10 Steps to an Excellent Weekend:

1. Go somewhere where no-one else goes

2. Do not plan anything

3. Attempt to follow instructions given only in Korean

4. Get naked in public

5. Hitchike

6. Go on a boat and make friends with everyone you meet.

7. Ask your new friends about how to get back home, (because you didn’t plan that and there is no bus).

8. Attend their family reunion.

9. Lose your purse

10. Realize that 50% of the people you’re eating with saw you naked yesterday.

So two weekends ago Grace and I went to Chungju.

1- Go to the middle of nowhere.

Chungju is a small town in the province of North Chungcheong.

http://www.cj100.net/english/main/?menucode=main

The website above makes it look like there’s lots of stuff to do in Chungju. There isn’t. The biggest problem is that most of the stuff is right outside Chungju, so you need some mode of transportation to get to these places. Renting scooters is possible but it’s more expensive and less ubiquitous than in Thailand or Cambodia. Also it’s still a bit cold.

We got to Chungju a bit late. We were both getting over a cold after last Saturday’s crazy toxic yellow dust storm and we really wanted to get some sleep. If you don’t know what yellow dust is, wikipedia can tell you here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_dust

Koreans are not kidding when they say that you have to wear a mask or you might get sick. As someone who ignored them completely, went outside without a mask and then got sick, I can tell you that it sucks. Aside from the yellow-dust sickness we also did not want to get up early because we were out late Friday night celebrating. What were we celebrating? PASSING OUR KOREAN TEST!!!! It was hard. This level (Beginner 5 ) suddenly got serious. Our teacher was really good. She didn’t use the text book we got. Instead she used one that she considered better (but that was also much more difficult) and she really pushed us in terms of vocabulary. I don’t think I’ve ever learned so many new words in one week. This was the first test that I was pretty sure I would fail. In my life. Both Grace and I studied reeeealllllly hard, but we were resigned to repeating the level and completely ok with doing that since neither one of us felt that we had mastered the material. BUT WE PASSED! Barely – you needed 11/18 to pass and we got 12 and 13. Nevertheless, as my students would say – LEVEL UP. So we went out that night with the class and with our teacher to celebrate our ascent to Intermediate 1.

Another hour of lateness was entirely my fault. As I got off the phone with Grace, I had every intention of heading out the door. And then I got distracted.

30 minutes later Grace told me that she was at Taerung station waiting for me (so that we could ride the subway together).

Grace: Is that your train coming up to Taerung right now?

Alice: uh….no….actually I’m still leaving Suraksan (the station where I live)

Grace: What? How is that possible?

Alice: um, I got distracted.

Grace: Alice what did you do?

Alice:…………………. *sheepish silence*

Grace: Alice…..

Alice: I was playing with my puppet.

Grace:………………Are you serious?

Alice:…yea.

(I got this really awesome marionnette in Thailand. It’s from the Thai puppet theater and it’s a warrior elephant god. I’m just learning how to make him walk realistically and 5 minutes turned into half-an-hour)

Grace: Alice…not today….

Briefly, I considered telling her that my mother had called just when I was heading out the door but I didn’t feel right lying to her about it. I figured in the end she would understand.

2- Don’t Plan Anything

When we got to Chungju around 2:30 pm, we decided it was time to plan what we were doing this weekend. The more I travel places, the less I plan. Or, to be more accurate: the more I travel places with Grace, the less Grace makes me plan stuff. There used to be a time 6 months ago when she actually wanted us to know where we were sleeping that night when we travelled places. Those days are gone. Nowadays we usually decide on Thursday where we’re going to go this weekend. On Friday after Korean class we decide how early we are going to get up the next morning. On Saturday morning/afternoon we get on a bus with a Lonely Planet, a ukulele, our backpacks and now Bruce (my new bulldog shaped-pillow – a birthday present from one of my awesomest students) and head to whatever destination we chose.

There really wasn’t that much to do in Chungju so we decided to take the bus to Suanbo – a hot-springs resort town nearby and then take it from there. If we liked it, we would stay overnight. If we didn’t, we’d go to Danyang – another small town nearby.

3 -Attempt to follow instructions given in Korean

When we got to Suanbo the first thing we saw was a tiny wrinkled ajumma encased in a big tourist information booth.  Actually the ajumma and her booth were obscured by a giant statue of a pheasant.

