Dobongsan - June 28

I went hiking up Dobongsan, a mountain in northern Seoul, with my friend Yonghwa and this group called Meet-Up.

We started around noon. The group was headed by a guy named Michael. I met a number of interesting people to talk with. Often during the week, becaues I'm teaching ESL kids and working with a mostly Korean staff, my English is limited to what others know. When I find myself around native speakers on the weekend, I have a tendency to get really chatty.  It feels like a breath of fresh air when I don't have to be too careful with how I'm saying something, like if I'm enuciating correctly, using simple and straight-forward enough grammar, or watching my vocabulary or idiom usage.


I hadn't gone hiking in awhile. I think hiking is wonderful, but so is sleeping and tooling around in markets on the weekends. Also, I do Hapkido during the week, so my weekends are like my "break time" from serious exercise. However, you can't pass up such a beautiful weekend to go play in the woods. It wasn't even that terrible sweltering hot that Korea's able to provide at times.

Yonghwa, her boyfriend and I stuck to the slow team. It was quite hot, and Yonghwa was feeling a bit tired and overdressed. She had pants, and it was over 27 degrees. Later, more people joined us because they liked our pace better than the more hard-core hikers.

It was great fun, especially the part where we kept going up to peaks only to be told by the group leader it was not THE summit and we had to keep going. At one point very near the final summit, there was a choice of going the "hard way" or the "easy way." Of course we chose the hard way, and I'm glad we did! There was a very steep drop down then up that we really had to climb on, using ropes that were nailed into the rocks. It was awesome. It wasn't as hardcore as "rock climbing" but as far as hiking goes it was quite exciting.

At the top, most of us were deflated and tired. There were other members of the organization who'd gone up a more difficult route. They were wearing bunny ears and blowing bubbles from the top. It was really cute.

We climbed down the easy way, and then found a typical restaurant on the foot of the mountain for a traditional hiking dinner of makoli (rice wine) and pajeong (octopus, green onion and squid pancake). I went home exhausted and happy. A really long hike, but very beautiful.