A Barbed Wire Tour of Inwangsan

Thursday was Children's Day, and all the teachers at my school got the day off. Interestingly enough, next Friday is Teacher's Day and not only do we need to show up for work but we need to do a performance in front of hundreds of our peers. I think they mixed up the names of those two holidays.

But back to Children's Day. It was on the 125th day of 2011 and of all 125 days it must have offered us the nicest weather yet. We decided to go hiking at Inwangsan, near Seodaemun Station in North Seoul. As the Buddha's Birthday holiday is coming soon (another day off next week!), a trail of colorful lanterns led us to the temple at the base of the mountain.

This simple gate marked the temple entrance.

With 25 degree temperatures, the hike up to the entrance had us red faced and tired, but then we were met with our arch nemesis STAIRS, of which weaved through some modest residential homes, the temple, and a bell. Beyond these buildings was the real beginning of the hiking trail.

I'm pretty sure that we did this hike ass-backwards. It seemed like many times we were faced with the decision of taking random trails that led left or right, but with no signs in Korean or English we just kind of chose whichever way looked the most promising. The first place our sweaty asses came to was a spring (to refill water bottles) and an exercise park. In case you like to lift some weights and just go into complete cardiac arrest.

Before long we came to a really big, flat rock where we relaxed, snacked and enjoyed the view.

Inwangsan is a cool place to hike because the rocks are NEAT. It's kind of hard to tell from the picture but the rocks at the top of the above photo looked like they were really defying gravity by not rolling straight down the hill.

After leaving our rock, we chose a trail going left, but were quickly greeted by the first of many bunches of barbed wire on this trail. Soooo, we turned around and found another trail going straight up. At least I think it was a trail... upon reflection it might have just been a path formed by water runoff. Either way, on our way through, we came across a little family of mountain kitties. They were looking a little ratty, but they weren't freaked out by people the way Seoul city cats usually are.

At the top of the trail/water runoff route were were greeted by two fences (one electric!), barbed wire, and a tall cement wall. We took our chances walking the perimeter.

The fence led to another trail where we could see the real top of the mountain, complete with stairs and everything. Problem is, we hadn't the foggiest clue how to get there. It didn't look too far away but we were obviously in the wrong place and there was no way for us to get there. Instead, we followed a path in the opposite direction, which led to the cool gravity-defying rocks we'd seen earlier.

From the rocks we could see much of the Insadong area from above, including Gyeongbukgong palace.

We weren't really sure how to get down from where we'd gotten ourselves, and we wound up basically rolling down another water runoff trail and found ourselves walking along an old fortress wall until we met up with this cool rock. It's called a skeleton rock, but we thought it looked like Castle Grayskull.

From there, we met up with an official trail, and got ourselves back down to the area with the spring water/exercise machines that we'd seen earlier. From there, we took a trail in the opposite direction from where we started our hike. We quickly found ourselves at one of Inwangsan's main sites, which are really just more rocks- ones where mothers traditionally prayed for sons. The touristy sign says they prayed for fertility but, c'mon, we all know they were praying for a boy.

We followed the trail along a little further and found this Buddha sculpted into rock. Meh, I've seen much nicer. Also, the entire exhibit is surrounded in fence and barbed wire.

Now, my Korean is far from fluent, but I'm pretty sure this sign next to the Buddha is asking people to NOT leave pig heads at the monument. We don't see too many signs like that in Canada.

Since there were no pig heads to eat, we hiked back down towards Seodaemun Station. We'd spotted a restaurant there that we'd been dreaming of since our hike began: BBQ Chicken pizza!!!!!! The loyal reader might remember on our annoying trip to Busan several months ago
one of the few trip highlights was this amazing BBQ Chicken pizza. BBQ Chicken has hundreds of franchises in Seoul, so we were sure that we'd be able to get this pizza whenever we wanted, but we were wrong. I can't tell you how many fried chicken places we've gone into in the past few months looking for this special pizza, only to see it absent from the menu. WELL, the pizza IS available at the BBQ Chicken in Seodaemun. While we waited for our order to arrive we were so nervous that it would be different, but it wasn't. It was perfectly, deliciously awesome. It had SAUCE. It had real pepperoni. It was $9! We. Will. Be. Back.

The day was young, so we went to nearby Samcheong-dong for coffee. We wanted to drink our coffees outside in the sun, but finding a cafe with a patio is not easy in Korea, because Koreans don't like sun. In fact, you will probably see as many umbrellas on a sunny day as you would on a rainy day in Seoul. Eventually we found a place (Coffee Factory) which allowed us to trade $7 each (that's almost a full BBQ Chicken pizza!) for basic coffees and a seat in the sun.

Samcheong-dong is an area that we'd been to once before, to see a hanok village, but we'd somehow missed the main touristy district on that visit. We were so surprised at how busy the area was. Maybe this is because of the holiday, but it was seriously more crowded than the busiest day of any of my trips to Disney World. There were clearly some cool, and quirky places to discover in this neighborhood, but after the peace and quiet of hiking, we felt invaded and annoyed. It was time to go home.

Home featured a viewing of the new American Idol, before a trip back down to Gangnam for supper. We tried a place new to us, called Pasha, which serves Turkish food. At first we were put off by the prices (18-20,000 Won for a main), but when the service started we saw that the portion sizes were humongous. We ordered a delicious mixed grill (served on swords), and enjoyed the excellent free soup and salad bar. We. Will. Be. Back.

Before going home for the night, we made a pit stop at Skin Food. Mel wanted to try some BB Cream, and I wound up getting some good stuff too. I bought some beer shampoo, but also spotted another interesting item: Makgeolli body wash! Shopping at this place was making us hungry again, so it was time to go home and get ready for school the next day. Luckily for us, there was only one day of work before we'd be free for the weekend again. May is a good month.