Jump Right In!: National Election Day

Wednesday April 11th, 2012 was the national election day here in South Korea. We all get a day off work just to go vote. Since none of us are actually Korean citizens, this doesn't really concern us. But luckily for us, we get a hump day holiday with beautiful weather!

Korean campaigning techniques are quite different from the ones back home. The MPs (or their Korean equivalent) stand on stages at street corners and scream things at us. Sometimes they dance on this stage (yes, they did the shuffle). Streets are also lined with lots of people from their campaign team wearing identical uniforms. They dance, talk, and bow in sync. And yes, that is a foam peace sign. They blare popular music with changed lyrics (probably talking about their platform). In Canada, I don't ever remember meeting the candidates, but here they are out everyday (rain or shine) shaking hands with passerbys. I have met most of the candidates around my home and school.

It was a beautiful day and we didn't want to stay home, so John and I decided to do some hiking + geocaching! We decided to go to Umyeonsan, a small easy hike near Nambu bus terminal station.

This was the entrance to the hiking trail. Looks like a space portal of sorts. And off we went! Geocaching in the mountains is much more fun than the city. After following the GPS to the general location, we have to look in trees and rocks, digging out leaves and stones. The geocaches were also off the trail so we had to climb and crawl, which of course, is awesome.

Found the first one! It was a really good hide and therefore a difficult find. Look where it's hiding! Now you may think it looks kind of obvious, but when you are standing in a mountain surrounded by trees and rocks with a 10m radius to search in, it's not easy! This was the biggest geocache I have found thus far. It was a huge tupperware box hidden in the rocks, with little toy souvenirs inside. Unfortunately, we forgot to bring a pen. So john and I went treasure hunting for a pen in the woods. Obviously, this was very difficult. Who tosses pens around in the woods? So when John suddenly yelled "I FOUND A PEN!" I thought he was joking. But master hunter John really did! Too bad it was dried out. So we improvised. We took the ink out of the pen, ripped it in half, and tried to write with that. This was our result. If we were stranded on an island. We'd do just fine. :P

We continued our hike.

And found the tallest wishing tower ever!

On the mountain, we found a temple. It was beautifully decorated as always. I love these temples in the mountains. So peaceful.

We know there's a geocache here, but we searched TWICE. John even crawled under this gazebo. No luck. This one got away. ARGH!

Here is where we found the 2nd one. This was at a beautiful spot, a little higher up in the mountain. John had to dig through leaves and rocks to get to it. Again, we had no pen, so we etched our initials on a rock and dropped it in. Oops?