Gwanak-san and Yeonju-am

After all that drunken hilarity, I was feeling a little bit of a loser having not done anything productive or interesting since my arrival. Admittedly, I had done a lot of local exploring during the week, and the situation at school was very chaotic.

This school means business. The emphasis is wholly on studying and huge amounts of homework. Long gone are the days of teaching a 25 minute class for 10 minutes, then dishing out word searches for the remainder of the lesson. There will be no more variations on Ghost/Zombie/Monster Game created this year. This, it turns out, is a good thing. Instead, I teach four 80 minute classes, with hardcore teaching/studying from beginning to end. I feel I'm probably 10x better a teacher already than I was at the end of last year, and feel much more confident in the classroom. The secret weapon of this school, which helps us a great deal, is the existence of the detention room and it's constabulary of stick wielding enforcers. If a student fails to complete any of their homework, or misbehaves in any way, with a quick tick of a pen you can banish them to the detention room for a whole hour after class has concluded. When you consider that some classes finish at 9pm and 10pm, you can imagine how popular this punishment is with the kids. Another positive aspect, is the strict enforcement of no Korean being spoken or written in class. I used to speak as much Korean as English in the old school, so I now feel my classroom Korean drifting slowly away.....phrases such as "Be Quiet!", "Hurry Up!", "Sit Down!", "Don't Do That!", and "Yes, I Am Bald!", having very limited use in normal society. Not to mention, I've been here a month without uttering "Babo!", except perhaps to Northy. Lastly, I can't remember what it's like to have a kids fingers jabbed in my arse. Also, of course, a very good thing.

Oh, I've gone off on a tangent. Which would be fine if it was an Eddie Izzard anecdote about piles of jam and radiators, and not about boring old school. So, the point was, I was very busy to begin with. This school has quite a lot of extra work for the teachers, including phone tests, essay marking, test making, syllabus making, and much more. Usually these tasks are completed gradually throughout the month. Unfortunately for me, I arrived on the 9th, had lots of training the next week, a public holiday the next week, and was on holiday in Jeju-do the last week. I ended up having barely much more than a week to complete all of this work. However, with talk of performance based wage increases, I decided to soldier through it.

Well, I know many of you will be wetting yourself awaiting the sight of yet another mountain and temple, so I will tease you no longer!



Gwanak-san is a mountain in southern Seoul, which used to form a useful protective barrier when those pesky Japanese decided to embark on some pillaging. (If you want to go, the nearest subway station is probably Seoul Nat. University on Line 2 (green). It's a wimpy sounding 629 metres high, but after torrential rain, and in stifling humidity, there was no question of this being simply a leisurely walk in the park. The trail begins at a picturesque pond, where I invested in a rucksack capable of storing more than just a coat, an MP3 player, and a packet of Polos. A bargain at W10,000.



You can't tell from these pictures, but it was incredibly hot and humid. Luckily, almost the entire hike follows a stream, which, following all the recent rain, had blossomed into many cascading waterfalls and rapids. Every time the trail intersected the stream, it was a relief to stick your head in and have a wee drink !




It's hard to gauge in the picture above, but the waterfall here was quite an impressive height. I stopped to speak to some Austrian guy who was about to have a heart attack.



Clinging to the side of the thickly forested mountain are numerous temples and hermitages. The most well-known among them is Yeonju-am, a Buddhist sanctuary founded in the mid-600's, and it's associated hermitage nestled precariously above on Yeonju-dae.



The view to the south encompasses the cities of Anyang and Gwacheon. The rocky ridge leading to the hermitage was actually quite perilous, and I was surprised to see kids jumping about up there!



Obviously, with this mountain being in close proximity to an urban sprawl, there were a couple of installations present to remind you that you were in fact on a day out from Seoul, and not a warrior monk in the year 627 climbing up to the temple to achieve enlightenment. Bah!



As you see above, the hermitage on Yeonju-dae is balanced on quite a steep precipice. This tiny prayer hall to the Mountain Spirit, stands firm only due to the many stones which have been piled into the cracks of the vertically layerd rocks which form its foundation.



OOOooh, look how treacherous. Actually, I think this was the point at which the old timers turned back. Useless codgers!



The Austrian guy took this summit photo for me, surveying the world from an astonishingly colossal 629 metres. In actual fact, in the humidity, the final ascent was one of the hardest stretches of hiking I've ever done, but perhaps the 3 months of hardcore drinking and the occasional smoke back in Scotland had taken its toll!



This was taken from the hermitage you saw in the previous photo. This monk was very bashful, and needed some gentle persuasion to pose for a photo, claiming that she wasn't a "model"! She was busy arranging some brightly coloured lanterns to the side......




After returning from the hermitage, I checked out the main temple, Yeonju-am, and its prayer hall which houses a statue of Gwaneum and several thousand bronze Buddha images.




These clay pots are used for making and storing our beloved kimchi.




As usual, I probably looked extremely conspicuous trying to snatch photos of people praying inside the hall, but I really don't want to look like an ignorant fool just brazenly snapping away and being a twat.



Due to my fitness levels, and my need to fully explore all parts of the mountain, I was an hour and a half behind schedule for meeting Northy for some ribs and Die Hard 4 action. The situation was further compounded when I got on the wrong bus and ended up in Silim, with not a Won to my name. If I arrived at the mountain on the number 815 bus, it would make sense to catch the 815 bus on the other side of the road, pointing in the opposite direction, surely? Not in Korea, and I was quite lost in no time. At least it provided me with a decent view of Gwanak-san at the end of the road, but I'm pretty sure I should be on the other side of it......