The Yang-yang Mushroom Festival-

30.9.06

Picture one-
With flags flying in the breeze you can see and feel the excitement of a great fall day in Korea as the winning team starts to carry their champion around the clearing.

Picture two-
The loser straining

Picture three-
The Song-I mushroom. This basket costs five hundred dollars.

Picture four-
The winner being paraded around after the contest.

Picture five-
The winner fortifieying himself with a big drink of makgoli

The Mushroom Festival
Yang-yang, Korea 30.9.06

Sokcho Diary

Well kids, guess what, another amazingly beautiful day here in Korea where it never rains and the only clouds you see are big and puffy.

Today in Yang-yang, a town about forty-five minutes south of Sokcho, was the annual Pine Mushroom Festival. Lacking anything even remotely more exciting to do I decided to head on down after waking up at the crack of noon.

After a quick bus ride, where I was the only passenger, I hit the very provincial town of Yang-yang. This is a quintessential market town in Korea. It sits on the southeast side of Sorak-san national park, inland from the sea, and well, pretty grim. There is not a whole lot here. Some restaurants, a few computer rooms, the agricultural cooperative, that’s pretty much it for Yang-yang.

Everything that is, except for the Song-I mushrooms.

From what I gathered here at the festival, and I was the only waygooks, this mushroom has magical healing properties, along with tasting really good. Judging by the prices they were charging for the fungus, about $300 for ten-fifteen caps, they better have been the greatest mushrooms known to man!

When I first got off the bus, I thought to myself, “this is stupid here I am in this tiny ass town for a mushroom festival and nothing, absolutely nothing, is going on here.” Then I saw the happy mushroom signs.

On the side of the road, leading towards the river was a big folding sign with a really happy mushroom cartoon on it and an arrow. Wow I thought, maybe, just maybe, there is something to this mushroom festival thing. I followed the signs, gradually leading towards the river and veered slightly through a small, narrow alley that wound around the back streets of Yang-yang, then I saw them, a huge collection of cloured tents and I said to myself, “Well that looks kind of festive like, maybe I should go there,” and off I went.

The first thing that I noticed as I approached a wide, rocky field on the riverbank was the sound of drumming and yelling, maybe this could be interesting. As I strolled down a little hill I looked upon an open area at something that I have never seen before, something that is probably as ancient as Korea, or even the world, a shamanistic celebration for a good harvest.

I have never, in all my life seen something like this before.

There were two groups of people on either side of a huge cypress log in an open space between rows of tents, dancing in a circle. Some of the men had drums, both big and small and were banging them in almost a trance like rhythm. Both groups were separate and distinct, except for one man who seemed to be taking the role of a priest or a leader of some sort; I never did get a straight answer. Around the edge of the dancers were several pairs of older women dressed almost like Catholic nuns in black and white skirts and hats who carried around large earthen jars filled with makgoli, a sweet Korean rice wine that really tastes like beer. As soon as I started taking pictures people started to gravitate towards me, and making a beeline to the only foreigner around, me, was a pair of the nuns.

As I squatted in the earth taking picture after picture of the incredible scene before me the two old ladies joined me. Taking their huge jar of makgoli they offered me a small, wooden bowl that had been smoothed by the touch of probably a thousand hands. The bowl I held was an exquisite object. It was not beautiful, far from it, it was rather boring to look at, but you could see that it had been hand made, probably by a skilled craftsman, many, many years ago.
As I held the bowl the women looked at me with wide eyes and asked in Korean if I would care to join in the harvest festival by having a bowlful of the wine. When I replied in the correct, affirmative, proper form of Korean that I would be delighted they smiled broadly and pored me a full bowl of the stuff. After dribbling a little on the ground as an offering to the gods I held the bowl to my lips and drained it, to the approval of about twenty Koreans who were standing around me. After I finished the bowl, cries of “anju” went up from all around me, (anju is a small bit of food that one eats after drinking a big draught of alcohol), and a piece of mountain Gimchi was popped into my mouth. After bowing respectfully to the women, I made my way to the other side of the celebration to take some more pictures.

