Climbing Stairs

My Saturdays in Korea are always amusing.  I set out to refill my bus pass and ended up buying a Tamagochi (that’s right, Tamagochi – for a dollar – thank you Asia) and hiking up a mountain.

One of my first impressions of Korea after merely walking around Yeosu a few times was “gee Koreans really must love hiking and mountain climbing” for every other store is a sports-wear shop.  They are seriously everywhere.

After a few weeks here my boss took me and one other foreigner to go hiking with her mom.  I should have put “hiking” in parenthesis.    Turns out, by hiking, she meant climb a bunch of hard plastic stairs that have been forced upon nature.

So I thought, “this isn’t hiking, why do people need special clothes, and shoes, and expensive aluminum walking sticks just to climb a bunch of stairs?  This must just be a weird mountain; they can’t all be like this.”

Wrong. 

They are all like that.  My boss, one other foreigner and I formulated a hiking club and every time we have gone “hiking” we’ve really just climbed some stairs.  Silly Korea.

So today I followed a sign to what was supposed to be an “ancient ruins park” but I knew better because Japan destroyed all of Korea’s ancient ruins some decades ago.  There are no ancient ruins.  But I wanted to see what they claimed was there. 

Turns out, it was a mountain.  And much to my surprise, there were no stairs!  You actually had to hike!  It must be pretty rare and somewhat dangerous or something because when I got to the top there was a man sitting in a booth with a walkie talkie - I guess in case someone couldn’t handle all the actual hiking and there was some sort of hiking emergency. 

The highlight of the hike was when I passed a bunch of middle school-aged boys who said “hello!  Where are you from?”  I could have answered in Korean but instead I said “New York.”  And they said “New York?”  And then they did the Statue of Liberty pose in order to confirm that they had heard me correctly.  I love that.