Mountain Climbing and 회식

Mountains are everywhere here.  My morning bus ride takes me through a short course of mountains to get to my school.  Some of my friends have to travel up the mountains to get to their school and I'm fortunate enough not to have to go through that trouble.  Anyways, I went on a hiking trip with my school at one of the nearby mountains.  What an experience that was.

When Koreans climb, they climb.  They aren't joking when they say they are going climbing.  They have the specific climbing clothes, backpacks, gloves, hats, titanium hiking sticks, food, drink and canteens with compasses on them specifically to drink soju with.  I, on the other hand, was decked out in my hoody, sweats and running shoes.  I was pretty shabbily dressed compared to the other teachers.  

I quickly realized that the mountain we were climbing was actually a mountain and not some nob of a hill called a mountain in the states.  The trail we traversed was very steep and in some parts nearly vertical in which you had to use the ropes that were planted on the trail.  Most people frown at a challenge of this nature but I enjoyed it!  

The gym teacher and I were at the head of the pack and we quickly made our way up the mountain.  The time that was posted said an hour but it took us two around 40 minutes to reach the top.  The view from the top was amazing.  We were literally on a rock on the top of the mountain 625 meters above sea level, I'm pretty sure.  We waited for the others to arrive and when they did the first thing that came out of the expensive mountain backpacks were soju and snack foods.  One of the teachers even pulled out some kind of Russian Vodka.  Again its so different to have this kind of bonding experience with your co-workers but it was fun.  

After pictures, eating and drinking we carefully made our way down the STEEP mountain after drinking.  Not a good idea!  And to top it off the guy who drank the most was at the front.  Usually if I said this about a group of Americans someone would have fell, but because I guess this is the common thing to do in Korea and Koreans have a lot of experience mountain climbing after drinking so no one fell.  

We later went out to dinner where we proceeded to drink more and eat meat.  My mentor teacher wasn't able to make it to the mountain climbing session and has been MIA because he's been busy writing a 100 page report on something so I haven't seen him.  But, he made it to the dinner and that was a good to have him there.  Compared with the last 회식 this one seemed like a lot of people needed to let off some steam and destress.  One of the teachers got quite inebriated but still kept her composure while we went out to the noraebang after dinner.  The noraebang was fun because I got to see everyone care free and having a fun time.