Teacher’s Day in Korea is on May 15th. Every year my school does something different. My first year in Korea the students made cheesecake and brought them out to teachers. The second year our principle decided it’d be fun to have a teachers version of sports day. This year the sports day was swapped out last-minute for a hike in the mountains.
The area of Gapyeong is big. And outside of Nami Island, the Garden of the Morning Calm, the Jazz festival and a couple other sites the biggest draw to the area is the nature. Thousands of people flock to Gapyeong every summer to stay at pensions, play in the streams, bbq and go hiking.
We all boarded a school bus in the early afternoon and headed off deeper into the mountains (all feeling a bit nauseous by the end of it) in order to go hiking. We were given an hour and didn’t get very far at all. A little over 430 meters, at the start of the trail which included sharing space with the occasional car. Not the most relaxing forest bathing (Shinrin-yoku) I had hoped for. The path took us past closed restaurants and stands that will be packed during the summer, through what felt like people’s yards where chickens wandered around clucking and dogs barked at us and down the narrowest path that I was sure probably wasn’t actually a path. Due to time constraints and not wanting to be left behind, I turned back too early, resulting in sitting around trying to compare English names to plants with Korean names.
After our “hike” we headed back for dinner at Neuti Korean Restaurant, 느티가든. Address: (경기 가평군 북면 제롕리 523-6 / 23-6 Jehyeong-ri, North-ward, Gapyeong-gun, Gyeonggi-do)
The school had made a reservation and we took up most of their main room, sending other visitors off onto the terrace. We ate seasoned samgyeopsal 삼겹살, and I spent most of the evening making them into lettuce wraps with soybean paste. It was delicious.
