When I was on my way to meet up with everyone, I noticed all of the Korean men and women were all wearing heavy duty jackets and scarves, etc. I got quite worried since I was only wearing a long sleeve shirt, so I asked Katherine to bring me a backup sweatshirt, but it was so nice outside, I never needed it! Once we had met up, we made our way to the bus that would take us to the temple area. It was actually a pretty long ride, which surprised me. But it was all in good company and thats what the day was about!
When the bus dropped us off, we headed to the temple and Buddha first. It was so peaceful and reminded me a LOT of China. It finally hit me that I'm in Asia. It definitely set the mood for the day... peaceful, calm and relaxing...
Me, Mary and Katherine
Under the Buddha
Natural spring water... you drink from the plastic spoons... best water I've ever had
We then headed to the Information Booth to grab a map and ask about the best route to take. The lady told us to stay on the white routes, that the red ones were "dangerous, only for professionals". After discussing with the group, we decided to take one of the red routes anyway, because the white routes were all sidewalks (which isn't hiking in my opinion). The lady at the booth must have seen us walking toward the red line, because she come running up behind us "excuse-ah me, excuse-ah me.... do you have mo-bi-le phone with you?" Yes we do. "Ok, here is my number, in case you get lost." She gives us not one, but two phone numbers "just in case". Poor thing, she really didn't want the group of 5 foreigners to go missing on her watch. So we thanked her, and went on...
Me, Steve, Mary, Katherine and Jordan
We didn't actually know where we were going, we just knew we wanted to get off the concrete, so we just started walking and randomly found a path. We would sometimes see Koreans walking somewhere and we would be like "I want to get up there!", and that is pretty much what we did.... just walked toward the Koreans when we didn't know what to do... We knew we eventually wanted to get to the cable car to take it back down the mountain, so we kept an eye out for it. At one point, we were standing looking at a sign trying to decide where the cable cars were and at one point Steve (kind of mockingly) said "cable-eh car-eh?" and BAM a Korean turned around and was like "cable-eh car-eh, cable-eh car-eh!" and started pointing us in the right direction. We have found that sometimes it is necessary to put a Korean accent on our English words... hey it got us pointed in the right direction... so off we went...
In the poor information lady's defense, the path to the cable car was intense... a lot of rocks, and pretty steep incline... some parts you had to use a rope to help pull yourself up the side of the mountain... but it was definitely worth it... we kept finding these amazing views... we would turn and say "wowww"... then 5 minutes later the "oh wow" would be even bigger...
Just keep climbing...
At one point I saw a huge rock that I really wanted to get on top of, but didn't really know if I could... but alas I hopped up and found a great spot... we actually all made it up and decided to hang out and enjoy the view (and the break) for a few minutes... then we continued on our way, finding more rocks to climb in the process...
My favorite rock on the hike
Almost died getting off this rock, but it was worth it...
We finally made it to the top, where there is a restaurant and cable car departure spot. You could tell that a lot of people would ride the cars up AND down, since they had little kids with them or were walking in heels. From the top we could see quite far, and we kept pointing at peaks we wanted to try to hike to next... so I'm sure that we will be hiking soon again....
On our way back down
But the day wasn't over... we needed to EAT! We decided to head back down the mountain a bit to grab some Korean BBQ, but we couldn't find a place we really liked (the boys were DEAD SET on eating BBQ, and I can't lie, I kind of was too) so we decided to head back downtown to grab some food.
Some of the best meat I've had here...
After a mishap with a restaurant, losing a camera (not me! and we found it) and the boys getting off the bus at the wrong stop, we finally made it to BBQ Alley where we ate at WHAT, a really good (but kind of expensive) BBQ restaurant. I'll definitely be going back!
Today was one of my favorite days in Korea so far. I absolutely loved seeing the Buddha and temple, hiking the mountain, seeing the views and spending the day getting to know my new friends better. I do have to say, one of my favorite memories of the day was when we were at the Information Booth, and a few of us had gone into a little store, and all of a sudden this little boy is staring at me, from right under my nose, literally 1 foot from me. I said "HI!"... this little kid literally screamed "aaaaahahhhhh!!!!!", like a full blown, terrified scream! It was hilarious. Oh, and the part where a bird pooped on my arm before we ever got on the bus (a great start to the day if you ask me)....
I can't wait to go again!
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