School hike

P1010591
Originally uploaded by kirijae

This last weekend I had the end of year school hike with the other teachers from my school. As usual I'm not exactly sure of the details for exactly where we went - about 2 hours south of Seoul - but it was very pretty. The weather is kinda perfect at the moment - crystal clear skies most of the time, so nice for a hike even if it is freezing cold. It was a pretty easy hike too, given that we took a cable car for most of the way up there, something I definitely approve of where mountains are involved. I'd never been in a cable car before so that was lots of fun - although I'm sure they weren't originally designed to fit the 25 people that managed to squeeze in there. Kind of like taking the last train home from Seoul on a Saturday night; don't worry about holding on, you can't move even if you wanted to!
I was very amused to see how glamorous the other teachers were for a hiking trip - and slightly embarrassed for the "just-rolled-out-of-bed -wearing-last-week's-clothes-lucky-I-at-least-brushed-my-dirty-hair" look that I had going. I mean, I figured we're going hiking right? So yay, no make-up today, no point washing hair etc. Wrong. Not only did all the female teachers have full faces done, their hair looking like they just came out of a salon, and all wearing the latest in hiking fashion, they actually took every opportunity to duck into bathrooms or to pull out little hand mirrors to check their hair and make-up on the off chance that some stray hair might have dared get out of place. So there's some lovely photos getting around with all the teacher's of Maehwa elementary school looking great in the group shot taken on top of the mountain - and me, standing out even more than usual with my pale face, red nose and hair sticking out all over the place. Makes me miss the solidarity of the Ris cycling trips :-)