Getting high with bbang

The theme of this blog post is "fun." It's a rare word on Seoulmateys but it does, in fact, exist in our lives. I'll use it in a sentence: "When not confronting grumpy students or manipulative bosses, Nami and I have fun."

For example, Nami and I, tired of the city, felt like going on a hike. After packing some bbang and water, we hopped on the subway and rode for about 45 mins to northern Seoul. We then walked for 30 more minutes through an urban neighborhood until suddenly we reached the foot of Bukhansan mountain. Yeah, not many cities can boast having mountains easily accessible by subway/city street.

It began as a pleasant jaunt. We found some chairs strapped to trees and decided to sit in them while we enjoyed our first half of rations. Why were there chairs and why is bbang so good?


Twenty minutes later, we came to an odd clearing where old men were lifting weights. This was pretty deep into the forest but whatever, we just accepted that this was like korea's version of muscle beach. Unsure of how to continue on the trail, we asked one of the Arnolds to help us. He pointed us to a really narrow, very vertical, and sort of wet path and told us that was the shortest way up but we might not make it to the top. About 30 seconds into following his suggestion, we started to believe that we weren't on a trial at all but a very steep, very slippery, and very buggy stream. Our theory was verified by the rope fence we had to cross to get to the main path. Sidenote: we did not get any sort of poison plant rash nor did we crush the eggs of any fragile avian species.

A group of older hikers spotted us stumble from the protected area onto the path. Probably thinking we were idiots, they asked us where we were going. Specifically, we had no idea, but vaguely, we wanted to go higher. They pointed us in the right direction. We ran into a lot more hikers on this new "official" trail. Average age was probably 50. Everyone wore proper hiking attire and carried those sticks that make you look experienced. All people we talked to seemed fascinated by our lack of clear direction and proper footwear (our sneakers didn't compare to their hiking boots). However, not even their doubts could keep our eyes off the summit even if we didn't really know where it was.

Nami and I took some fun photos. Seoul's smog is so....um...beautiful.


I'll be honest, we almost didn't reach our goal. The path got legitimately treacherous. The last 50 yards or so were almost completely vertical, completely jagged rock face. Nami drew other hikers' attention to herself by whimpering and cowering in the middle of the path. A mother and her young daughter were patient enough to guide Nami up the incline. After some intense sweating, body-hoisting, and Nami-encouraging, we made it to the top. To celebrate, we finished off our other piece of delectable bbang.

Our legs felt pretty wobbly coming down the mountain. We weren't expecting such a bad ass hike but we showed the old men who doubted us. Yessiree.