Continuation....

After lunch, we grabbed a taxi and headed to a "flower festival" of some sort. Emily read about it in a book and wanted to check it out. We got there and it just looked like an orchard with some blooming trees to me. Guess it wasn't all that special to me, but they enjoyed it. It wasn't really worth the taxi ride there and then back to our hotel though, at least in my eyes. We blew around 50,000W (around 45$), but it wasn't really up to me, so I just went along. Then it was officially time to relax and do nothing, at least for me. We got to our small, but nice hotel room overlooking one of many mountain rivers. It wasn't large; we had to sleep on matts on the floor, but it was more than fine for me, as I was as exhausted as I could have been. I laid back, showered and they set to cooking our dinner. Thank god I wasn't expected to help. I barely stayed awake long enough to eat and was soon out, while they continued to slug down soju (pronounced sew-jew) and amaze me with how much they could eat. People keep telling me I don't eat much here. I think it's cuz I don't stuff myself to death, like I see some of them do. If you think Americans are trained to finish food on our plates, Coreans would put us to shame. If there's any food on the table left at all, they just keep picking away at it with their chopsticks, all the while commenting that they're already full. It confuses me and amazes me the amount they can put down at times.

The next morning, we all got ready and had yet another meal with rice and kimchi. At this point, I was inwardly groaning wishing I could eat something for breakfast that wasn't spicy and didn't include rice. That and I was aching for coffee. The only positive to cooking all the food, was that my pack seemed like half the weight afterwards. This time, they did tell me that we would be hiking 4 hours. I was a little leary of this, as I was a TOUCH sore from the day before, but at least I had been given a chance to process it. I geared myself up during our short taxi ride and had pretty much come to terms with things by the time we got there. To my pleasant surprise though, we dumped our backpacks in a restaurant and then headed up to see a beautiful temple. This was were we began. As this was my first temple, I must have looked a bit like a puppet as my mouth gapped open looking at all the ornate buildings and carvings everywhere of Budda and other Buddist symbols. I took some pictures. I only hope they capture things as I remember them. From there we headed on a trail to see a waterfall. 2.5 km up, and another 2.5 down. Not bad. Going up was a bit tough, but bareble enough to struggle through, especially seeing all the older coreans that were limberly meandering on up as I huffed and puffed away. As it was Sunday, many people were out too. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits and some said hello too. This isn't so normal on the city streets of Uijeoungbu, so I was pleased. On the way down though, things got a bit rough. It wasn't hard hiking, but about 1.2 km down Christine turned her ankle and we had to help her gimp down the rest of the way. She sprained it pretty badly. It was already swollen by the time we got to the bottom. It took us so much longer to hike down though, than expected, we had to rush to eat dinner and then go to the catch our bus home. I did manage to buy a really nice quilted monk's backpack and a couple bracelets though. I was overall pretty pleased with the trip, even with my occasional complaining and soreness.