Cheonan visit: Vegetarian buffet and scenic view

On Sunday, June 10 (the day after hiking Dobongsan for Jonathan's birthday), we took the bus to Cheonan, the city we lived and taught in right after we arrived in Korea back in November and December. Before we left Korea we wanted to visit our friend, Fabrice, who was the only other teacher at our institute while we were there. We took a taxi to Fabrice's apartment and then spent some time visiting with him and his friend Ho Jin. Then another friend, Daniel, one of my former English students, picked us up and took us out for lunch at a completely vegetarian buffet - Dul An Chae - a favourite of ours from when we lived in Cheonan. The meal was, as always, delicious!

On our way to our next stop of the day Daniel stopped the car beneath a tall bridge going over the road and we climbed up the stairs to see the view from the top. Cheonan, as I recalled it from the cold wintry days we spent there, wasn't a very beautiful place. But the amazing verdant scene that met my eyes from the top of the bridge made me realize how very wrong I had been. On the way to our final destination, I sat with my face pressed up against the car window drinking in the gorgeous foliage-covered mountains and the brilliant-green rice paddies with the startlingly white heron/egret birds sauntering through them. It was truly one of the most beautiful sights I witnessed during my entire year in Korea, and I was so amazed at the huge transformation of the area from the brown of winter. Later, on the bus ride home, I was kicking myself for not taking pictures during that drive or having Jonathan take some, but sometimes you just need to take in the beauty around you and not worry about having to take pictures to show other people. I can assure you that that drive is forever ingrained in my memory, as firm as any picture could be.

Some of the delectable spread at the vegetarian buffet

Jonathan at the dessert table

Fabrice, Daniel and Ho Jin with their food

Walking bridge connecting two mountains

Ho Jin was quite afraid of the height, but he conquered his fear and walked to the other side and back

Connecting the trails

Hazy view from the top

Ali had to document these well-being stretches posted along the trail

Ho Jin happy to be back across the bridge

Friends chattering while descending the stairs

Watch for our coming Cheonan post about The Independence Hall of Korea, the place we went to next.

Hiking Dobongsan

Sabbath, June 9, was Jonathan's day to decide what to do. It being his birthday, I thought it only fair to let him choose how we should spend our last weekend off of our time in Korea. He picked hiking Dobongsan (Dobong Mountain). We researched how to get there on the subway and what peak to climb the evening before. Then that day, we were lazy in the morning and didn't arrive at the mountain until around 11 a.m. That was a bad choice as June was already sweltering, but we accepted the sweat dripping down our bodies and faces as our punishment. Dobongsan, within Bukhansan National Park, is one of the tallest mountains in Seoul with an elevation of 739.5 m (2,426 ft). It is also one of the most popular mountains to climb because of its proximity to Seoul and easy access from two subway stations.

Before reaching the park gates, we first had to maneuver through the maze of hiking stores and restaurants for 15 minutes. After grabbing an English map and asking a park ranger to point us to the peak, we set out. The first part of the trail was on an easy cobble-stone road that soon turned into a dirt path. Every so often we would come across stone stairs. About halfway up the mountain (or so we thought at the time) two Korean men passed us as we stopped to rest and rehydrate. We caught up to them again and one of the men spoke to us in very good English. He asked us all kinds of questions as we hiked up one section together, and told us that he hiked every weekend and had brought his friend along on the hike today. We gathered that the friend wasn't nearly as avid a hiker as he was, since he stopped often to let his friend rest. We continued stopping and catching up to each other for the rest of that part of the trail until we reached the ridge.

Then the REAL climb began as we came to an infinite wall of stone stairs reaching ever further up the mountain. I was ready to quit after just a few minutes of the tall stairs, but we stopped to eat part of our food and rested every few minutes from the steep climb. Somehow we managed to get past the stone stairs and then had to tackle metal stairs up the last portion. Once we reached the top of the metal stairs, we hauled ourselves up to the summit, pulling hand-over-hand with a hand railing up the very steep boulders. It was an incredibly hard hike with the incessant heat and tower of stairs, but the view from the top was, as always, amazing, although we were a little sad that the day was so hazy and Seoul was barely visible through the smog. After a well-earned rest and lots of pictures from the peak, we headed back down the mountain, going on a different trail, and finally resting our feet in a cool mountain stream before getting back to the city streets and myriad hiking stores. When we got home, we had celebratory cake for Jonathan's birthday (and for actually making it to the peak of Dobongsan). A splendid ending to a memorable day! :)

Map of the mountains we would be hiking in. Unfortunately we were unable to discover the actual peak we were aiming for.