After a little while the dancing and drumming reached a crescendo and a man in white and blue moved into the middle of the clearing where a huge cypress log rested on two small, fairly rickety looking pallets. A white cord was passed under and over the middle of the log and strapped to his back and he took a deep breath, stretched his legs, and lifted the log.

As the log swung off the pallets you could see that it weighed a freaking’ ton! Every vein in his face was popping and I could see beads of sweat running down his face. Slowly, very slowly, he turned towards his team and the log swung with him, and then he crumpled to his knees, his mission a failure.

With a massive roar from his team, the man in blue was lifted out from under the huge log and headed back to his side of the circle. The drumming reached a new level as a man in gold from the other team fortified himself with a huge bowl of makgoli, not the little bowl I used, but a big vat of the stuff and strapped himself to the log, which by now in my drunken state, I had realized was fake, and prepared to give his utmost for the harvest gods, his team, himself, whatever.

With a grunt and a groan he lifted the huge log from the pallets and sank to one knee, got up, staggered a bit, turned the log, and finally, used its momentum, to reach his team on the other side.

With a huge grin on his face he leaned towards his team, then, with a grunt, a bellow, and a shove, he lurched into his group and dropped the log in the middle of them. His team, the crowd, and everyone else, including me, shouted and cheered this mighty effort, then the real fun started.

With what I presumed was a lot of taunting, shouting, and gestures, the winning team hoisted the man in gold onto their shoulders and took him to the head shaman, a man with a great black beard and a pipe. The shaman said some magic words, waved his opium pipe up and down like a catholic priest giving a benediction, and the party was on.

The winning team got in a massive conga line, drums blaring, cymbals crashing, and marched towards the other team which joined them in saluting the champion of the day. They marched around and around the circle for about fifteen minutes, chanting, singing and banging all the while, then it ended.

All that, and then it was over, there was nothing more going on, it was finished, kaput, done. By this time I was fairly well in the bag and wandered around for a few minutes looking at some mushrooms and exhibits, ate a squid pancake, and went home. The great mushroom party was over.

A note about the pictures. The images that you might want to see are small so click on the picture to enlarge them on the web browser, Ara

1. At the top of the hill in the center you can see a North Korean guard post.

2. This is on the reverse slope of the observation observatory, not facing the north. The Korean words spell out "One Country"

3. This is the best shot that I could get of the north south transit point, toll booths, and visitors center. If you click on the image and look at the bottom right of the green sign at center you can see that it says, "North South Transit Point."

4. Looking back south at the beach. Note the rail line and the excellent shape that it is in. It was just opened to serve as a way to transport goods to the North Korean port of Woosan.

5. Tour busses heading to Mount Gamesong. The mountain is the tallest one in the distance to the right. The actual border can be seen about fifty meters in front of the busses. Look at the road and note what looks like big pillars on either side. This is the border.

North Korea

Sokcho Diary 25.9.06

Sunday was a pretty big day for me. After having lived in Korea off and on for just over a year now I finally got to go up to the border of the last Stalinist, closed, society left in a world that has seen the fall of almost every Communist country.

There was a time, just twenty short years ago when the communist world was still going head to head with the capitalist one. Communism held sway over Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and North Korea. Almost half of the world was under some form of Communist rule.

All that has now changed. Russia has become a democracy, at least in name, and its former client republics have emerged to become some of the newest democratic nations on the face of the earth. Some like Hungary and the Baltics have met with success and been welcomed into the realm of “free world” countries while others like Belarus and the central Asian republics have descended into chaos and dynastic rule. China and Vietnam are Communist in name only, having both engaged a free market economy that has started to become real players in the world markets, especially China. Cuba, a country that I thought would remain a stalwart of the revolution for, well, ever, is starting to turn, slowly but surely, to a market economy and Latin America, despite the left leaning, socialist ideas of the leaders of Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile has embraced a more moderate brand of Socialism rather than moving to a radical form of Communism that I thought would surely follow the collapse of the ruling military juntas.

