Spring in Korea

If you can get past the yellow dust coming up from China and the heavier seasonal rains, you'll see spring is a beautiful time of year in Korea. The warm, sunny days and drizzling, cool nights provide the perfect environment for the plants to grow green and bounce back from winter. It's now that you begin to realize how many flowing plants there are in Korea. It seems as if nothing is grown (on purpose) or planted unless it produces blossoms at sometime of the year: the most common being spring.


Thus my walks around the city, either for transportation or simple enjoyment, have been filled with flowery aromas and wonderful colors from the array of flowering growth. Cherry blossom trees can be seen everywhere. For the Koreans, they are both a beautiful signifier of spring and a sorrowful reminder of the Japanese (who planted them during their occupation of Korea).


Taehwa River, and the many tributaries leading to it, seem to be a central point for many of the green and flowers. Lately, I've chose to take an hour walk rather than a 20 minute bus ride to get to most of my destinations.



Because of the cherry blossom season, many of the teachers at my school got special permission from the principal to leave early in the afternoon one day in order to take a trip up to Gyeong-ju to see one of the more famous cherry blossom viewing sights. I was super excited they invited me along for the journey. It ended up involving lots of silly pictures in front of the beautiful scenery, a free coffee and a delicious traditional Korean dinner.


After they talked me into doing a jumping picture on my own, 3 of the 6th grade homeroom teachers and the head teacher joined me for a few more.




I got a picture with one of my new Korean co-teachers, too. Although she was super reluctant to even be in a picture, she decided to throw up some bunny ears at the last minute.



Since our principal let us leave early for the occasion, we were lucky to have most of the cherry tree covered hill to ourselves. There were only a few other groups wandering and taking pictures. I've heard that at peak times of day and on weekends, it can often be so crowded that you can barely see the blossoms except the ones directly above your head.



Now, as I'm writing about this at the end of April, the cherry blossoms have all fallen. But their green leaves continue to brighten the springtime scenery and there seems to be a new kind of flower reaching is peak blooming time every week.


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