Sokcho and Seoraksan National Park

In the morning we planned to visit the city of Sokcho, which is a sea boarder city, known for good seafood. Yumi, Doctor Kim and the kids drove directly down to the place they were staying at overnight. We headed out to YangYang first to get some breakfast and some coffee. Some people had a hangover and apparently it was so bad that he didn't even want his morning coffee.
I got to do shopping in the bakery, Korean style. Backed goods seem to be something Korean's are very proud of. Coming from the US, it is not difficult to find bakeries here much better than at home. They seem to be heavily inspired from a French style of baking. It did taste quite good, but on the other hand, it was kind of boring as it was very similar to what I got back in Denmark.
We continued to Sokcho which to me seemed more like a ghost town than anything else. The beach season was over and most areas had been deserted and really looked like some area ready to be torn down. I had a hard time imagining how it would have looked during the high season. The water here though was warmer than you would find in San Diego, even though this is further North.
We were not quite sure what to do and see today, I was kind of interested in checking out the DMZ, The DeMilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. I didn't exactly know what to expect and after checking a little more on the Internet it looked more like something that couldn't be taken care of in an hour or two. So we postponed that till the day after, if there would be time then.
Instead we headed for Seoraksan National Park, with a brief pitstop at a market place to get some snacks for the trip - and beer. That's what happens if you send Hyunju shopping on her own.
We headed for the mountain, it as Sunday. On the way up there I think we passed something like 200-300 busses from all over Korea parked along the road, many! That seemed a little exaggerated to me, but soon after we got stuck in traffic, traffic to park in the parking lot, which was more or less full.

We chose to park at a hotel 10min away from the entrance, as there was parking there. The 10min of walk up to the entrance, we saw hundreds of people leaving the park. Obviously some people had been up earlier than we and had already done their hiking for the day.
It was around 2pm and I guess it was quite optimistic to start doing anything serious at this point. We decided to jump the cable car going up the mountain. There was almost 2 hours wait in which we had time to get some lunch instead. Klaus was still hungover, with good reasons.
Finally it is out turn, we get the cable car up and I am surprised how many people are on top of this deserted mountain top. The sun is already low on the sky making it kind of difficult to take good pictures one way, up towards the mountain ridge. The other way, we can see the Sokcho and the ocean in the not so far distance.
People were climbing left and right to get up higher on the bare stone, not everyone was using their heads I can say for sure. Some people were even jumping around the rock in flip flops, adding great danger to themselves and others. Oh wait, that was McSmarte himself.
There were way too many people there to feel any kind of calmness, so after 30 minutes or so we ventured down again, only to find the line the gondola extremely long. Not good, as someone needed to visit the restroom, right now! Found a mountain version of a restroom after 5min of searching and hiking, it was really hidden very well away.
As we were descending Yumi called and told us that we should come to the hotel before it got dark to see everything there. Sounded interesting, so we almost ran back to the Mini and excellent mountain driving and 20 minutes later we were at the hotel - at the expense of the back seat passenger had become a little motion sick. The Mini is not a comfort vehicle, it is a little car with a big attitude that needs to be driven that way too. Fits Yumi good by the way, haha
The hotel was not just a hotel, it was a huge mansion kind of resort. The room we got was a 2 bedroom, with living room kitchen etc. It was more like an apartment than anything else. Doctor Kim had negotiated with his powerful friends and now were were going to enjoy the luxury, at least for a few hours.
We were discussing what to have for dinner as the resort offered many different choices for dining. Somehow, not sure who allowed it, Hyunju was going to be cooking dinner, closely supervised by sister Yumi though (thank you, thank you). The food was going to be kimchi fried rice, couldn't say I know how it is supposed to taste, but it wasn't bad at all.
When I first met the two boys, Yumin and Jimin, Yumi told us that they were not too fund of kimchi. After I had been fooling around with the kids holding them head upside down each in one leg, they realized that I was bigger and stronger than them. I convinced them it was due to all the kimchi I had been eating. Later that day for lunch, they both munged on kimchi and were hitting their biceps, waiting for them to grow. You can already see some progress in the picture here, soon they will start growing exponentially