My skiing experience

Don’t worry Nannie we have been getting your comments. I didn’t know if you knew how to check comments so I wasn’t replying to them, but I will start replying to them now. Are the other Willies reading the blog?

Last night we kicked the cats out of the room at the beginning of the night. It worked pretty well, I could hear Koy playing with the new toy we bought him, but he wasn’t attacking my feet while I tried to sleep (which he likes to do), so I managed to get to sleep pretty easily. Later on in the night they figured out that the bedroom door wasn’t closed properly, so they got in the room, but they were pretty calm by that part of the night. In fact, Koy spent most of the latter part of the night sleeping at Erin’s feet. Boots is coming around now, he’s only afraid of me sometimes, like when I’m blowing my nose, but usually he’ll let me pet him now.

It’s been cold in Daegu lately! They told me it was pretty mild here in the winter, and I guess it is, relatively. Though it has been getting to -10ish all week, and there’s wind on top of that…. so Erin and I have been avoiding going outside over the past couple of days. It’s weird that it’s been so cold this week, on Christmas is was a high of +10.

Skiing was a great time. I went with a couple other foreign teachers, two Korean teachers and a few Re-test teachers (they are Koreans who handle the detention room and do lots of odd jobs at the school). It was a two hour trip north and we took two cars, with each Korean teacher taking his SUV. For Koreans, a two hour trip is quite a long one, so we had to stop twice, to pee, smoke and maybe have coffee. The Korean teachers, Jae Won (my partner) and Chae Hyun put the whole thing together for us, they just collected money from everyone and they handled meals, coffee, tolls, lift tickets and rentals. It was like having tour guides!

I didn’t think I would be any good at it because I hadn’t skied since my days in Ottawa (yes that’s like 8 years, I didn’t think it had been EIGHT years). I got the hang of it pretty quickly though, it seems allot like skating for me, and soon we were skiing the hardest run on the mountain. There were only three runs though, and one of them was pretty short. They did have more than three runs, but the others weren’t open, it looks like they don’t get a ton of natural snow, even at the mountains. Most of the snow we skied on was that manufactured stuff, which is weird because I thought mountains only used that stuff on top of the real stuff. At this mountain though, it seemed like all of the snow was manufactured. In areas where there was no skiing there was zero snow. Under most chairlifts was nothing but trees and dirt, no snow. Very unlike what I’m used to seeing. So the snow quality wasn’t like us foreigners were used to, but it was still fun.

The weather was perfect for skiing; it was just before it started to get cold so the temperature was perfect. Also, it started to snow while we were up there, so we were skiing on a layer of fresh powder for a couple of runs. The other foreigners I was skiing with said they had never seen is snow so much in Korea. I have to admit it’s weird to come to Korea to ski for the first time in 8 years, especially when I lived in Kelowna, but now that I have skied again, I think I will be doing it more when I get back to Canada. I will post pictures of skiing when Erin teaches me how to do that.

Erin and I are sorry for the lack of posts lately, it was a very busy weekend with skiing, the amusement park and cats, and now we have this new curriculum to worry about. Everyone is pretty stressed out about it at school, and it’s pretty confusing because they keep changing things on us. I think we’ll be going to work early every day this week.