So that leaves the D.P.R.K., the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, as the lone holdover to the days of Stalin, secret police, and five year plans. And here I am, just twenty-five miles away from the last workers paradise left on earth. I had to get as close as possible to it.

My friend Kelsey, who works at Dari School, also has a perverse fascination with the forbidden places that still litter the earths surface and she said that she would head up to the border with me so that I could have some company.

Amazingly enough here in South Korea, a country littered with heavily armed troops getting to the border of a nation that has been intent on invading it with its army of 1.1 million men for about fifty years, it only takes a short ride to get to what Bill Clinton called “the scariest place on earth.”

We hopped the number one bus to Dajin right outside of our building about noon and headed north. The sea was to the right, the east side, and on the west we passed miles of rice fields with the Taebak Mountains behind them. This far north the beaches stretch for miles, unbroken sand with crystal clear waters and not a soul on them. Here security is taken vary seriously. While there are a few beaches open at times for public use most of them are closed off with huge swaths of barbwire and fences with small guard posts. The threat from the north is taken so seriously that, every morning, teams of conscript soldiers are sent out to rake the sand of the beaches smooth so that footprints leading up from the waters edge will readily betray an incursion.

Something truly odd here, despite all the fear of invasion and incursion, is the constant idea that reverberates throughout the country of unification. When you ask a Korean where they are from the always say “Korea” not North Korea or South Korea, but Korea as a whole. They firmly believe, as do I, that one day soon there will be no division of the peninsula, that all Koreans will be from one country. Nowhere is this more evident than the huge new four-lane freeway under construction from Sokcho to the north. It goes all the way to the border and stops about five miles from the D.M.Z. where there are tollbooths and a visitor’s center ready and waiting to facilitate traffic up the peninsula.

When we got off the bus in Dajin we had to go up to the visitor’s center to buy tickets, a whopping two bucks for the both of us, and more importantly since there are no busses that run all the way to the border, find a ride.

Kelsey and I were totally prepared to pay forty bucks for a taxi ride up to the border but when we bought our tickets the lady at the booth asked us if we had a car to get up north and when we said we did not she asked the two Koreans behind us if they would mind taking us with them and it was no problem. These really nice people were the epitome of Korean kindness as they cleaned out the back seat of their car to make room for us, and so we set off.

After passing through a checkpoint where we had our papers checked we passed through the northernmost town in South Korea, a charming, rural place of about a thousand people, just a fishing village with a new school, some boats, and a few tractors. Nothing really that identified this as the last bastion of democracy before the proverbial line in the sand.

One thing that really struck me on the road past the village was the huge free way and tollbooths that were next to the little two lane road that we were on. Here the road was completed and just waiting for traffic to be able to move north and south just like it was in 1945 when you could board a train in Pusan and take it all the way to Paris.

When we got up to the visitors center I had the eeriest feeling of being watched. On the observation platform the sensation was almost unbearable. Here I was just a mile from the border and I knew that I had already been photographed by South Korean intelligence, D.P.R.K. border troops, the C.I.A, and who knows whom else. It was so strange to know that so many people were watching me.

Looking at the huge expanse of beach and crystal clear water that ran unbroken to the north you could just sense that everywhere around you were enough troops and munitions to plunge the world into a massive conflict that would probably include the use of nuclear, biological, and conventional weapons.

Looking at the north all you could see were mountains and trees. The only buildings were a D.P.R.K. guard post on the top of a hill and some huts at the borderline. No troops, no flags, no propaganda, nothing. All you could see were mountains, the beach, and some rocky islets just off shore. There were no boats in the vast sea, no fishing buoys that are so common off the shore in Korea, nothing, just empty hills and the sea, and then, out of the corner of my eye, a hint of the surreal. Heading up the highway to Gamesoung Mountain, the third most sacred peak in Korea, were eleven tour busses in a convoy, no doubt packed with tourists going off to see a heavily sanitized version of the last Stalinist state.

