Hiking, Drinking, Eating, and Singing

Camera is MIA courtesy of the cats. Photos will be updated soonish.

So it’s the end of the semester. Despite what you’d think, its actually really stressful and irritating because it means one thing: CAMP. Yes, the four letter word of doom. Winter camp was awful and because of the way my school is set up, I have now learned how to set up and run a camp pretty much by myself. It may not be the best camp ever, but whatever.

Anyway, I was planning to have a nice relaxing weekend in Donghae involving a Thai massage, a movie in the theater (Harry Potter of course), and if the sun was shining, reading on the beach for several hours.

That’s not how it happened.

It started innocently enough. I was speaking to my co-teacher about camp and she said something about a trip. I blinked blankly and asked what trip. She stared at me in guilty horror and explained that there was a teachers’ retreat in Pyeong Chang (official home of the 2018 Winter Olympics and damn proud of it).

Thinking on my feet is really not a skill of mine. After looking like a crippled, maim deer for a few seconds, I said I would go. My mind was scream nononono, you FOOL! They will do what they always love to do and it will SUCK. Don’t do it! If my thought processes went faster than a legless centipede, I would’ve come up with some brilliant excuse like, ‘Sorry, the beach and Harry Potter are far more important to me than spending a lonely weekend hiking my sorry ass up a mountain’ or ‘I’m allergic to soju and beef and singing; I think I’ll pass and stay healthy.’

What do Koreans love to do? Eat. Eat, eat, eat. Drink soju and nasty Korean beer. After being sufficiently smashed, they then proceed to the nearest singing room for hours of good times with strobe light effects and tambourines while eating (dried squid/cardboard snacks) and drinking some more. Lastly, they love hiking. Well, okay, I like hiking too, but not in the rain.

Needless to say I entered the bus without the best of attitudes appropriate for such a glorious trip in a rented bus.

It didn’t help that I had gotten food poisoning a few days before and my body now rejects all cold soups in remembrance of the event.  I got away with saying I had a big breakfast. My school is used to my “tiny stomach.”

As predicted, storm clouds rolled in as we rolled up to Mt. Oda. However, the hike was clear and the temples were quite nice. The part that lifted my mood, however, was watching several grown women doing this:

Over this:

Yes, they were going gaga over chipmunks after I showed them how to feed the little buggers. I wandered off to look at the temple and get a small Korean lesson from my vice-principal only to come back to giggly Korean women who were still feeding the chipmunks. I take this as proof that Koreans want to like animals but culturally don’t know how. It improved my mood quite a bit until dinner…

Having been a vegetarian for so long (10+ years) I’m still uncomfortable eating large amounts of meat. I like bulgogi (Korean BBQ) but not as an entire meal. Plus, they go on for-ev-er. If I had been smart I would have ran to the bus with the bus driver. I tried a few times but was spotted and chased back inside.

By the time we got to our rooms, several people were drunk enough to curl up like this:

She was poked and prodded awake before being dragged out the door for singing. I declined and I think everyone was better for it. I was happy, they were drunk, I watched discovery channel, they drunk some more and were tone deaf, I took a glorious, wonderful, fantastic, heavenly, REAL shower and enjoyed the silence while they came back and had a mini-party out in the hotel’s commons.

I was door guard until they decided to snag the key… plunging the rooms into darkness and cutting the air. The poor nurse had been in the shower and came running out confused. I laughed and stuck my ARC (ID card) in the door before sleeping through the chaos that ensued when the unmarried women returned. I heard the next morning that quite a few interesting things happened…

Not to mention they all looked very sorry the next morning at the crack of dawn while I was cheerfully prancing around, gulping down fake coffee, and reading my book. I continued to happily do so for the rest of the day while my co-teacher grumbled that I looked “too good” and dragged me into pictures. It was a fun day for me because we did things I liked…

Trekking through a Jurassic Park forest full of mud and mosquitoes, capering after butterflies, wandering through massive flowers/herb gardens with all sorts of insects, feeding sheep and petting the dog, generally wandering around and just hanging out easily while managing to show up for all the treats.

Yes, my complaints are two pages long and my joys are one paragraph. Well, that’s the way it goes, right? The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

So what did I learn from all this? As annoyed as I get, my co-workers really are sweet, friendly people. It’s good to be reminded of that. 

I still probably won’t be going on any more trips in the future.

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