keeping up with Ellen: Chuseok vacation

Finally the weekend! Milton is away for he weekend in Suwon catching up with Adam who is here from Canada to visit his sister, and I am more than happy to have the apartment to myself and to finally catch up on a few things I’ve been meaning to do. I’ve spent about 4 ½ hours on the phone so far trying to get back in touch with people, and still have a few more calls to make today. I’m also finally finding the time to post a few things on my blog.

If you’ve been checking Milton’s blog, some of what I have to tell will be old news because he seems to have more time than me during the week while he is at school to update his blog and does it more often than I do.

Last weekend was the Korean Chuseok holiday, when Koreans return to their home towns to visit family and celebrate the harvest – like the Canadian thanksgiving I suppose. Korean women don’t like this holiday too much because tradition states that they must visit their mother-in-laws before visiting their own mothers, and because the women have to do all the cooking all weekend while the men drink and play games. Family gatherings are quite big and meals often have to feed 20 people or more, and they eat ALL weekend, it’s not just one meal.

The holiday gave Milton a 4 day weekend and me, a 5 day weekend, so we decided to get off the mainland for a few days and we headed to Jeju Island for a mini vacation. We ran into lots of other Canadians on the ferry ride over who had the same idea as us – take advantage of the long weekend and the nice weather we are having, and stay away from trains and buses since everyone in the country is travelling and the roads are completely gridlocked, bumper to bumper all weekend. It was a nice ferry ride over, but the ferry was not quite what I was expecting. When we picked up our tickets, Milton and realized hat we had the same seat number which we thought was a bit strange. Well, it turns out there are no seats – the number was room number to a room you share with about 20 other people and you all sit Korean style on the floor for the 4 ½ hour ride! Here is a picture of our room:

The people either ate and ate and ate the entire ride, or they slept (see the lady eating her cold cob of corn in the background - she ate about 6 cobs on top of all the cookies, popsicles, and hard-boiled eggs she had eaten earlier). Milton and I spent a lot of time out on the deck and then in the lounge area where there were actual tables and chairs.

The weather wasn’t fabulous for the entire weekend but we did get in a few fun activities. The first night we met up with 9 other people we know who are teaching in Korea right now too. We went for a nice swim before sunset and the beach was amazing! The sand was white and the water was still fairly warm still and it was so clear! When I was swimming I could see everything in the water – fish swimming by and at one point I may have seen a sting ray, but it may also have been a volcanic rock that was perfectly shaped to look like a sting ray. Either way, me and the girl I was with screamed and swam away as fast as we could, and I didn’t let my feet touch the ground again!

Sunday, Milton and I made our way to Mt. Hallasan, the highest mountain in Korea. There are 4 paths you can take to climb the mountain, each one offering a different view, and also a different difficulty level. We wanted to do the longest, most scenic route that would have taken close to 8 hours. In order to do so, you have to be at the mountain to start by 10am – we were cutting it pretty close. We were on a bus on our way and we tried asking the bus driver if we could get a cab to the mountain instead since it would be faster, but he didn’t understand us. We were so surprised when he handed me his cell phone and had me talk to his daughter who spoke enlgish very well. She explained the situation to him and before we knew it, he was stopping the bus to get us a cab and telling the cab driver where to go and to get there fast! Koreans are so nice sometimes and really go out of their way to help us. So we hoped in the cab thinking we would get there on time, but it turned out that the cab driver was heading towards the start of a different path, a shorter one that doesn’t go all the way to the top, and since it was raining, we gave in realizing that the 5 hour climb would probably be more than enough time spent in the rain.

The only other problem we had was that we hadn’t eaten breakfast, since there was nothing at the hotel and because as soon as we stepped out the door of the hotel we were on the bus. We were really happy to find a little shack at the bottom of the path where there were toilets and a tiny store selling rain coats and noodles! So we had the breakfast of Korean champions – warm, spicy Mr. Noodles, put on our gear and headed for the hills.

This is what we looked like all dressed in our ridiculous rain gear with umbrellas, while the Koreans passed us on the trail decked out in $2000 worth of hiking gear.

I stopped at this nice little water spring for some mountain fresh H2O!

It was actually a much more difficult climb than we had imagined and we experienced a few different types of weather along the way, but we made it up in 2 hours and down in an hour and 20 minutes. I think we are done with climbing mountains for a while though now!

At his point we were above the clouds, but still had quite a ways to go!

Here we are at 1600m - which took almost 2 hours to get to, and we are still not quite at the end of our path.

The mountain is 2000m high, so it was pretty disappointing to get to the top of our path and to think that there were only about 3000m separating us from the highest peak. At the top of our climb was another little shack and some toilets. Milton has another bowl of noodles -that cost 1000 won more at the top than they did at the bottom, which I totally disagree with! they should be giving them to us cheaper for having made the huge climb! I skipped the lunch noodles since my stomach was still angry at me for the spicy breakfast!

After the climb, we made our way to the other side of the island to Seogwipo, the other major city on the island. It had been raining pretty much all day and was still raining, so we were really happy to get to our hotel to dry off and to have a place to rest after the trek! Beside our hotel was a sign saying that we were only 300m from one of the 3 great waterfalls on Jeju island, so that’s where we headed first thing Monday morning. It wasn’t quite Niagara falls, but it was impressive and beautiful none the less. Our photos are a bit blurry from that day because we hadn’t notice that some of the settings on the camera had been changed and not set back to where they should be. I think you can still see though how nice the park and the falls were.

The first waterfall we came across seemed a bit small compared to what we had read in the tourist information booklet.

Ok...that's more like what I was looking for! Like a scene out of a movie - gorgeous!!!

The ride home on the ferry was a bit more rough than it was on the way there because of the weather, but we were smart and as soon as we got on the boat we set ourselves up at a big table in the lounge where we stayed for the entire ride with the other 9 people that we had been with on the Saturday night. Everyone else played cards while I tried to convince myself that I wansn’t feeling seasick! I distracted myself by taking pictures of this guy who I think looks like a Korean Johnny Depp!