We decided that this was a good time to put to use our Korean and approached the ajumma for directions.  There were two things that we wanted to do in Suanbo the next day: we wanted to climb Woraksan, and we wanted to take the ferry back to Chunchu.  No problem, said the ajumma (in Korean).  We could just take a bus from a nearby stop (which she pointed us to) to Woraksan the next morning.   And then we could take the ferry from Woraksan back to Chungchu.   No problem.

Delighted with our success we headed into the middle of the town.  It took us 3 minutes to get there because it takes about 7 minutes to walk accross the entirety of Suanbo.  It looked like a place that was really popular in the 1970s.  The architectures was Soviet Union chic, and there wasn’t a soul around.  We had considered staying in the Suanbo youth hostel (an abandoned castle 15 minutes away from the town) but since transportion was difficult to arrange we decided against it.  Also we didn’t want this trip to turn into a bad horror movie.  We wandered around until we found a decently priced hotel and dropped our bags there.  It was pretty grimy – clearly nobody had stayed there in several months.  We also had some friends staying with us.

roomate

Yup.  There were bugs.  This place had nothing on Jeonju Guesthouse or any of the Cambodian guesthouses either.  After dropping our stuff off we set off wandering about the town.  It was a pretty strange place.  Some things made perfect sense:  the yard-full of pheasants we encountered was one of them.

the pheasants were elusive and did not want to be photographed. They sensed their impending doom

Some made less sense, namely, the church that made it look like we were in rural Quebec.

The House of God.

We didn’t just wander aimlessly though – we had a final destination.

4 -Get Naked in Public.

We were headed to Park Hotel – home to the nicest hot springs in Suanbo.  To get there we had to trudge up a never-ending hill that reminded us how woefully unfit we had gotten.  The reward was worth it though:  an outside hotspring pool with a view of the mountains.  As usual, we stripped down and showered in the jimjilbang first.  This time, however, there was a small difference.  In Seoul when you go to the jimjilbang, nobody looks at you.  It’s kind of a rule, and there are enough foreigners in the city that people aren’t shocked.  No such luck in Suonbo.  People stared.  A lot.  Fortunately we were already seasoned jimjilbang goers and had no problem traipsing around nude.  We stoically ignored the 20 pairs of eyes, stepped outside and ducked into the hot-spring pool.  Soon we were joined there by lots of women.  There must have been 12 of them, of all ages, and eventually they stopped throwing glances at us and just talked in a constant soothing hum of Korean.

We must have spent three hours at the pool, sometimes getting out and lying on the tiles, laughing about how much this was hippy/woman power-times: we were hanging out in a hot-springs pool, outside, naked, among other women, under the full moon, in the mountains.    All we needed were some candles and ritual chanting.  We talked for hours about hilarious things I can’t post here since my parents read this blog, counting on the fact that the women around us didn’t speak any English.  It was a pretty safe bet since outside of Seoul, there isn’t that much English spoken in Korea.  When I went to look  out to the mountains, however, one of the women turned to me and said in pretty clear English:

“be careful, that is where the water from the hot springs comes out.”

“E-excuse me?” I stuttered, taken aback.

“be careful.  The hot-springs water pumps from there.”  The woman repeated.

I thanked her and went back to my spot in the pool.

“Grace!  She speaks English!”  I hissed, totally embarassed by the fact taht this woman probably understood good chunks of our conversation.  Grace shrugged, unphased: “who cares, Alice?   We’ll probably never see her again.”

When we finally left Park Hotel it was completely dark.  We were giddy with joy after having spent three hours completely relaxing.  We skipped down the entire hill to the confusion of several taxi drivers (and their passengers) who were not used to seeing foreigners in Suanbo, let alone skipping foreigners.  In our defense, skipping is the most energy-efficient way of getting down a hill.

We wandered back into town and were greeted by an alarming amount of neon.  While we had been gone, Suanbo revealed the way in which it decided to make Soviet-chic architecture inviting:  lots and lots of neon lights.

surprise butterflies and neon

We saw a lot of neon. Eventually we realized that we were hungry and decided to try out the Suanbo specialty:  pheasant.  We picked a restaurant solely based on the number of reality TV we could see inside, and the size of the pheasant statue at the front.  While back home we might try to distance ourselves from our food, there is none of that in Korea.  Usually if you’re eating pork, there are probably happy dancing cartoon pigs on the menu.  Thus, in front of the pheasant restaurants there were invariably statues and pictures of happy pheasants.  We decided to go for shabu-shabu, which was a little pricy by Korean standards, but really cheap compared to Canada.  Consider:  $25 per person, for pheasant.  It is a mark of how good and cheap food is in Korea that we even stopped to think about it.  It’s just that by now we have gotten used to the fact that we can get a good dinner for $3, so a meal that costs $50 for  two people gives us pause.

