................Taking Flight...............: Chuncheon Weekend Trip

I had to wake up bright and early for the trip to Chuncheon. We were meeting at 8am at the GOA’L office in Hongdae. I made it a minute or two early so I got a muffin from a shop in the subway station and waited for Krystle. She arrived and we walked to the office together. A few other people arrived and then all of a sudden a halmoni/ajuma street cleaner came up to our group and started yelling at us. She was angry because we were standing on the street and were “in the way” of where she wanted to be sweeping. She spent almost 5 minutes yelling at us, went away for a few minutes and then came back to yell at us some more. Luckily one of the GOA’L workers that was Korean was with us and she tried talking with the lady, but she was very frustrated by the older woman’s attitude. Finally everyone arrived and we walked to our bus.

We stopped once on the way to Chuncheon and arrived in about 2 hours or so. We got to the canoeing place a little early and had to wait for our reservation time. Then we had an “orientation”/training to explain the canoeing and course. And then, we were off! Krystle and I went together in a canoe. It was a lot of fun and the weather was actually warmer than I expected-all that paddling and I got warm in the 3 layers of clothes plus jacket I was wearing.

When we finished I had really bad cramps and felt sick. I got some pain meds from John (my soccer captain-he works for GOA’L) and just took it easy. I was in a lot of pain though. Everyone ate lunch, but I couldn’t even eat. We finished lunch and went to the hotel to check in. We had an hour to just relax and I took a nap. When I woke up I felt a lot better. Our group met up and went to check out downtown Chuncheon. It was raining, which put a little damper on everything. We walked to a bowling alley our hotel told us about, except when we arrived, it wasn’t there. So, we had to take a taxi to another location. We bowled 2 rounds. The first one we tied! The second one my team won! I also got one strike. It only cost 8,000W (a little less than $8) to bowl 2 rounds and rent shoes-nice. After we bowled, we took a taxi back to the area near our hotel and went in search of a restaurant. We found a Pho place and almost everyone ordered noodle soup. After dinner we came back to the hotel and Krystle and I talked until bedtime.