Ever Evolving Primate: Travel, photography, food, cooking, and just about anything else.: Climb Ev'ry Mountain!

Ah, I’m a bit late in updating the blog after a fairly eventful weekend, but the unreliable nature of being a waygook with no personal internets (soon, SOON!) has made it difficult to sit down with a connection long enough to blog for a few days.

When we left off in this odyssey, I had just attended the middle school band concert, where raucous Koreans went wild for Mamma Mia. The next morning we woke up, headed down to the coffee shop for super slow internets and downloaded some American TV shows. You have no idea how comforting the soothing voice of Tyra Banks and the America’s Next Top Model girls can be until you’ve lived overseas, I’d venture to say. Anyway, we weren’t there merely to download crappy TV shows, we were also there to meet our friend Laotia (she’s Laotian, and in case you haven’t noticed I try not to use real names on the blog) so that we could all walk over to the Daegu arboretum together and see some of Korea’s nature. Well, we walked through the arboretum until we found the back gate and found a muddy trail. Of course when life gives you a muddy trail, you should follow it.

Out the back of the arboretum we headed, along what looked to be an ancient dirt road. There were many Koreans out with their top-of-the-line hiking gear, but we thought we’d be just fine in our jeans so we braved nature anyway. Korea is quite mountainous, and soon the dirt path we were following took a steep incline. We continued onward, intrepidly braving the harrowing cliffs what must have been (we are in Asia after all) Mount Everest, or K2, or some other peak with a name. It was a pretty good workout for us, but 70 and even 80 year old Koreans were zooming by us on the trail. These people are FIT. As we neared the peak we noticed more and more people. As we reached the summit we noticed…even more people…nearly all senior citizens, and every one of them was on a piece of workout equipment. THEY PUT A FREAKING GYM ON TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN! Not only did those old Koreans pass us on the way up, but they WORKED OUT when they got there. Not surprisingly, THEY PASSED US ON THE WAY DOWN, TOO!

On the way down, we stumbled across a gravesite of some kind. It was really serene and picturesque, with a view of mountains in the distance. What a calm place, I can see why someone would want to be buried there for eternity and whatnot. It seems like the kind of place where you could just rest. Once we found our way back to the trailhead we headed back into town. We live one block from the mountain, so that wasn’t a very long walk. We were famished, so we continued one block past the house to the BBQ Chicken, a chain restaurant with awesome Korean Fried Chicken. We ate the entire box, and then cracked open a couple of bottles of soju.

Soju is an easy way to get intoxicated, it goes down smooth and hits hard. In my experience it also upsets the bottom end of your digestive tract. Pretty much immediately. The next morning Babehoney and I woke up and headed to Chilseong Market. We heard this would be a good place to look for furniture, but we really didn’t see anything we liked. We did see some authentic looking places to buy food and stuff, especially seafood, and found a neat stationery store. We stopped to do some grocery shopping on the way home (also always an adventure), and finally made it back to our comfortable little place in the sun.