We were not disappointed.

When we ordered, our shabu-shabu the waitress confirmed: 꽁 1 마리

Grace and I looked at each other.  “Did she just say….”  “I think she just said…”  “Han Mari?”  “Yea…it’s probably not…”
To be clear – Han Mari means, literally, “1 animal.” We coudln’t believe that we had just ordered an entire pheasant – that is a lot of food.  And when the meat came out we were relieved:  this was definitely not an entire pheasant.  But then the food kept coming.  And coming.  I cannot in depth describe everything we ate so I will just show you through pictures.  Suffice it to say that difference versions of pheasant kept coming out and the highlight was raw pheasant  tossed with thinly sliced pear and quince, in some sort of delicious dressing.  It was amazing.  Probably one of the tastiest things I have ever eaten in my life.  It tasted exactly the way a new Lonely Planet guide smells – fresh and lemony and full of upcoming adventure.  There was also pheasant sushi, pheasant dumplings, and of course – the shabu-shabu itself.  By the end of the meal we were full almost to bursting and could not believe that we just polished off an entire freakin’ bird.

I invite you to treat this pheasant statue as a work of art and consider its expression and the range of emotions it conveys to the person entering the restaurant

food: step 1

the most amazing food I've ever tasted

the actual shabu-shabu

after a while, they brought out the bones of the ill-fated pheasant and threw them into the shabu-shabu pot to make soup

the restaurant

We weren’t hungry again until 4 pm the next day.

5 – Hitchike

The next morning we arose bright and early at 8:30 am (for Grace this is like getting up at noon) to catch our 9:17 bus (as per ajumma instructions). We said goodby to our dingy hotel room and our insect roomates and made our way accross town to the stop.  The bus came around 9:15 and we got on it, routinely asking “Woraksan ga-yo?” (does this bus go to Woraksan?).  Suddenly we were faced with a whole bus-full of worried Koreans.  The bus driver shook his head frantically and yelled, “ANIO! ANIO!” and pointed further down the street, presumably to where the correct bus stop was.  We thanked him and booted it off the bus quickly, to the sound of anxious Korean chatter behind us.  We walked a little bit down the street  to a convenience store and eventually, with the help of the store owner, made it to the right bus stop.  We got on the bus, showed the bus driver the little piece of paper where the ajumma wrote down instructions, paid the fare and sat down happily.  To our relief we saw passengers around us decked out in full hiking gear so we knew that we were headed in the right direction.

on the way to Woraksan

Eventually the bus stopped at typical Korean national park entrance.  There was a mountain in the distance, but to get to it you first had to walk through 200 metres of hiking-gear and souvenir stores, as well as many restaurants catering to ajusshis (old men) drinking makkoli (rice liquor) before galloping up the mountain and putting lazy westerners like us to shame with their tipsy agility. All of the hikers got off the bus, but when it came to us the bus driver suddenly began to protest.

“NO YOU CAN’T GET OFF THE BUS! NOT YET! YOU HAVE TO SIT DOWN! ”

Stunned but determined we refused to sit down.  “We want to get off the bus! Everyone else is getting off the bus.  We’re getting off the bus!”

“NO YOU CAN’T GET OFF THE BUS YOU HAVE TO SIT!  YOU CANNOT GET OFF THE BUS!” (this is what we understood.  There was more but we didn’t understand it).

“We’re getting off the bus and you can’t stop us!”

We got off the bus.  We suspect that the bus driver wanted to follow the instructions that the tourist-box ajumma wrote down, but we no longer trusted her and thought it would be better to follow the crowd of hikers.  They probably knew what they were doing.  To our surprise and delight, we saw a sign for the one thing that I wanted to see in Woraksan: Maebul – a giant buddah carved out of rock in the middle of the forest.  It wasn’t even very far away.  We set out immediately – happy that we had managed to get where we wanted to go.  So far, following instructions in Korean was not a great success.

The forest was lovely.  It was just starting to show real signs of spring so mountain brooks were gurgling, birds were happily chirping and leaves were doing what leaves do (rustling, growing, etc.).  We were really happy.  It was so much nicer here than in the Seoul parks.  Granted, Bukhansan National park is absolutely gorgeous but because it is on the north edge of Seoul, it happens to be the most visited national park in the world.  It’s impossible to hike there without running into hordes of hikers.  You see as many people there on a Sunday as you would in a mall on Boxing Day at home.  Woraksan on the other hand, being in the middle of nowhere, had a lot more peace and nature to offer.  We enjoyed it thouroughly.  We walked up to Maebul, took some photos, played the uke a little bit and headed back down.  We still had a boat to catch.