Picture One-
Buddha giving to the poor, a frescoe at the temple

Picture Two-
The view from half way up the mountain looking twoards the sea

Picture Three-
The bell tower

Picture Four-
The view from the top of the mountain

Ulzinbawi- The Old Man

Sokcho Diary

23.9.06



There is a new waygooks here in town, an Irish lad named Conner from Dublin. He just arrived in Sokcho last week and we met here in Dongjin today as I was leaving to go and climb Ulzinbawi with Karen. He seemed like a nice enough guy, and being new in town I asked him if he would like to go up the mountain with us, kind of like a little tour.

We walked down to the bus stop about noon, and what a nice day it was. Blue skies with little streaks of white clouds at about twenty five thousand feet and a warm sun keeping the temperature at about seventy degrees, a really great fall day.

We met Karen down by Sokcho beach where she lives, on the other side of town from me and we rode out to Sorak-san together, talking about schools, jobs, and the places that we have been.

Turns out that this is Conner’s second tour in Korea, he had worked for a chain school in Incheon before and wanted to get back to nature this time around so he looked around a bit and found our little piece of heaven here in Gangwon-do.

We rode out through the river valley, past the rice fields that are just about ready to harvest. It was just a few weeks ago that the rice paddies were a deep, dark green and now they have become golden, like ripe wheat. The hulls at the top of the rice wave gently in the breeze that has become a daily part of here in Sokcho.

Rice is what makes life here in Korea what it is. A popular greeting, still to this day, here in Korea, is “Did you eat your rice today?” This harks back to the time just after the Korean War when food of any kind, even rice, was scarce. It is good to see, even today in the age of huge agribusiness, the small family farms here, and all over Korea, that provide this staple to the Korean people.

Back to the story of Ulzinbawi, so sorry for the digression about rice!

When the bus headed through Sorak town the traffic started. Even though the leaves are not even starting to turn the park was packed with tourists from all over Korea and even abroad. The bus was stuck in a massive traffic jam and we got off at the Kensington Hotel stop to walk the rest of the way.

After stopping by the statue of Buddha to pray for a safe hike we headed up into the hills. Along the way we stopped and went through a temple that was originally built in 1543, destroyed during the Korean War and rebuilt in the sixties.
This temple is not the commercial enterprise that so many have become. It is a pretty simple place with a few buildings housing the gold statues of Buddha and some long, low, yellow buildings that the monks live in.

All the buildings are painted in brilliant colours and have wonderful frescos on the walls depicting Buddha seeking enlightenment and giving to the poor.

When you walk through the main gate of the temple you pass through a building that houses some statues of Buddha and the saints. In front of you is a gravel courtyard with a two buildings, one bigger than the other, that house the gold statues of Buddha where the faithful kneel and pray, lighting joss sticks to ensure good fortune.

Behind the courtyard there is a small building, probably the most ornate in the temple that houses the bell that calls the monks to prayer. The building is painted in brilliant colours, reds, greens, blues, and yellows and there is a small walkway leading to it, unfortunately blocked off. The bell itself is huge and there is a wooden beam tied on a frayed rope that hangs next to the bell that the monks slam against the bell to make its sound.

After leaving the temple we hiked up through the greenery and past the usual rest areas that serve beer, soju, and seafood pancakes.

When we got to the base of the rock we started up through a rock fall and soon reached the bottom of 833 very steep stairs that wind their way up to the top.

After about forty minutes we reached the top of Ulzinbawi. The rock outcropping that is Ulzinbawi looks out over Sokcho and the sea. There is not one specific peak; rather it stretches in a line about a half a kilometer like jagged teeth that are set away from the more major mountains that are behind the rock.

A very old Korean legend says that the god of the city of Ulsan heard that the Sokcho area was very beautiful and he decided to move there. When he got to Sorak-san all of the other gods had taken the best spots and he was forced to move outside of Sorak-san and he became the jagged line of peaks that have become Ulzinbawi.
I really expected the climb to be harder than it was. People had been telling me for a while that this climb was very difficult and strenuous, that the 833 stairs would do me in, but it just wasn’t. Too be honest I felt the climb was almost too easy, it lacked the challenge of Dae-chun-bong, the mountain that I climbed a few weeks ago. While the view from the top was good and it was fun to climb with Karen and Conner I am going to seek out more strenuous hikes before the snow and cold of winter close down the hiking in Sorak-san.

