With Korea being devoid of public Luna New year celebrations (and with Kat spending Luna New Year with her mum in Shanghai!) Emily and I decided it was the ideal time for another Adventure Korea trip – they’re becoming a bit of a regular occurrence now!.

In Korea Luna New Year is a public holiday, it is the biggest celebration after Ch’usok, so the trip was over two nights instead of the usual one, giving us more time to get to know the others on the trip.

We departed Seoul early Saturday morning and headed to Phoenix Park for some snowboarding, before going to a youth hostel type place in Bang-dong where we would have a BBQ and camp fire on Sunday night before walking along a frozen lake on Monday morning.

The snowboarding itself was fairly uneventful – I taught myself one fairly unimpressive trick and Emily realised that as she didn’t have Kat to be slow with she had to try harder and keep up with me, by the end of the day I had her turning on the black runs – quite an achievement for Emily!

VIDEO – Snow Ballet – http://www.mediamax.com/j150vsc/Hosted/Boarding/snowballet.WMV

The weekend’s fun and games was off the slopes.

We went back to the bus between afternoon and night boarding to be assigned our room. We instantly spotted an American guy complaining loudly about the cost of the lift pass and decided we definitely didn’t want to share with him (he turned out to have his wires crossed and, to his credit, apologised to the guy he was having a go at). There was only one other person on the trip we didn’t want to share with and that was a very loud bird, called Reena, we’d met briefly on the last snowboard trip.

As there was only two of us we decided to hang back whilst the rooms were being decided and, aside from trying not share with the two aforementioned, we would take a spot in whatever room was available.

As we were waiting a girl asked if we wanted to share with her and five mates, she assured us: “Don’t worry we’re all normal,” but added: “Do you mind if we come in late!” We agreed, and having found another girl, Rebbecca, who’d come by herself had a full room. It was then we found out that one of the ‘five mates’ was Reena!!! Too late now.

We got to the room and everyone, apart from Emily and I, went to get Korean for dinner. Not feeling so adventurous Emily and I headed to Domino’s pizza. On the way to the takeaway we met two European guys, called Fransisco and Chris, who asked if we would meet them for a drink later, we agreed and arranged to meet at midnight (we were boarding till 10pm) in the sports bar. Then in the take away we bumped into an English guy who’d been on the last snowboard trip, him and eight mates had arranged their own Luna New Year snowboard trip. We told him we’d be in the sports bar later and he said they may come for a drink.

After devouring our pizza we went night boarding which was wicked fun but a little too icy for my liking.

Luna New Year – Emily and I with some penguins.
Emily and I met some friendly penguins during out night boarding session.

When we got back to the room we found two guys (whose names I can’t remember) in bed having injured themselves in the afternoon and the rest, Reena, Liz and Rob, drinking Soju. Just as we were heading out they went to find the organiser guys, who they spend a lot of time drinking with.

We arrived at the sports bar half an hour late only to find we’d been stood up. So we had a few beers before they closed at around 1:30am, then exhausted we headed back to bed.

We got back to the room to find the two nameless guys and Rebbecca asleep, Reena, Liz and Rob were still out.

About 3am Reena and Rob came back, turned all the lights on, shouted for a bit, woke everyone up then left again.

Then half an hour later Reena and Rob came back. Reena walked in shouting: “Has anyone got a fag,” turned all the lights on, woke everyone up then left again.

Around 4am Reena and Rob came back again, this time Reena had lost her shoes, she switched all the lights on, woke everyone up, then left seemingly crying about her shoes.

About 10 minutes later she came back demanding to know what had happened to her shoes, switching all the lights on to look for them. Luckily her friend (who’d stayed in) got up and went to the room upstairs, where she’d been, and recovered her shoes.

Then around 4:30am Reena, Rob and Liz finally came to bed, but in the process turned all the lights on, shouted for a bit and woke everyone up AGAIN. They were so drunk by this point that Liz had to pushed up the ladder onto her top bunk because she was too drunk to climb!

Around 5am I was laid in bed and I could here someone saying: “Your bed is over there, this is my bed.” I drifted back to sleep thinking I was dreaming but the voice started up again. This time I woke up properly and discovered a very drunk Rob, not having a clue what he was doing,  trying to get into Emily’s bed! She kept saying: “This is my bed,” to which he responded: “I know”! She told him: “Your bed is over there,” to which he responded: “Yeah!” This dialogue continued for about five minutes before he got out of her bed and started trying to put on her clothes! Emily said: “They’re my clothes,” to which he responded: “I know!” Luckily the helpful friend awoke again and coerced him back into his bed.

At this point, laying in my bed, I had a little giggle to myself. The night had been so ridiculous that we would laugh about it in the morning. But there was more still to come!

We’d just got back to sleep when we were woken by Rob yet again! This time he was putting loads of [his] clothes on. When asked why he said it was because he was cold as he didn’t have a duvet. He’d come in so drunk that he’d neglected to notice the duvet placed beneath his pillow and had been asleep on top of it all night – well for the last few hours anyway.

After this incident we managed to grab about an hours sleep before Reena’s alarm, on her phone, started going off. Still being very much out of it she put it on snooze and went back to sleep. Ten minutes later it went off again, but this time she was too comatose to even notice. After the third time of it going off her friend had to climb out of bed and switch it off for her.

About half an hour later the same scenario was played out with Rob’s phone. It was now after 7am and we had been woken constantly throughout the night.

At 8am Rebbecca got up to go skiing for the morning and after failing to fall properly back to sleep Emily and I decided to get up and visit the jinjibarn (Korean spar). Upon getting up and getting ready to go we were exasperated to notice that those who had kept us up all nigh slept right through us getting up – grrrr.

Stay tuned to find out about our adventures on day’s two and three of our Luna new year trip.

Over and out till tomorrow.

* Posted by j150vsc on 27/02/2007.
* 2 comments