On Friday night I went to the 24 hour bar For You, where one of the guys who hangs out there invited me to go skiing with him on Sunday. He said it was cheap, so I decided why the hell not.
Dock-ho picked me up at 8:30 and we headed out on the highway, with a quick stopover at Red Smile for him to get some breakfast. I didn't eat anything--you honestly think I could eat something described as "red smile?"
I had a bit of trouble finding information online on the hill, Jisan Forest Resort.
Someone on Ask the XPat posted:
Don't go to Korea skiing - the locals seem to have no idea how to stop on the slopes
and just tear down the hill until they either hit something- someone or reach the bottom
At NuTang, this was said:
Koreans are terrible skiers. It's not so much a severe lack of natural athletic ability, but a rather sad fact that a ski resort in Korea doesn't amount to much more than a white anthill by any other country's standards. An anthill that's crawling with ants; Korea's ski hills are so packed that there are rules against skiing down the mountain in a straight line for fear that you would generate too much speed and plow right through all 50 zillion of the poor skiers on the hill.
But don't we have rules in Canada against hotdogging with no regard for human life?
My favourite comment was on Go Ski dot com:
Please keep in mind that Koreans ski/board like they drive - with their eyes closed.
There is a stretch of road less than an hour from Suwon where several ski slopes are located. I believe we went to the second one. It's smaller than Rabbit Hill in Edmonton but bigger than Snow Valley. Nowhere near Banff or Jasper, but then again you could take all the mountains in Korea and they wouldn't add up to a single Rocky Mountain.
This was the black diamond. Actually, they didn't have black diamonds.
Here's a shot of the map. A lot of runs were closed; they've only had one snowfall this year and I guess the snow machines aren't enough sometimes.
Here's a look up the main intermediate hill. The chairlift ends just over the edge. This was the hardest hill there, and it was also the least crowded.
Don't worry, this picture exaggerates the size of the line. I was waiting for a lift immediately outside the left frame. The wait still was 40 minutes.
It's a little strange because there only snow visible was directly on the runs.
This is looking down from the top of my chairlift to the other one.
So that's why this directory is so stuffed.
I think there were a lot more snowboarders than skiers. The snowboarders were better than the skiers--they only fell an equal amount of times to the skiers.
The lodge is the small brown building before the parking lot.
They had this ingenious conveyor belt for the kiddie hill--way better than a rope tow.
Here's the view looking back from the chair lift. Note that, although you can't see me, I was the only one on the hill in jeans. Although, as I told Dock-ho, I planned on not falling.
Below you can see a short mogul course. I went on them for the final run, but they were a little weird. Half were randomly covered with powder and the other half were icy. Oh no, someone lost a ski.
While Dock-ho lit up at the top, I stood and took photos of people falling while they got off the chair.
