close-up:
I'm not sure what's creepier, the fact that they have complimentary gas masks in the subway stations, or the fact that there were only about 30 of them. I'll let you be the judge.
Upon arriving in Itaewon - the Island of English in the heart of Korea - we promptly found an Indian restaurant and proceeded to devour an incredibly delicious dinner of various curries, butter chicken, nan bread, rice and the best gulab jamin (Indian desserts) that have ever been tasted, anywhere. Thoroughly stuffed (this particular restaurant was an all-you-can eat buffet for around $12), we decided to go for a walk around town to give ourselves time to feel a little less huge before hopping back on a bus to come home.
As we were walking down the main street (just as a quick reminder, Itaewon is in Seoul - a city of over 11 million people) we hear some English folks calling after us. We didn't turn around, cause they weren't clearly talking to us. Until, that is, they yelled "Trent University!" which made us spin around quite instantly. The girls that were calling we had never met, but the guy looked vaguely familiar. Turns out that Ryan had an English class with him in 3rd year at Trent. The three of them were up visiting a friend of theirs that lived in Seoul, a guy named Simon that was at our TESL course in Peterborough, and who we knew from Trent as well. Very weird. We didn't even know that he was living in Seoul.
Such a small world. We ended up spending time hanging out with them which was tonnes of unexpected fun. Unfortunately, another unforeseen event was that of the subway and bus station closing for the night around 12:00. When we realized this at 2:00 am in the morning we decided to get a hotel room. Unfortunately the area that we were in at the time had hotels where rooms ran between 300 000 to 200 000 won. As the bus station opened at 6:00 the next morning we decided that our best option was to dance the night away in Itaewon as all the bars are open until around 4:00 and then a few stay open until 5:30. At 5:30 we waited for the subway to open with several other individuals, most of whom looked as though they had been out all night too.
After arriving back in Cheoungju we crashed for a few hours and then ran to the church retreat for the Sunday Monday. We stayed in a beautiful smaller country church that was overlooked by mountains.
The food they served was fantastic which was such a relief. We didn't get to do as much hiking as we would have liked but we have a few pictures.
The first is a tomb - they bury their dead sitting up into the side of the mountains like this:
This one was taken from the side of a mountain as we climbed up it. On the other side of the valley there was a ginseng field being overlooked by a hillside cemetery featuring more of the peculiar burial mounds. These ones had headstones, though.
Well, that was last weekend. There will be another post coming fairly soon, as we've accumulated several pictures and stories, but we don't want to bog down this post with anything else. So keep your eyes peeled.
bye!