Cherry Blossoms

This last weekend was perfect.  I spent the whole entirety of it mostly outside.  Korea has finally decided that it is time to warm up a little bit, and all of us are so grateful!  To celebrate the warm weather Julie and I spent the weekend together going to 부길 (Boo-Gil) High School to look at the cherry blossoms.  Apparently this is the place to go to look at Cherry Blossoms in Cheonan.  When I heard it was at a high school, I wasn't expecting too much because most high schools don't have tons of land.  I thought maybe a few rows of Cherry Blossom trees.  Oh my was I wrong!  This place was HUGE and it was covered in Cherry Blossom trees and Magnolia trees.  
It was absolutely beautiful.  Julie and I spent a good portion of the afternoon at the high school looking at the trees, watching a high school baseball game, and watching ladies doing Tai Chi in the park.  It was a great afternoon.

I guess we just didn't have enough of the beautiful weather because from 부길 we decided to go climb a mountain.  We have a mountain literally in the backyard of our apartment building.  We have discovered that in a hour we can get to the mountain, hike up it and get back to our apartment.  This mountain is intense though.  It doesn't seem so bad at first but the last little bit of it is straight up!  At the top of the mountain is a beautiful, very colorful pavilion.  The view from that mountain is so beautiful.  There is a lot of nature and a great view of the city too!
When we made it to the top there was an elderly man sitting there in the pavilion.  At first he was pretty quiet.  But then he started to talk to us, in Korean of course.  I was so happy that Julie was there.  I was understanding a lot of what he was asking, but I don't always know how to respond to the questions.  Julie's Korean is much better than mine, she is one of those people who just has to hear something once and then she knows it...awesome skill to have for language learning.  I'm pretty jealous of that! Anyway..he was asking where we were from, how old we were, why we were in Korea, and other basic questions.  He then asked us if we wanted 막걸리 (mak-uh-li), it is a traditional Korean rice wine. I was telling one of my teachers about this experience and she informed me that it is very popular to climb mountains and then sit on the top and drink 막걸리.  Before Julie and I could say "Oh, it's okay, we're going to start heading down."  He had out two dixie cups.  One for him and one for Julie and I to share.  He filled it with the rice wine, which is pretty disgusting, and then proceeded to pull out of can or corn and a can of snails.  He handed us a pair of chopsticks and told us to eat.  As we were sitting there trying to get the wine, corn, and snails down, two other older men joined us.  Luckily one of them spoke English and started translating.  Julie and I sat on the mountain with these three older men discussing things such as why we decided to teach in Korea, the music of Smokey Robinson (I don't know why, but one of the old men LOVED Smokey) and Obama.

After about an hour talking with them, one snail actually eaten (thank you Julie), a can of corn half-gone, and a few dixie cups of 막갈리, we decided it was time to head back down the mountain.  It was a great Saturday!  This coming weekend we are planning on going to the Korean Folk Village..I'm sure there will be many stories to tell!

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