Wolchulsan Mountain 1

Words cannot express how freaking huge and amazing that mountain is!! Since I come from a flat place like Ontario, this was easily the biggest mountain I've ever climbed. We arrived in Yongam at about lunch time and from the distance wolchulsan looked like no big deal. Wolchulsan is about 800m high, which isn't all that tall, but for a hick like me it was pretty amazing.





This is us after entering the park and preparing to tackle the mountain. Of course this was a great photo opportunity, so we enlisted the help of a friendly passerby to take our picture. Then when they were done, they wanted their picture taken with us!! If you look closely, you'll notice the random man on the left has a truly heinous mullet!! Mullets are a very frequent thing here in Korea which is both puzzling and entertaining for me. I can't quite pin down Korean style, and I don't think I ever will. It's definitely interesting. When we paid and were about to park, we saw about 10-15 tour buses and we realized we'd be sharing the mountain with A LOT of people!! We got a lot of "hello!"s and stares all day long, but that was okay.






Some of Stuart's middle school kids were even there at the extension bridge featured above and below, so he was a huge hit! At one point we were walking behind a huge troupe of Korean men, and a man in front of me turned around and thrust a candy into my hand saying "here". So I took it and popped it into my mouth with a muffled "komsamida" (thank-you). Then laughed to myself as I thought about what I would do if a strange man offered me candy in Canada. Here people are constantly giving me things on the street, or I'm giving my students stuff; it's just widely acceptable here, which I think is pretty awesome. At lunch I was offering oranges and pepero's to any Korean who would stop to look at us/ ask us where we were from. People always say "American?" and I always reply with "no no no!!! Canadian!!!!". Not same same.