A Trip to Rural Korea!

On Thursday it was National Independence Day in Korea, which is one of two national holidays celebrating Korea's resistance against Japan. So luckily we had both Thursday and Friday as holiday! We decided to go and explore a large national park called Jirisan which is about 2.5 hours away on the train. The park is connected to a small village called Ssanggyesa which is not much more than a small roundabout of restaurants and little hotels called Minbaks. This was the first time where we really felt like we were in a completely foreign place and we were going to have to depend on our limited korean speaking and reading skills and A LOT of miming! Our first port of call was to find somewhere to sleep for the night. It had been advised to us in Lonely Planet that there were various small minbaks in the town. The first one we came across looked like something from a murder horror film so we moved swiftly on. We found a small restaurant advertising rooms in the back of the restaurant so we wandered in using our best Korean.... "Minbak??", and we were shown to a small but clean room which seemed perfect for one night. The room was very Korean in that there wasn't actually a bed! In Korean houses the heating is in the floor so that's the warmest place! Therefore, lots of Koreans simply put mats and duvets on the floor instead of having a bed! It was a new experience for us but it was actually quite comfortable!

It's custom in Korea to remove your shoes when you enter a house or restaurant and wear slippers when you're inside. So when we entered the minbak we took off our walking boots but didn't have any slippers so we wandered around in our socks which the Korean family found very funny! One of the Korean ladies went and got us some slippers which fitted Nina fine, but did not accomodate Ed's size 11 feet. So Ed was made to shuffle around like a Geisha in these tiny little slippers! After finding our place to stay we walked up to Ssanggyesa temple which we both agreed was the most beautiful temple we've visited so far. The weather was warm and the sun was just going down so the whole place had a really calm atmosphere. Here are some photos of the temple:

After the temple, we decided to visit the Korean Green Tea culture centre! The main museum was closed because it was a holiday but two smiley Korean ladies were in the gift shop so we thought we'd pop in. They prepared some tea for us and we ended up sitting with them for about 45 minutes having a sort of conversation about the weather, Korea, England and University with us not speaking Korean and them not speaking English!
For dinner, we thought we would try the restaurant in front of our minbak. We had a slight problem in that we weren't gonna be able to read the menu very well, and even if we could we probably weren't going to know what the dish was! We made a plan....... in the back of the Lonely Planet guide were 'dinner phrases' so we were going to point to the sentence saying 'Can you recommend something to eat?' therefore we could avoid just randomly pointing at something in the menu! However, the plan backfired when the woman didn't have her glasses so couldn't read our Lonely Planet translation! Luckily, we spotted Bibimbap on the menu which is a traditional rice dish so we managed to order without looking completely useless!

The following morning we got up early so that we could set off on a hike with lots of time to spare. Unfortunately, unlike the nice warm weather of the day before, it was pouring with rain! We put on our cags in bags and started our route. Our goal was to reach a waterfall called Buril Pokpo. The route was good fun, being completely deserted and in a large forest. It was kinda fun to pretend like we were in Lost. We were absolutely soaked in the rain, Ed commented that Nina's hair looked like corn rows.

After about an hour and halfs walk we reached the waterfall. To both our suprise the waterfall was partially frozen! It looked more like an icy rock and we concluded that waterfalls are a lot better when there is water, and it's falling.

On the way back we came across a camp area with park benches so we had a short tea break of biscuits to keep our energies up. Nina's wet corn row hair was starting to make her cold and she noticed that there was a plug socket in the camp so she plugged in her hair dryer and gave her hair a quick blast!

Once we were back in Ssanggyesa we bought bus tickets from a fish restaurant on the side of the road and hopped on the first bus of four back to Jinyeong!!!