Wake up at 6:30am. I'm going skiing with a large group of public school teachers from Daegu and I need to meet the two teachers from my school that are going to be on the trip so we can all ride to the buses together. Except for my alarm, I turned off all sounds and vibrations on my phone so my five hours of sleep wouldn't be interrupted by late night New Years text messages or phone calls from friends who were out all night. Turns out it was unnecessary as no one felt the urge to bother me. Just by chance I see that my phone's screen is lit up. One of the two teachers I am going to meet is calling to make sure I am up, which I am, but just barely. I manage to eat a bit for breakfast before I grab my bag that I packed yesterday and walk down to my school to meet Yong-bum, the librarian who has never skied before in his life and fits well into the stereotype of a male librarian: meek and frail and glasses and quiet. He and Dong-hun are waiting for me in Dong-hun's car. Dong-hun is a P.E. teacher at my school, and, aptly, is talented an every sport I have played with him.
My eye lids are dropping and I'm waiting to get on the bus so I can sleep but we have to pick up Dong-hun's girlfriend first. He is over thirty and not married, and has recently begun dating this girl, so it's a big deal because if you are over 30 in Korea and not married, it's not good. I say hello and miraculously remember her name. I have enough trouble remembering the names of fellow Westerners I meet, let alone Korean names. We get to the bus and I settle into sleep, waking up briefly when we stop at a rest area, but I'm too tired to get out and eat or drink anything so I just go back to sleep. I get out of the bus for lunch at a restaurant that Big Bang ate at according to a note on the wall, but I'm relatively out of it, and don't bother really talking to anybody at my table, all of whom I will be sharing a room with at the resort.
When we get to O2 Resort in Gangwondo, the majority of us, those who do not have our own equipment or ski wear, shuffle through a bunch of lines to get our stuff. It costs 10K Won to rent ski pants and a ski jacket for three days. This is currently the equivalent of $7.50, and there are no forms to fill out, or papers to sign saying you wouldn't just go home with a new set of fairly fashionable ski clothes. The snowboard and boots are about $15.00 for the three days, also without any sort of burdening paperwork. We are in a huge tour group of about 350, so maybe they already had our information, or just didn't want to deal with the sheer number of us. Anyway, I get everything I need and we miss the last of the afternoon skiing, but apparently there is night skiing so all is not lost for the first day.
Our hotel is brand new, as is the entire resort. In fact everything is so brand new in this its opening year, that there are only two trails open: easy and intermediate. After dinner (free - does this resort plan to make money on anything?) it's time to hit the slopes. I ride up a lift to the midway point of the easy slope with one of the guys I am sharing the hotel room with, Jae-bon, and then up another lift to get to the top of the easy trail. They aren't kidding when they say it's easy. It's been nearly a year since I last snowboarded, but I don't need much of a warm-up, and this trail hardly counts as a warm-up anyway. I cruise down over the snow orange from the floodlights, and walk over to the intermediate trail to see if I can find a bit more of a challenge.
It's not much more of a challenge, although the first part is a bit steep. The chair is quick, and so is the ride down, about six minutes round-trip. Oh well. There is a park, but it appears to be closed. Maybe tomorrow I'll be able to mess around in that. The tabletops are small, but the angle of the ramps look like they'd launch you pretty high. After a few laps on the "intermediate" trail I go back to the easy trail just for some variety, and stop halfway down to get some hot ramyen for 2K won, or $1.50. I love that things are so cheap here. Hot ramen mid-slope in the states would cost you at least $6. The easy trail turns out to still be quite easy so I do a few more laps on the intermediate trail and then go into the lodge to play a baseball game on my cell phone and eat a Snickers bar to pass the time in a more exciting fashion.
After meeting up with my roommates in the lodge towards the end of the evening, I take another run or two to close the night out and head up to our hotel. Like the hotel I stayed at in Busan, there is a closet full of mattresses to spread out on the floor, but unlike that hotel, there is also one room with a bed that the women take over. There are about nine of us in the room, which has a huge living room and kitchen, a small sleeping room room for us men, a balcony, the good-sized bedroom, and two bathrooms. We stay up pretty late eating food and talking and watching TV.
January 2nd:
It's somewhere around eight AM when I open my eyes. The previous night was spent between overheating, thanks to the heated floors, and trying to drown out the snoring guy next to me. I think it was Jae-bon. I close my eyes again and get up a bit later, not bothering with first tracks on 90 seconds of corduroy, although I must say, for being purely man-made, the snow is decent. I've dealt with much shittier conditions repeatedly in New England. I make it down to breakfast with Dong-hun and his girlfriend. There's nothing like rice and kimchi and soup for breakfast, but on the bright(ish) side, they did have bread and jam. I spend the remaining part of the morning doing laps on the intermediate trail, constantly looking at the rangers working in the park, hoping it's open the next run. It's not though. I ride up the lift with some random guy snowboarding, and when I say "Ahnyeong haseyo" he says, "Hi, I'm not Korean." Turns out he's from Hong Kong, on vacation, so I do a few laps with him on the trail and chat with him on the chair.