This is where it got tricky.  We got back down to the restaurant area, and headed for the nearest ajusshi to ask him about how to get to the ferry (on the way we were diverted by a lovely woman who insisted on feeding us some bananas).  We approached a gentleman selling hiking gloves, showed him a picture of the boat and asked him where the bus to the boat was.  The guy shook his head and said, “busuh opsoyo!”  (There is no bus).  Alarmed, we asked if there was a taxi.  He just laughed.  Slightly annoyed we asked when the next bus back to Chungju was, and he pointed to a sign that said 6 pm.  At a loss for a plan, we asked the ajusshi if we could walk to the ferry, to which his reply was something along the line of “no no! Too far! You can’t walk.”  And then he made the gesture for flagging down a car.  Yes, we were going to hitchike.

“Alright,” I said, “hitchiking it is,” and put out my thumb as we started walking in the general direction of where we wanted to go.

“ALICE ARE YOU CRAZY WE CAN’T HITCHIKE!!!!!”  Grace yelped, pulling my arm back down.  As we wrestled, a perfectly respectable-looking van whizzed by.  Unsurprisingly, it didn’t stop for the two foreigners fighting on the side of the road.

“Grace, we don’t really have a choice.  Do you want to wait until 6 pm.?  Also, we’re in Korea!  And we’re in a national park.  The only people here are families – it’ll be ok.”

Convinced, but only to the point of not stopping me, Grace silently struggled with years of upbringing while I tried to flag down the next car.  It was a family with two boys and a daughter.  I heroically struggled to explain to them that we wanted to go to Chungju, but we didn’t want them to drive us to Chungju – we just wanted them to drop us off at the bus terminal.  They tried to explain something to us, but we didn’t really understand.  Eventually they just motioned for us to get in and we squeezed in the back with the mom and the two little boys.  The drive to the ferry terminal was about 20 minutes – definitely not walkable.  The family dropped us off and we congratulated ourselves once more on  successfully getting to where we wanted to go.  So far every time I have hitchiked in asia, it had turned out well (though this was only the second time – not enough for a pattern yet).

6 – Go on a boat and make friends with everyone you meet

We got in line for the ferry ticket, pumped to make our (scenic) way back to Chungju.  “Two tickets for Chungju please!”  We asked the squat man behind the counter.  “Anio.”  He responded gravely, looking at us as if were a little bit crazy.  Confused we tried to clarify. “We can’t go to Chungju?”  “No.”  At this point we both had flashbacks to the conversation we had with the tourist box ajumma in which she assured us that there was a boat that went from Woraksan to Chungju.  “So….where can we go?”  The man pulled out a map and drew us a picture:  we could go on the boat, take a large tour around the lake, and then come right back to the ferry terminal.  We would get really close to Chungju but we couldn’t actually go there.  Grace was annoyed and worried about how we would get home.  I wanted to go on the pretty boat ride and figured that it would all work out later.  My suggestion ended up winning, to hilarious consequences.

Chungju lake is actually manmade, but it is surrounded by really beautiful scenery.  We were not the only ones there to see it.  When we walked onto the boat we were met with many many pairs of staring eyes.  There were two giant family reunions on the ferry, and nobody understood what we were doing there.  Granted, we also didn’t really understand what we were doing there, so it’s not like they were alone.  We headed to the roof, willing to brave the cold in order to enjoy the misty grey mountains and the turqoise water.  We were soon joined by several adults and hordes of their children.  We started chatting with one girl, Lini, who quickly introduced us to her entire family.  Soon we were also approached by two curious little boys with very good English.

“Excuse me,” the older one said, “our mom wants to know where are you from?”  We told him that we were from Canada but now we lived in Seoul and worked as English teachers.  They left but were back shortly with more questions from their mom.  “Excuse me.  Our mom wants to know where do you teach?”  We told him.  5 minutes later: “excuse me, our mom wants to know where do you live?”  And so on, for the rest of the trip.  As we were getting off the boat we saw the boys again and thought it would be a good idea to ask them to ask their parents how we could get back to Chungju.  It was time to deal with that particular problem.

7- Ask your new friends about how to get back home, (because you didn’t plan that and there is no bus).

