Taebaek Snow Festival

Taebaek Snow Festival Concert

Oh man, this concert was something I can honestly say I've never seen before, and hopefully never will again. I don't know what I expected, but I was not prepared for the onslaught of cheesy Korean pop music that we endured. Oh well, here are some of the more interesting moments of the night.

Korean drummers, not very good, but entertaining.


The first afro I've seen in Korea. Also, the girls that are clapping their hands are some of my students!



Awww, so cute, Korean soldiers dancing in front of the stage. Notice the heart shape the one soldier makes with his arms. This is a popular gesture here.


And the best part of the night was this crazy electric violin. Amazing!




ANNNND, apparently Rob and I really stand out in a crowd of 1000 people. Of course, the whole event was in Korean, so we can't understand anything that is being said. Suddenly, Mr. Cho (my co-teacher) starts laughing, and says "they are talking about you" and we hear the host say "Where are you from?". Ah, what? So, I yell out "Canada!". If that wasn't strange enough, later on in the evening she mentions to one of the musicians something on stage. All we hear is "Canada" and "hi". So if Taebaek didn't know about us before, they do now. Yeah, we're celebrities.

Random Findings

I was very bored today, so I forced Rob into taking a walk with me.
The best way to learn a city is to walk it. You always see things that you would never have seen if you rode in a bus or car. We were told that there were many hiking paths that went up into the mountains, we just had to find them. We walked along a main street for awhile trying to find a bridge to cross the river. As we were walking we saw four beautiful birds.


I don't know if they were cranes or herons, I'm leaning more towards heron because it flew with its neck curved, but I don't know for sure. They were a dusty blue colour, and darker blue under their wings. They were standing in the river, but when we walked by they became airborne gliding around in formation for a while before resting in the trees on the far side. After that we found a trail that didn't really look public, but we decided to walk it anyway. It was a nice footpath beside a frozen river. After a bit though we saw in the distance a monk doing monk things, so we decided to turn around quietly and leave him to his monkish activities. The second path we found seemed more promising as it had a sign, with a map. This was a really nice path that followed a frozen stream up the mountain. In the summer i am sure it will be just beautiful, when the leaves come out, the ferns wake up and the flowers bloom. Along the way we found an underground spring with absolutely delicious water, and a outdoor gym. We didn't follow the path to the end, as the sun was setting. Maybe tomorrow...

new years at the summit of mt. taebaeksan

Kat and I decided to take it easy this New Year's Eve, and went out for a tame supper with friends and fellow local foreigners Mike and Susie Rowe. Delcious Bakgalbi (chicken and cabbage in a red pepper paste fried up in a communal grill in front of you) was the main course, followed by some ice cream and coffee at the local coffee shop. It was at this coffee shop that I met a group of foreigners traveling from Daegu to spend New Years at the mountain summit. This is a tradition that many Koreans have been doing for generations and generations, the local superstition being that if you make a wish upon the first sunrise of the year at the top of the mountain (or at the shores of the East Sea), it will come true. So we invited them over to have some celebratory New Years drinks at our apartment, and then we would head off to the mountain. After about 2 hours of sleep (more like 2 hours of sobering up), Grahaem (forgive my spelling), Liz, Ann, and myself embarked out to climb the mountain. Katherine decided to sit this one out (or should i say sleep this one out).

We arrived at the base of the mountain just a little before 4am, as it would take a few hours to get to the top. The crowd was quite large, it's difficult to really estimate well how many people did the trek, but it was in the thousands. All of us filed up the mountain slowly, the cold increasing the further up we went, same with the level of snow. I spent most of time listening to my iPod and taking in what was going around me, though i never brought a flashlight, there was enough ambient light from the moon and others' flashlights that i had no difficulty seeing my footing. I won't forget the sight of people and flashlights lining the narrow rock stairs for as far as one could see. As we approached the summit, the trees all around became white ghosts from the wind and ice crystals, bent and random. I saw a few yew trees lining the path, ancient trees with life spans of a thousand years or more. Ancient ghosts lining an ancient rock path built by some forgotten culture, leading to two stone shrines at the summit.



This is Chonjedeon, there were buddhist ceremonies taking place at dawn here, and it was our destination. When we arrived at the top, however, the biting wind and lack of shelter created a very miserably cold morning, and unfortunately, had already numbed everybody's extremities, and to wait another hour to hour and a half for the sun to rise could be disastrous. However, luck, or fate was in our favour, and the local mountain climbing shop owner whom I had talked to the previous day about the journey was there with a tent, and invited us in to warm up. Keep in mind, this tent is a two man tent (being generous), and we managed to fit six people in it. But that worked, and we warmed up with a propane burner, and three bottles of soju.

The sun came up, and shone for only moments, glowing the mountain range in the distance, and taking my breath away, realizing that we were above it all. No pictures do any justice of the summit, but the mountains stretched for hundreds of kms, and you could see even the most distant, faintly against the horizon. However, it would be shortlived, and the sun disappeared behind the clouds until much later.





So we headed down the mountain again, with our new friend Sung Moon, the mountain climbing shop owner/mountain climbing club president. We stopped at a Buddhist temple and monastery along the way, and then hit up some lunch. By the time I finally got home, it was 2pm, the travellers had continued on their way back to Daegu, I had a new Korean friend, and many new memories, which I reflected on as I slept for seven hours without rolling over.