Before Chuseok, I headed to Korea's version of Burning Man. By a lucky stroke of fate, not enough people wanted to leave Friday night, so we missed the torrential rains that soaked the campsite Friday night and Saturday morning. Our fearless leader Reza got a call from the organizers pleading for him to "bring positive energy because people here are unhappy and wet"... As we arrived (because we arrived? haha), however, the sun came out and everyone began drying out and spirits began lifting. Saturday night, lots of flame twirlers performed, and then a man in a bunny suit set the Man on fire. I crashed early, but a hardy few partied through the night until 10 am the next morning, when the rotating DJ schedule came to an end. We loaded up the bus with our equipment and a weekend's accumulated trash, and headed back to Seoul.
The weekend before Burning Man, I met up with 이경진 & co for what was originally going to be my first climb of Gwanaksan. The stars didn't align, so instead, we went bowling near Gangnam. People take it really seriously... Uniforms, monogrammed bags, etc. From there, we headed to Hangang Park and rented some janky bicycles and proceeded to get in everyone's way, in a really fun way. Plenty of too-serious bicyclists there too. I don't think that I would head to the Hangang expecting to be able to ride freely and get a lot of exercise. Beautiful place though.
