Another Weekend of Ice Climbing

This past weekend was awesome. We meet up on Friday night with a girl named Heidi who we had meet a while back at O2 (a climbing gym) and kept in touch with via Korea on the Rocks (KOTR- the climbers forum for foreigners in Korea). On Saturday morning we headed to Pandae Ice Park and a korean climber was nice enough to set up a top rope for us to practice on. As we were waiting for the guy to finish our route, we noticed a man a few routes over having some trouble placing his next screw. As we were watching him he took a 15m fall upside down. His ice screw held and prevented him from taking a 25 m ground fall. It was a crazy thing to watch. Then moments later, I was walking to our packs and the next thing I knew I was waist deep in water. The ice broke just beneath my feet and I was in the river. I managed to get myself out quickly and I was lucky that my reaction was to put my hands out which prevented me from going in even deeper b/c my feet never hit the bottom. I wasn't in a marked off area or anything. In fact, there were about 20 people around me and others had been walking right where I fell in but for some reason it decided to break with me on top. My underclothes were dry and the grounds keeper let me dry out my clothes next to his heater. I ended up putting bags over my feet so that I could climb. We had a great time climbing despite the crazy events at the beginning of our day.

Heidi has her own car and drove us to Wonju. It was a dream compared to hours on a subway and public bus. She bought it for only 600,000 won which is about $600 US dollars. Now Keith and I have decided that we must have a car! There are these microvans (Daewoo- Damas) that we see all the time and we've decided to try to find one at a reasonable price so we can purchase it for weekend adventures! Not to mention how nice it will be to travel around Korea in our own microvan when we have visitors!

We got back from climbing on Saturday night and were expecting Pete & Jenny to visit the next day. Unfortunately, Pete got sick and they were unable to make it. So, instead Keith and I spent the day in Seoul and did some shopping. We bought an Ipod and we've been having fun putting tons of songs on it and listening to it on public transportation.