"Mountain Climbing"

I should probably begin this post by imparting one vital point of knowledge that I discovered in the past few days: If a Korean asks you if you want to "climb a mountain" with them, know exactly what you are getting yourself into. Also, get some fucking climbing shoes. My adventure on the mountain began early, really early Saturday morning at 5:30 am, when the PE teacher picked me up and we began our 30 minute drive to one of the nearby mountains to climb and pick mushrooms. Now I, coming from a background in the US where climbing to higher elevation usually entails a gravel path or maybe even paved path with a very minor grade, assumed that this climbing would be such, as the PE teacher clearly saw that I had no special gear and would have made a point to mention if I was ill-equipped for the task at hand. So I threw on the shoes that appeared to be most suited to what I perceived would basically be hiking: my indoor soccer flats. I love my Adidas sambas to death, but anyone will tell you that they are called flats for a reason...they have almost no tred or traction. So we get to the mountain and we begin driving up a small, winding road that goes along the edge of the mountain that will take us to, I assume, the trail. After a time, Jeeong simply stops the car, gets out and begins crawling/climbing up a less steep and more accessible section of the mountain. Fuck. Now granted we weren't climbing up shear rock face, but the climb was steep enough where we were both using trees and branches to help pull us up as one simply could not walk upright normally. With my poor footware slipping and sliding all over the mountain I basically crawled up on all fours. While the initial part was a bit of a shock, the struggle was well worth it as the view (see facebook photos) was incredible as we hit the mountain right about dawn. We traveled up the mountain for about 2 hours before finally resting for some breakfast of kimbap (Korea's version of the sushi rolls with the goodies in the middle surrounded by rice and wrap), little Korean pastries that are pressed to look like walnuts and are filled with crushed walnut paste, and a real hearty man's chocolate, Hersheys. Can't beat starting your day will a real blue-collar chocolate, not that elistist Girondelli's shit (I'm sure I spelled it wrong, but I don't care). Our search for mushrooms proved to be rather ineffective, and we soon headed down the mountain. Now I thought going up the mountain was difficult. Dumbass. Trying to go down a mountain where over half of your footings slip/give way and send you sliding down the mountain on several occasions can be rather unsettling. I even had a branch that I was using to hold myself on the mountain break and I literally slid 5 feet or so before I was able to grab hold of another tree to stop my fall. To top off our strenuous trip, when we actually got back down to the road, we couldn't remember/find where we had parked the car, so we wandered aimlessly for 30 minutes or so until another car came by and drove us to our car. Wow.