Ski Trip

Conclusion: procrastinating on blog posts make them really difficult.  I am going to take these one step as a time.

I guess the easiest way to start this post is to talk about what I have been up to.  On Thursday, we left for our ski and cultural trip.  We really didn’t do anything cultural.  Apparently in years past they have visited a small village on this trip.  Why we didn’t do that this year, I don’t know.  Did they think we were uninterested?  I don’t know.  But honestly, the ski hill was not good enough to justify taking an extra day for skiing instead of seeing Korean culture.  Because I can ski at home.  I cannot see Korea at home.  And I really haven’t seen that much Korean culture yet.

Seoul is like Hong Kong in that way.  It is so clean and modern, that they have cleaned up a lot of their culture right along with it.  Or have hidden it under the rug.  It took us weeks of searching before we found a traditional instrument concert.

Anyways, back to skiing.  Things got off to a rocky start when I and another student got into a sledding crash.  We are both fine now.  We spent the afternoon renting everything from snow pants to ski boots.  We took a gondola up to the top of the mountain for no apparent reason (the chair lifts take you to the same place).  There were sheep there, also for no apparent reason. We rode back down, then had some free time to explore the resort.  The resort was a huge, ski out place.  It was made up of three main building, each with over ten floors.  There were also separate pool buildings, café buildings, and building that I really don’t know their purpose, all connected through indoor bridges and tunnels.  I think they might have been trying to compensate for something…

Finally, after dinner, we hit the slopes for the first time.  For the first time in my life, I went skiing with a snowboarder. Which would have been fine, except her bindings were crappy, so it took three times as long to strap in as it should.  Sigh. 

The hill had about the difficulty level of Lutsen, but the length of about 1 ½ Hyland hills.  Not bad, but the way people were talking, I was expecting mountains.  But they still believed that they needed high-speed lifts.  Which was fine, as it was faster.  But completely unnecessary!

I was lucky in that I got pretty good boots and skis. But some of the other people had water leak into their boots.  The prof’s daughter even got frost-nip.  It was also very, very cold.  Easily single digit wind-chill, so we were all in and out, trying to keep warm.  One of the other students lost his wallet (it was later found).  But all things considered, at the end of the night we were all less than thrilled.  But we ended the night with karaoke, which made everything better.

The next morning, skiing was a lot better.  The sun warmed things up, so no breaks needed.  I also able to ski with some different people, and we spent the morning racing down double black diamonds (orange circles here).  After lunch, we returned to Yonsei, and we all collapsed of exhaustion.

Obviously more stuff has happened since then, but I’ll write about that later.

It is not even 1pm, so to say good night would feel a bit wrong.

Good Afternoon!

Andrea