Transient Friends


Picture One
Everyone gathered at Matthew and Catherines for the great give away of things they are not taking with them.

Picture Two
My good friends Matthew and Catherine

Picture Three
Eating a last lunch with Matthew and Catherine and the rest of the A.P. crew. We are eating Pak Ban. Pak Ban means a meal consisting of side dishes. We have close to eighty differant dishes on the table to try.






Sokcho Diary

20 September 2006



One thing that really sucks about Korea is the social scene. I do not mean that the people I hang out with are not fun, they are. I have had some great times with the A.P. crew so far, and I hope to have many more. The people I have met here so far have been great. We go out for drinks, go hiking, head out to do our shopping together, we hang out a lot and they are some great people.

What I do mean is that here, in Korea; you are always losing your friends. Every month or two people who you really like leave just when you are getting to know them. It is the nature of the beast that we all live with here.

In Korea all of us waygooks are on one-year contracts. That means that every month someone’s contract comes up, and if they do not re-sign, they leave.

Case in point, Matthew and Catherine, two of my co-teachers at A.P. They were, are, wonderful people that I enjoyed seeing everyday and doing things with. I pretty much spent every weekend on the past month and a half hiking with Matthew and then going out for drinks with he and Catherine, but alas, it was there time to go two weeks ago.

In the next few months I will be saying goodbye to Kelsey and Lloyd, two other people who I have grown fairly fond of since I came here and I am pretty sad about it.

It works both ways too. When my contract is up, I will leave behind people who have just arrived and who have started to hang out with whom, and me possibly, will be a little upset that I am leaving as well.

So what does friendship with other foreigners mean in Korea? Well, in short, you live it up as much as you can. You live one day at a time and have a blast doing it. No one brings up the date that they will be going back to the real world, back to jobs, families, friends, bills, the rat race of Europe or the States. This is the life we have chosen, and while it is a good one, the sacrifices that we make, in terms of friends and relationships, is a profound, deep, sense of loss that we do not share with anyone. We just keep it inside and deal with it alone.
So this beast, this life of teaching overseas that I have chosen for my career, will it always be this way? Will I always have to make new friends and lose others? Probably, but will it make me any less of a social animal? I don’t think so. I make a lot of friends here, some I will keep in touch, others not, but they all add to my being in some way or another.

Picture One (Top Left)
A pretty gritty part of town down by the water. The large building to the right was abandoned about half way through construction. This is suppossed to be picture three on the walk

Picture Two (Top Right)
Crossing the bridge very near school. Note the mountains looking west. That is part of Sorak-san Park. Picture four of the walk.

Middle Left
The building my school is in, note A.P. English sticker on the third floor. Our chicken place is at the lower right with the red sign. This is the fifth picture of the walk

Middle Right
The main street in Sokcho the Brits have got me started calling it the "High Street". In Britian this means the main commericial street in town. This is where all the cool stuff (such as it is) is and happens in Sokcho. Picture two in the series

Bottom
Just leaving Dongjin (my building) one of our two bus stations in town is just to the right. From here you can take busses to anywhere in Korea. Straight ahead is the ferry terminal and naval base where I saw five South Korean frigates and two destroyers this morning.

Sokcho Diary-

17 September 2006

Walking to School-

Its twenty after twelve, time for you to come with me on my little walk to work. It will take us about forty minutes and I can show you a bit of my town on the way.

Down the elevator to the first floor and out the revolving door. Do you see the little guard shack to the right? Wave to the guy, he is good to have on your side as that is the man who can unlock your door if you come home drunk and have lost your keys. When I make cookies I always take a few down to him.

Past the gate, lets make a left and walk past the tennis courts, church, and cultural center on the other side of the road. On our right is the Dok-do singing room that has very peculiar sounds coming from it late at night as drunken Korean ashojis caterwaul into the wee hours of the morning here.

At the corner we go left again, towards the sea. See the bus station across the road? You can take a bus from here to anywhere on the peninsula for, at the most, thirty bucks.

