Greetings from Korea

So after about a year of begging I decided that I would humble myself and guest post here on Hannah's blog. I would probably say no if I hadn't have had such an awesome first week in Korea. However, I had such an awesome first weekend here, so Hannah decided that I need to blog about, so here it is...

My roommate is a very adventurous person and I like to think I am the same way, so within the first 20 minutes of talking to him, I found out that there are some really great places to rock climb here in Korea. He said that he was going out this weekend and I could come along. I have had quite a bit of experience with rock climbing so I was really excited to be able to be doing what I love in Korea!

The day started early, my roommate and I woke up at 7:30am saturday morning (4:30pm Texas time) and had a quick breakfast while we waited on his friend that was going with us. Taxis are everywhere here, even on base, so we took one to the train station 20 minutes away where we took a train to a city called Gurye (about an hour and 30 away.) The actual climbing area is called Yongseo Pokpo.

We had to stand for the whole train ride and we were in an area of the train with about 30 Korean cub scouts. We stood in between 4 girls and 4 boys on either side of us and every one of them wanted to practice every bit of english they knew. Your name, where are you from, what food do you like, do you like kimchi, what is your favorite star (movie star, Harry Potter was one of theirs,) how old are you. After every question they would ask they would look back at their friends and giggle. One was even nice enough to give me some Korean candy he had from his sack lunch!

When we got to Guyre we took a short taxi to Yongseo Pokpo where we are right in the middle of the huge rock faces, beautiful fall colored leaves, even a little water fall. We hiked up a short trail, over a stream and we got to the designated climbing area, where they had actual routes for us to climb and anchors for our ropes at the top.

We met up with a few people at the train station that are living in different parts of Korea and teaching english in schools for a year. One was a fellow Texan, one from South Africa, and couple other that I can't remember where they are from.  These were people that the guys I was with had met on previous climbing outings.

So after several hours of climbing I was sore and extremely happy with my first day out in Korea. I couldn't have had a better way to experience everything that is good here all in one day. I saw gorgeous landscape, met wonderful people and experienced more of God's creation on the other side of the world. We even got an invite to a thanksgiving celebration by the english teachers!  They requested we bring avacados from the base commissary... I guess they don't have access to any.  I also got to climb with a few Korean climbers which was really nice and pretty fun trying to talk climbing with a man that can only speak broken english but was far better than my level of climbing. I didn't meet anyone that wasn't extremely nice and enjoyable to be around. The only thing that would have made this weekend better is having Hannah with me.

Well I guess that's it for my first ever blog post, I hope you all enjoy it! Who knows there may be more to come...

Karl W. Burton