Where we are headed

We discovered that if you somehow managed to roll out of bed stark naked and forget EVERYTHING,
you could completely suit up and gear up as you walked through the maze of shops to the trailhead.

Getting water from a rock

Lantern

Very rocky mountain

Looking back down at northeastern Seoul

Up into the hazy yonder...

Demoing the ropes for climbing which I didn't need

It was pretty steep and these railings were almost necessary at times, especially right at the top

At the top!

I attempted a 360 degree panorama but Photoshop didn't want to do it... I think I got maybe 180 degrees,
the rest was too featureless to find merge points (click to view larger)

Quite nice scenery

Seoul

Overlook

Fish in a stream where we bathed our tired feet

Tiny cascade

Back down in the shops

Upon our return, we found this celebratory sign - never found out who it was from...

The cake Ali got me - from Paris Baguette

Banpo Bridge light-and-water show

The months of May and June had a surprising number of Korean holidays: May 1 - Labor Day (bank holiday), May 5 - Children's Day (national holiday), May 8 - Parents' Day (observance), May 28 (lunar April 8) - Buddha's birthday (national holiday), & June 6 - Memorial Day (national holiday), which commemorates men and women who have died while in military service or in the independence movement.

This year Children's Day fell on a Saturday, so we didn't get a day off work, but Buddha's birthday was on a Monday and Memorial Day was on a Wednesday. We used May 28 to relax at home and do some cleaning and organizing that had been neglected a little too long, but we decided to make good use of June 6. Our initial plan was to make a picnic lunch, then go down to the Han River to rent some bikes and bike along the river, eating our picnic whenever we felt hungry. Well, our plans changed when we walked outside in the morning to a heat wave and had sweat running down our backs by the time we reached our nearby local grocery store to buy the ingredients for our picnic lunch. Instead of biking along the Han River, we made a nice lunch and ate it at home before braving the heat several hours later for a afternoon of exploring a new area of Seoul.

We had seen an entry in our guidebooks for a bridge, Bangpodaegyo (Rainbow Fountain Bridge), in Banpo Hangang (Han River) Park, which has a light-and-water-show every evening. We had made a note to go see it before leaving South Korea and decided this was the perfect opportunity, especially since we'd initially planned to be near the Han River anyway. We headed out and took the subway to Gangnam station, where we had to walk a long ways underground and through a bunch of construction to get to the right exit. Once we emerged into daylight again, we had to ask several Koreans how to get to Banpo Park before finding someone who knew and pointed us in the right direction. A pleasant half-hour walk later, we came to the park and continued strolling down the walking trails beside the Han River.

As afternoon faded into evening, we found a place on the concrete bleachers on the left side of the bridge, along with a number of Koreans, some setting up tripods and expensive cameras. 8 o'clock rolled around, and we wondered if we were somehow in the wrong part of the park, since the bridge looked the same as before. Suddenly water started gushing from the other side of the bridge and music played on loudspeakers. Everyone waiting on our side of the bridge jumped up and rushed across the road to the bleachers on the other side. We found a spot wedged between excited Koreans and settled in to watch the moving water fountains with different coloured lights projected onto the spray and set to classical music. It was a pretty sight and a relaxing way to end the day. After five songs, the fountains, lights and music stopped, and we stood up and wandered down the pathway in the opposite direction, looking for public washrooms. When we came back to the trail several minutes later, the fountains had started up again, and we watched from further away this time before finally walking back to the subway for the hour ride home. All in all, Memorial Day had been quite memorable for us!

An interesting building built on a man-made island in the Han River

Another interesting building

A floating stage

Han River cruises lighting up the water as they watch the light-and-water show

Bangpodaegyo - Rainbow Fountain Bridge

Light and water! See light go! See water go! Go light go! Go water go!*

Shadows

On our walk back to the subway, we went through some walking tunnels under the road and found these interesting spray-paint pictures. :)

*The first two sentences happened to be the text Jonathan put in as placeholder after he uploaded the pictures for this post - I thought it was hilarious, added the last two sentences, and decided it needed to be a caption somewhere in this post. Yes, we are nerds. :)