Lets keep going, past the butchers and the gas station. On this street you can see Yeogwans (small hotels) restaurants and other cheap shops selling a few essentials, nothing big,

At the reunification statue, a stone monument of a mother and child looking longingly at their homes in the communist north that they had to abandon, we turn left. The ferry terminal is just behind the statue. From hear you can go to Russia and Japan. This is also where the Korean navy keeps a squadron of five frigates that are currently tied side by side to a pier across from the ferry terminal.

This street that we are on now is the high street. The main commercial heart of Sokcho. Here we can see a lot of brand name shops and their Korean knockoff alternatives. To the left is the administrative heart of the city. The courthouse, city hall, it is all here in this one big complex.

Do you see the two little restaurants just down from the gun shop that only sells b.b. guns? The ones with all the deep fried goodness out front? Lets stop and grab some squid and sweet potatoes for a couple of bucks, a good quick lunch. If we eat standing up at the counter we can dip our stuff in the soy sauce flavored with ginger, scallions, onions, and chilies.

At Mr. Pizza we turn left, off the high street. Above Mr. Pizza do you see Dari International School? That is where my friends Helen and Kelsey work. That school does not only English but also Chinese and Japanese.
Down this little side street, past a couple of restaurants and some love motels is a dirt road, we take a right here.

See that uncompleted building? The one that is about ten stories of bare cement and unfinished room completely open to the elements? What a waste. Millions of dollars spent and there it sits, never to be finished, slowly sinking into the muck.

Further we go down the road, past the recycling center where the handicapped and disadvantaged scrape out a few won, enough to buy some kimchi and rice, working ten hours a day sorting through the debris of a society that has swept them to the curb to fend for themselves with no help from the state.

After about a quarter mile we see Yongin Lake and the park around the west shore. See the football fields and trees, the bike paths around the lake. It’s a pleasant place to while away an afternoon. I wish I could sit here with you awhile but I have to run to work.

Across the bridge we go. To the left is Yongin Lake and to the right, the west, are the mountains of Sorak-san Park. If it was a little clearer we could see Ulzimbowi, the Old Man, a ragged set of limestone teeth that look over Sokcho.

Over there is Tire Pro. See it, the green building? We have to cross the main road here and take a quick jog left. Quick look up to the third floor of the building with the Koreana chicken sign on the bottom of the building. See the A.P. logo on the third floor? That’s my work. I have to go in now, so why don’t you head down to Gimpap Click for some donkas and I will meet you around eight at Koreana for some chicken and beer.

Sokcho Diary

The Cave Hike

13.9.06


One of the many hiking trails in Sorak-san Park is a hike up to a Buddhist shrine deep in the mountains. One of the first big hikes that I did with my friend Wojtek when I got here was to head up to the cave as he had never been there and I really wanted to see it.

When you take the bus to Sorak-san you go along a river valley lined with some very traditional villages that sit on the banks of a boulder strewn river that looks tame now but you can tell has seen some terrific floods in its day by the size of the rocks that litter the river bed. There just had to be some tremendous forces of water rushing down from the mountains to carry these massive stones into where we see them now.

When you get almost to the gate to the park the bus goes over this bridge and through the town of Sorak. This is a nothing but a rest stop, a tourist town. There are a few min-baks (homes that rent rooms), yeogwan (small hotels), and two five star palaces, the Star Hotel and the Kensington arms that are very high dollar. Along with a few homes and stores this is all that exist in the town of Sorak proper.

While touristy, Sorak does have on redeeming quality. It is incredibly beautiful. It sits on the slopes of the river valley and the town extends a little bit up the sides of the mountains. Everything is a brilliant green and the peaks rise up the valley with tops of craggy limestone. Have you ever seen a painting from Asia with the mist rising over a verdant green slope crowned with pinnacles of bare rock? That is what this town, and the park of Sorak-san looks like.

