Nic Trips

Since we were home away from home in a land without Thanksgiving day, I took it upon myself to make the holiday happen among our group of 8 friends. I found a $40 turkey at Costco and in my tiny apartment (with the actually decent sized kitchen), I spent an entire Saturday cooking a full Thanksgiving meal. It was my fist time cooking a whole, raw bird, my first time making stuffing, and my first time make gravy from scratch, but it all turned out delicious! Andrew was my assistant chef for the day (designated to cut things and help me keep an eye on whatever was cooking in my toaster oven at the time). The gang all brought a ton of wine and we spent the evening playing some games and eating the Thanksgiving meal with chopsticks! The complete menu: mashed potatoes, bread rolls, fried green beans, a ham steak, stuffing, turkey, gravy, and cornbread.

Shane's birthday is Nov. 23rd, and my birthday is Nov. 24th, so of course we celebrated them together for convinience. When we showed up to our birthday dinner on Saturday night, we were both surprised to find the elaborate night our friends had planned for us: Mission Shacole. Since Shane was apparently not interested in surprises, they chose to focus on something they knew I would love: a challenge. There are 8 people in our close knit group of friends and so they gave us 8 challenges to complete by the end of the night. They even made us all t-shirts with our names on the back in Korean. Our group of 8 getting a little family photo and showing off our t-shirts. Of course the birthday boy and girl get the center. This was the laminated card they had us wear around our neck the whole night. Each time we did something we could mark a tally, then once we complete a challenge, we had to present it to another group member to sign off on. I finished everything with

The Saturday before my birthday we decided to take another hiking trip. Another group of foreigners had hiked to a lake in Buk-gu the weekend before; we had seen the beautiful pictures and decided we wanted to go ourselves! We met up at a bus stop just south of Hogye in the late morning and set off. First up before our hike/walk though, Jaryt made a brought us breakfast burritos, complete with eggs, bacon and salsa! It was delicious and a great surprise start to the day! Much of the beginning portion of the walk involved navigating and finding out way through the farms behind the main road to get to the mountains to the east. According to the maps we were looking at on our phones, the lake/reservoir rested just at the base of one of the mountains south of Hogye. Almost every stop we took, we could still see Hogye towering in the distance to the north. After walking for about an hour (we had to back track a few times before we found the righ

Making Korean friends is great for lots of things. Their friendship (of course) is rewarding enough in itself, but you also get to find out from them about all sorts of cultural events that you otherwise would not have known were happening. For instance, Ashley, Jarah and I would never have know about this lantern festival happening in Nam-gu! There were tons of paper lantern sculptures lining the creek, with a big concert going on on one side, and a bunch of stands for making lanterns, tea and souvenirs on the other side! We got lots of great pictures and enjoyed the whole cultural scene.

Mid-November is the perfect season for hiking. The colors are beautiful. The weather is cool, and the sky is often clear. One weekend we decided to hike a mountain near the University in Mugeo-dong. When we started the hike, we thought we would be climbing Munsu Mountain, but when we got to the top, the sign read "Yeongchuksan". Little did we know you have to climb either over or around Yeongchuksan before you can get to Munsusan, so we decided to leave Munsusan for another day. There were many trails covered Yeongchuksan, and one of them lead to this little pond surrounded by a boardwalk. We paused here for a little water break to rest and enjoy the view. Noticed this little guys scurrying across the path and almost squashed him on accident. The first view point from the mountain was great because you could see the whole city of Ulsan in the distance. (...or at least the downtown areas to the north and south of the river. Buk-gu and Dong-gu were too