Weekend of 6/4/2011
I know its been a while, but I would like to get you caught up on what I have been up to.
Two weekends ago, I went for my co-worker’s birthday weekend in SOKCHO. There was a huge mountain there, so a lot of people wanted to go hiking. We had a three day weekend, so it was a good time for many foreigners to go somewhere for more than one or 2 days. There were also supposedly some nice beaches around as well. Well, we left Saturday morning for a supposed to be 5 hour bus ride. Three to Seoul and two hours to Sokcho. It took longer than we thought, but when we got there, it was around 5 or so. We decided to go shopping because the place that we were going to stay at had pots and pans and a grill. We got lots of food and made kebabs for 13 people.
I didn’t help make anything, but they turned out pretty good. They had veggies, chicken and shrimp on them. The shrimp (which I’m not a HUGE fan of, but I eat it) was amaaaaaazing on the grill. So good. we ran out of coal and whatnot so after 2 rounds of kebabs on the grill, one of the guys there took them inside and made it even better, stir frying it. SO good. Well, the place that we stayed at a place where we had “rented” a sort of house. There are no beds, but semi-comfortable blankets and pillows that you lay out on the floor in the rooms
. I guess maybe about 8 people can stay in a room. We had 3 rooms, a living room and a kitchen. It was pretty nice. The next morning, after some drinking Saturday night, we got up and some people went hiking and some went to the beach. I went to the beach. 
It was really hot. There really wasn’t too many people on the beach, but more came in the afternoon. I think its ridiculous how Koreans try so hard not to get a tan. Korean’s tend to think white is better…so they don’t want to be tan. I think this is funny because a good hunk of Americans I know want to be tan and stay tan. This being said, they carry around sun umbrellas and while I was at the beach, witnessed several women and children wearing long sleeved shirts, hats, face scarves, sunglasses, etc. it is 90 degrees out but they are bundled up like its winter, just so they don’t get a tan, or tanner than their original skin color. Everyone wants what they can’t have. 
Finally, after the beach, we decided to come back a day early. The group I was with anyways…so, first, the lady at the ticket counter was a bitch and was kinda mean to us. She was pissed at one of the people we were with so she wouldn’t let one of us use our debit cards…THEN, we had to wait an hour…which wasn’t too bad, but when the hour was up, everyone was kinda in different places… Everyone was running for the bus (because they leave exactly on time) Me and one friend, Carissa, were getting kim bop, which is kinda like sushi, but not. It usually takes like maybe max 5 minutes to make fresh. Well this woman was taking a year. We just left money. Not sure if it was right, but definitely enough. Three other friends were coming from a pharmacy and one had gone into the bus station to use the restroom. Well, the girl that came from the restroom got the bus door closed in her face because of time constraints after we tried to stop the bus. So, Laura had to take the bus back by herself…3 or 4 hours. When we got to the bus station in Seoul, Andrew, a co-worker, had realized that he lost his wallet. It was probably left at the rest stop we stopped at on our way back. He was worried about that of course, we were trying to figure out when the last train was back to Daejeon because there were no more buses, and he was trying to check the bus for his wallet. We met back up with Laura because her (next) bus left just 5 minutes after ours. We had 30 minutes to get to Daejeon station to catch the last train to Daejeon. Well, the station was not very close to us. We told our cab driver BALI BALI (?) which is HURRY HURRY (I guess). Well, he hurried. We were going in no driving zones, through red lights, around cars that were stopped. This cabby was awesome. We made it with 7 minutes to spare. So, from leaving Sokcho around 6-30, we didn’t get home til 2ish. Loooooong day.