We hiked through the gate, paying our whopping 3400-won entrance fee, about four dollars and stopped by the five-story statue of Buddha. Even though I am a baptized Catholic, when I am in Asia, I do as the locals do. As this area, and everything in it, is essentially a Buddhist retreat, I have always felt that it is only appropriate that I stop by the statue and pay my respects, asking for a safe hike from the gods.

From the statue it was a pretty easy hike up to the start of the mountainside where the cave is located. We stopped at a couple of rest areas on the way to have jon, Korean pancakes, stuffed with mountain vegetables and squid and had a couple bottles of soju. I know, it was early in the morning but it really goes great with food and well, it tastes good.

When we got to the last area before the cave there was a little signposts with distances to various points along the trail. The one we wanted pointed to the right, across the river, and said, “Cave, .6 kilometers”. Easy we thought, that is only 600 meters about six football fields, hell we could walk that in about fifteen minutes we said and started off. It took about ten minutes before we realized that it was going to take us a tad bit longer than fifteen minutes because the “mere” 600 meters happened to be straight up, an exciting vertical climb.

First we scrambled up the obligatory rock fall, the trail marked occasionally by a small rope as our only guide, what fun!

After about a half hour scramble we came to a very narrow ledge where the trail forked, the left went over a pass to a temple deep into the mountains, about fifteen miles away and looked like sheer and utter hell. You know the ten thousand yard stare that combat veterans have? That is the look on the faces of about five Koreans stumbling towards us. They looked like they had come from the seventh pit of hell and had absolutely no desire to head back. Luckily the cave was to the left, up 963 steep metal stairs, oh boy!

As we looked up at said stairs I turned to Wojtek and uttered the only words I said from there to the cave and said, “I hate fucking stairs”, took the lead, and started heading up.

The hike was awesome. We kept heading up and up and were constantly rewarded with views of the mountains and the peaks with layer after layer of mist rising up. It looked like those old landscape paintings of China from Szechwan Province.

After about forty-five minutes we reached the cloud line and could not see anything for a little while. Wojtek had taken the lead and it was getting tough to see his white t-shirt about five meters above me.
We finally broke through the cloud line at about 850 meters, right at the entrance to the cave. It was a little disappointing until I realized that is peace and beauty were not to be found in a gaudy, church like place but in the simplicity of a small gold Buddha statue with a few prayer lanterns and some burning joss sticks.

The Big Night Out

Top-

The crew who made it to the Western Bar. From the lower left: Lloyd-Welsh, Kelly-British, Stewart-Scottish, Karen-Aussie, Helen-British, Kirsty-Aussie

Second-

At the Zu-Zu club in fine form @ 3:00 a.m.

Third-

Out side Koreana Chicken-

Catherine (with her back to the camera),
Matthew, Wotek, Kirsty, Karen, Helen, Kelsey

Fourth-

The girls singing "Buttercup"

Fith-

Lloyd singing with his new Korean buddy

Sokcho Diary

The Big Night Out

So a couple of weeks ago the A.P. crew, Matthew, Catherine, Kirsty, Karen, and I decided to get together after work at our local chicken place right down below the kids school.

We have been doing this every Friday night, going out for chicken, beer, and dried fish. We usually have salt and pepper chicken, sesame chicken, Cass beer, Soju, and dried Pollack. A great end to a tough week.

It was a cool night and after snacking a bit we decided to head down to Bar Western, a local watering hole that draws a good mix of Koreans and ex-pats with its mix of western décor and, for some reason, a ton of Oriels pennants on the wall.

At this fine establishment you can get anju, light appetizers, makju (beer), soju, and padu-soju (grape juice and soju mixed in a pitcher, it kills the taste and makes the firewater taste like kool-aid, lethally deceptive). Since we were in the mood to drink and had just eaten we ordered a lot of beer and padu-soju and proceeded to tell stories and lies until about two a.m.

After amassing a whooping 64,000 bar tab for all of us (about $70.00) we headed over to the Zu-Zu Club a karaoke bar and met some new friends!

We all had a great time singing and acting like drunken fools. I was even able to finally understand how to play cricket! The night was pretty much a blur so I do not have a lot to say about it but it was a blast and I finally headed home about five.