After lunch I take a few more laps and then head up to our hotel to relax for a bit with a couple of young teachers I am staying with. I do some reading and they head back out after awhile, but Dong-hun and his girlfriend Ji-hyang have come back so I hang out with them. I go out for another few runs before coming back in around 3:30PM and break out the cards I brought and teach Dong-hun and Ji-hyang how to play Golf. I dominate and thus they cook dinner for me instead of vice-versa. I get out for the evening session again, hoping the park will be open like one of the ski patrol people told me earlier in the day, but maybe something was lost in translation, because it's still not open. After more of the same I head to the lodge again to work on my baseball season and eventually get found by one of the young teachers I'm sharing the room with. She's pretty cute actually, except for some teeth issues. Anyway, we eventually go up to the room to retire the snowboards for the night with the intent of playing some pool. The pocketball table, as they call what we know as a regular pool table, is occupied, and so are all the other four-ball tables. These are tables with no pockets, and are used to play a game called four-ball which involves two red balls, a yellow ball, and a white ball. Alternating teams, white and yellow, try to hit both red balls on one shot without hitting the other team's ball. It's ridiculously hard. We visit the arcade instead. Later in the evening after I show the cute teacher and Seong-mo, another young teacher I am sharing the room with, how to play Golf, and beat them both, winning beer out of it, we go back to the arcade, and then see the pocketball table is free. Me and Yong-bum, my school's librarian, beat the cute teacher and Seong-mo two games out of three and are entitled to not paying. We get to bed around three AM, which seems to be nothing unusual for Koreans.
January 3rd:
Last day at the resort. The snowboarding has been by no means exciting, but it has still been a good time since the people I am staying with are fun. I get up sorta late, and don't get onto the snow until 10:30, agreeing to meet everyone in an hour to turn in my equipment. I do a couple laps with Jae-bon and Dong-hun. Dong-hun has spent most of the trip teaching his girlfriend how to ski so I haven't spent much time with him on the slope. It turns out that he is super good at skiing, at least as far as one can be good on such a mild hill. There is a slalom course that is closed off to the general public and I ask him if he has ever raced slalom. I am surprised and impressed to find out that four years ago he was Daegu city's amateur champion in the giant slalom. In a few days I find out that he is or was also a national bobsled athlete. Wow. That's not too common at all. Anwyay, I do a few laps by myself, after they take off. I take some time to make a round-trip video of the intermediate trail, from the bottom of the chairlift up to the top, and then back down again. Here it is:
Unfortunately, I don't do a very good job at catching the liftie dressed in a cow costume at the beginning. There are a few of these lifties in different animal costumes, presumably just for fun. I've seen some students wear them on special occasions, and they are hilariously cute. Seeing women in full body hampster and cow costumes makes the casual trip up and down well worth it. The run following the completion of this video, the park is finally open. I look at the time and see I have to meet everyone in twenty minutes to turn in my stuff. What luck.
My first run I hit the first jump with a straight grab to get a feel for it, then boardslide a rail and almost fall because it is so slow and I almost have my weight too far forward anticipating less friction. I hit the last jump with another straight grab. My next and last run, I get real crazy and throw a 180 grab down on the first jump, and see by the reactions of the Koreans sitting around in the park that it was clearly something impressive. I boardslide the rail again and hear some ooh's and ahh's disappearing behind me and decide to really blow them away with a 360 on the last jump, which I execute pretty poorly and skid out on the landing but don't entirely fall on. Still, I'm sure they were impressed by this way-gooks skills. I only wish I had more time to play around on the jumps and rails, or had someone really good with me who could blow their minds with some decent tricks.
I could push it and get one more lap in the park in, but I figure that it's 12:28 and I should be on time to meet everyone at 12:30. Of course, no one shows up till 12:50, meaning I could've taken three more runs in the park I waited for all weekend to open. Every minute they were late, I figured they would show up the next. I also figured I would hurt myself trying to do something stupid in the park if I felt rushed on another run, so by staying in the lodge I was really acting in my own self-interest. Oh well. Now it's lunch time, so we chow down before heading up to the hotel to pack our things and get back on the buses to Daegu. This time I score the center seat in the back row of the bus so I can stretch my legs out down the aisle as I sleep.
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