We approached the boys and they introduced us to their mom (who actually spoke very good English).  When we asked her how to get back from the ferry to Chungju she seemed very alarmed.  Apparently there was no actual way.  She ran off for a minute to talk to her husband and came back with a solution:  they would drive us back to Seoul.   We were stunned.  “You…will take us to Seoul with you?”  “Yes.  But first we will eat.  We will meet here in 30 minutes.”  Completely shocked by the continuous stream of kindness that we were encountering (to counteract the complete lack of transportation) we wandered into a restaurant and sat down – excited to try out the local specialty: snail.  The people sitting behind us were Lini and all of her many family members.  Before we had a chance to order though, the two boys and their mom (whose English name is Kimmie) ran in.

8 – Attend their family reunion

“Quick! Quick!” Yelled Kimmie and her sons, “we are leaving now! We are leaving now to Woraksan to eat! Let’s go!”

We bolted up, grabbed all of our stuff and followed her to the car.  When we got there (there is Woraksan, where we just were) we realized that we were just de-facto invited to have lunch with the entire family.  The family was there on a reunion in honour of the grandfather’s birthday.  This is what we were just invited to.

9 – Lose your Purse

As we were getting out of the car I asked Grace: “hey, can I put my wallet in your purse?”

“yea sure.”

And then silence.   The silence was because we both realized that Grace’s purse was not in the car with us.  In our hurry to get out of the restaurant, she must have forgotten it under the table.  We told the family immediately and they tried to call the restaurant without any success. This being Korea, we weren’t worried about the possibility of Grace’s wallet being stolen.  We just felt really bad that this family that had already gone to so much trouble would have to go to more trouble just to go back and get her stuff.

After a bit of consideration they put us at the kids table with the two boys we had already talked to, two more kids from Busan who spoke almost no English, another  boy and a girl close to our age who spoke a bit of English.  There was also a baby floating around from person to person, but it wasn’t at the kids’ table most of the time.

Halfway through lunch, Grace’s cellphone rang.  She picked it up and looked confused.

“Yes…this is Grace…Jeonju Guesthouse?  Yes I remember you…hello….did I lose my passport?  No but I lost my purse…. oh…oh ok!”  She motioned quickly for a pen and something to write on.  I had a pen but no paper so I provided her with my arm instead.  The children at the table freaked out at this.  I suspect they’re not allowed to write on themselves.  Grace wrote a phone number down on my forearm.

It turned out that someone had picked up her purse, tried to find a contact phone number inside it and had found the business card for jeonju guesthouse  – the place we had stayed at a couple of weekends before.  They called Jeonju guesthouse and the owners still had our phone numbers (because we had made friends with them too) so they called Grace and gave her the phone number of the woman that had her purse.

Grace dialed the number.  “Hi, this is Grace Hutton I think that you have my purse…”   and then “Lini?”

Yup.  Lini had picked up Grace’s purse.  Not only that, she was going back to Seoul that evening so she would bring it back to Seoul for Grace.  This way the family that we were with wouldn’t have to go back to the ferry terminal.  So far we basically survived this weekend because people take care of us non-stop in this country.  We explained this to Kimmie ( the mom) and continued to eat dinner happily.  At some point in the conversation the girl sitting beside us even mentioned that they were staying at Park Hotel and we wondered if we might have glimpsed them in the jimjilbang the other night.

Just as we were starting to think that, one of the boys spoke up.  “Alice and Grace,” he said, “our mom knows you.”  We looked at him, sort of confused.  It was beginning to dawn on us, however.  The baby that was being passed around looked really familiar.  Also the grandmother looked really familiar.  We turned to the girl beside us.

“So you were staying…at Park hotel last night?”  She nodded silently.

“So you were at the–”

“YESyesIwas.”  Her entire face had turned red at this point.

10 – Realize that 50% of the people you’re eating with saw you naked yesterday

This was when it finally dawned on us that the group of women in the hotsprings tub with us last night were here, at this family reunion.  Every single woman at this table had seen us naked.  So when we were getting on the boat, thinking that we didn’t know anyone – actually everyone was like “oh those are the naked foreigners from last night.  What are they doing here? Naked foreigners.”  The randomly curious boys were not actually randomly curious.  Meanwhile, their mom was the woman who had spoken English to me the night before to warn me about the hot water.  Remember the part where Grace said, “it’s ok that they heard our conversation, Alice, we’ll never see them again”? Yes that was foreshadowing.  Not only did we see them again, WE ATTENDED THEIR FAMILY REUNION.  Clearly Kimmy did not understand everything since she ended up giving us a ride home.

All in all – the weekend was a complete success.

Pictures to be found here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/alicetsier/Chungchu