The Skate Park

As we were walking towards downtown Changwon in South Korea we found a skate park so we went to check it out. A few things that we found interesting was that no one had a skate board but everyone was on roller blades (makes me wish I brought mine). There was a dozen kids skating around on the Sunday afternoon and I think they were all between the ages of 7-12. There was not one teenager which made me wonder where they all were and then I realized that I rarely see anyone between the ages of 13-23 and I was told that it is because they are all in school. The saying is if you get more than 4 hours sleep a night you aren't studying hard enough.

As we approached the skate park everyone stopped and looked at us in amazement which happens a lot in South Korea, if I walk past 10 Koreans during a stroll I will hear 5 "hello, how are you"s as they marvel at the opportunity to talk with an English speaking Westerner. Angèle feels like we part of a freak show sometimes.

Back to the skate park, I had my camera out and I signaled to everyone that I wanted to take some action shots of them and the crowd went wild. Everyone started yelling with excitement hoping they would impress me with their "mad skillz." They each took their turn rolling around and taking 6'' jumps off some ramps and I snapped away. They all gathered around me to see their picture and one kid didn't have one. Well, imagine the sadness, I sent him off to do his thing and he got the whole group excited with what he said he would do and I was a little worried that he was going to do something too dangerous. I placed myself where I thought he was going and he zoomed right by me going 100 miles per hour and I got my best shot of the day but it wasn't what I was supposed to get since he took a high jump of about 1' high off the top ramp. So, I had to reposition myself and he had to do it again and this last picture is what he did. He got to look at his picture and everyone was happy so we said our good byes and went on our way.

As we left Angèle asked me, "Did you notice there wasn't any graffiti"? Not one spray of graffiti could be found anywhere in that skate park. Just goes to show you how innocent and wholesome their way of having fun is.

Higher up the Mountain

This is just a nice picture from our hike today. We went 0.6 KM up the mountain the first time and this time we went 1.5 KM up the mountain and this is our picture from the hike. The trail kept going for another 0.8 KM however we were too tired but we plan on doing it sometime.

Hike up the Mountain

On our first weekend in South Korea we decided to hike up the mountain that we can see from our apartment. As it turns out a lot of people hike up the mountain and there are several trails. The first thing we saw that we thought was quite interesting is that they have a Gym set up at the start of the trail and we saw a few people lifting weights before or after their hike. We aren't sure if it's free yet because we haven't tried but we saw a sign-in book and there is a guy watching the area so we think there is a fee or he just makes sure everyone signs in.

As we hike up the mountain we pass a lot of other hikers but the funniest thing we saw was forest advertisements. There are banners hanging in the trees as advertisements. They advertise everywhere around here. It's worse than Toronto with all the apartment flyers.

The mountain goes up pretty high. There isn't any snow on it however just a few cms below the dirt there are ice shards.

We hiked as far as we could and turned back. I think we made it almost halfway up the mountain. We plan on hiking this mountain weekly if not almost daily for exercise.