10/15-10/18
I’ve been terribly bad all month about updating the blog. I finally had a pretty low key weekend, the first time I haven’t gone hiking at least one day. Saturday I had a lazy morning and met up with Namhee and Young Ah at 3 to go shopping for hiking gear at Nampodong. We started in the department store Lotte and looked around the street shops too, but came back to Lotte in the end. Young Ah had a credit card that got 15% off there so I got a great deal on really nice black Columbia hiking pants and a green Columbia backpack as well as orange, brown, and maroon Merrill hiking shoes. It was so nice to finally get to go shopping and get some good gear, and Namhee and Young Ah are really fun to hang out with and thank goodness they love shopping since I’m pretty picky and took a while to decide on things.
After shopping we went to dinner near my neighborhood at Sajik and had Andong jimdak, a really really good stew type dish kind of like coq au vin with pieces of soy sauce marinated chicken in a soup with clear rice noodles and big chunks of carrot, zucchini, and potatoes. It was quite scrumptious!
On Sunday, I went on a group outing with Hongbeopsa Temple (the place that does foreigner activities where I had made songpyeon for Chuseok). There was a bus full of around 40 of us, including a bunch of my friends from the daytrippers group. We went to Yangdong Folk Village, about 2 hours away near the ancient capital of Gyeongju. We had a nice traditional lunch with a really good sweet pork dish and lots of fresh sidedishes. The village was recently named a UNESCO world heritage site and had noblemen’s houses that were over 600 years old, with some members of the ancestral families still living in the houses! It was a beautiful and picturesque village. After the folk village we went to Gyeongju to see the ancient mound tombs of past kings of the Korean Silla dynasty. The mounds were really surreal, and kind of reminded me of hobbit homes. It was pretty impressive how big they were though. After the tombs I grabbed a big stick of cotton candy from one of the vendors in the parking lot and also got a few kitchy souvenirs. Then we piled back on the bus and headed home after a fun daytrip.
Adventures in Korea! 