Hiking

The other day we went hiking to Inwangsan. It was really close, I mean, you could get there by taking the subway. It was just some stops away from the city center. Seoul is a big, big city, but you can get to the "nature" pretty easily by going to some of the hills. (Finns like to have an access to the nature when the city life gets too pressing :P...)

The sky was cloudy and you could only see the north-west part of the core city and some suburbs that continued further north, but still the view was amazing! I'd really like to fly over the city by a helicopter just to get an idea of how big the city actually is. Of course I could check that from Google Earth, but I'm telling you, it is so different to see the view with your own eyes!

We started our "hiking" from this gray and cold suburb near the subway station.

But after walking up the hill a little bit we came to a much more beautiful and traditional area. I wouldn't want to live there though. You need athletics feet or a four wheel drive to get up there!

I was first wondering if they were having a party in the tempel, but later on I heard that the food is a sacrifice to the ancestors. When it has gone bad it's thrown away...

At the first peak there was a really interesting looking rock that birds seemed to favor.



We climbed higher...

This is one of my favorite pics from Korea! Taken by my roommate Kate :)

As we went on the path became smaller.

The rocks there looked really interesting. This one was actually a lot bigger and did not fit into the picture. But it looks like it's gonna slide off any minute.

The nature was kinda Scandinavic but in some ways also really different.





As we continued higher the steps were getting bigger...



...and after the intense bodystep aerobic it was hot! No t-shirts in Finland yet, right? ;)

All the nature is pretty rugged this time of the year but it was nice to see it like this before it starts to bloom. I wanna go back there later this spring to see the change :)

On top of the hill the exhausted hikers enjoyed the mind-freeing heights and flew paper planes. One of them actually managed to float in the wind for a bit.

On our "extremely challenging and dangerous" hike we wore jeans and sneakers to, we came across quite many Koreans who were really well prepared. They had proper shoes, jackets and even gloves for the sunday afternoon walk on the hill. I hear Koreans put a lot of effort to the 'right gear' in these kinds of activities.

The top of the hill.

I don't have pictures of this one incident that happend on our hike (for a reason). At one point the path went past a military base or something and there were some military people in camouflage clothes. But the scary thing was that one of the men was binoculing us through his sniper-sort of-like-gun and showing some hand and finger signs to another man. I'm not used to this! Where I come from people don't point a sniper at you!

I of course didn't start waving my camera and taking pictures of them.

The presence of the military and riot police forces make me actually feel uncomfortable and even unsafe.

We came down from the hill another way than we went up so we didn't quite know where the path down would lead us.

We wound up in this old and not too fancy looking area. The interesting thing was that all the people seemed to be leaving. There were piles of old furniture and junk on the street and people packing their stuff into trailers.

In Seoul there are these renewing housing projects going on. Basically it means people out, demolition, building, wealthier people in. Some of the projects have turned out to be pretty nasty when the people refuse to leave their homes for the price they get. In those cases they might be forced to leave using other means. I don't know if this was one of those projects but it seemed so since the houses were emptying in front of our eyes.




After our adventure we returned to the good old streets of Seoul :)