First, since the lodging is near a lake, Aaron and I woke up and walked to the lake at around 7am. We just took a little walk and took some pictures of the lake. The lake almost reminded me of West Lake in Hangzhou, except a lot less people and less pagodas and temples. It was pretty peaceful and we did enjoy our walk a lot. There was also a temple (Gyeongpodae) on top of a little hill next to the lodging area so we walked up there and took a few pictures of the lake view.
Then at around 8 we met up with the rest of the foreigners and our guides, and the bus took us to breakfast, which was sundubu aka soft tofu. It was soft tofu stew in some water, and we had to mix flavors (such as soy sauce, or kimchi, or bean paste soup, etc into it. It looks like cottage cheese but it was actually pretty good.
After the breakfast we took a long and windy road to the mountains near the city. It took awhile and but finally we got there. First the guide explained about two shrines in the mountains, and then we took a little hike. First we hiked up to an area, and then we hiked down to another view point. The hike itself wasn't too bad, but sometimes the leaves made the ground slippery so I fell once unfortunately. But other than that, it was a decent hike. The views at the end were pretty good as well, lots of mountains right next to each other.
After the hike we took the bus again, and ended up at this little old village. A lot of the houses were abandoned, but there was still a lot of the farms still there, as well as a little old spring (that lived a few small frogs). It was pretty neat to see what the old Korean farm houses looked like. There was a little mini hike through the wooded area to see some really large rocks (Crane Rock) as well.
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Finally at the end, we had lunch. It was a pretty good lunch, and we had this interesting rice thing, where we got rice in stone pots, and we scraped and ate the rice in another bowl while hot water is poured into the stone pot to make a ricey drink. There were also tons of banchan, including fish, japchae noodles, tempura, tofu, seaweed, pancake, etc. We did fill up pretty well.
After that lunch the program was over so we all headed back to the bus terminal, where we took buses and finally got back to Anseong around 7. Click here to read more
