A Trip to the Countryside

Many of you are familiar with our Korean friends, Jimmy and Sarah, who have been great friends and helped make our experience in Korea enjoyable and memorable.  We appreciate them so much because they allow us to see parts of Korea that would otherwise be inaccessible to us. 

 Case in point: Yesan.  Jimmy works as an executive for a major steel company called Posco.  He is currently in charge of a steel-cutting plant in a small town called Yesan, about 2 hours south of Seoul.  He has an apartment there, as he spends several days down there during the work week.  The wonderful thing about this place is that he often invites friends to join him and his wife there on the weekends, and we get to enjoy hiking, small town/countryside diversion from the city, and their famous hotspring.  I've included some pictures of the time we spent there last weekend.

My favorite part of this trip with train ride we got to take.  For about $8.00, we took a 1.5 hour train ride.  The seats almost fully reclined, and Michael discovered a massage chair that really made the trip for him.  :-)

Ahh, one of the quintessential icons of Asia--the terraced rice paddy.  They are very lovely and peaceful to see.

We climbed this mountain.  When we got to the top, Jimmy asked some folks with way was best to go back down to the bottom and they sent us the wrong direction.  So we went down the mountain the wrong way and had to go all the way back up and then down the correct side.  We climbed that dumb thing twice.

At the top--the first time.