Hiking my face off

Alright, I'm sober now so I'll try to give a rundown of North Korea. We left Seoul on a bus around midnight on Friday and we didn't get to our hotel until 10am. So that was pretty terrible. At one point, we sat in a parking lot for 2 hours. Going through North Korean immigration was also a joke. There was no building. It looked like a giant catering tent. Bender and I were the last ones through after about another 2 hours and after 3 million South Koreans had already gone through. The hotel was like any Western hotel and they even had CNN, which was a bit surprising. Driving through the DMZ and then along a heavily guarded road with soldiers every hundred feet is a bit depressing. Because you can see outside the fences the poverty the people there live in, but yet you're on a bus driving to the one place in the country that looks anything like a modern civilization.

I didn't sleep at all on the bus and then we didn't eat breakfast for some reason. So clearly after that, it was the perfect time to climb a freakin mountain. It was cold and snowing and Bender was way ahead of me most of the time. He's a douche. The most pathetic thing was watching all the 70 year old Koreans blow by me. At one point coming down the mountain, a Korean lady with a 5 year old kid strapped on her back literally ran past me. I probably should have thrown myself over a cliff at that moment. Also on the way down, there was one spot that was covered in ice and everyone was going across it really slow. A bunch of people fell. The Korean guy in front of me was so adamant about not falling, he stood there for a minute kicking dirt onto the ice. He finally started moving and he was going along fine until out of nowhere someone slips and slides right through his legs. We both fell down. I thought he was going to kill me. After that hike, we skipped some other events because they sounded terrible and I wanted to take a nap. By the time we woke up and made it out of the hotel room, the lobby wasn't serving beer anymore so we went back to the room and watched a documentary on conflict diamonds. It was fascinating.

Oh, I haven't mentioned the douchebags yet. It makes me angry just thinking about them. There were about 6 or 7 people who were the worst people alive on the trip. Every time something went wrong on the trip, one of them was to blame. On the way there, they drank soju on the back of the bus so we had to stop every half hour for them to go to the bathroom. Then they woke up later on Sunday so we waited on the bus for them. And then, in what almost made my head explode, the biggest douche of them all had an expired South Korean visa when we were trying to get back to Seoul on Sunday. That held us up for another hour. When he finally got on the bus, as I had predicted, his fellow douches in the back, all started clapping. I guess the thing that was weird was no one else on the bus seemed angry. I would have joined in a riot to kick his ass if anyone else showed any kind emotion. Somehow we always ran into the douches wherever we went. Every time we tried to use the elevator, they would all be in there, making terrible jokes. One guy asked us if we wanted to "join the team" as they were "on the prowl for girls." It was nice to get to the invite, but apparently none of these guys had looked at any of the girls on the trip. Let's just say most of them were about as large as a minivan. I'll post a terribly inappropriate video I made of one of them trying to get water from the mountain later.

The hike on Sunday was much better, although we couldn't go all the way to the top because we didn't have spikes on our shoes or something. I wasn't that disappointed. Overall, it was a good experience even though we saw so little of the actual country. The whole hiking thing almost killed me and I don't plan on ever going near a mountain again, but I guess physical exertion is important sometimes.

Bender forgot to mention this in his blog, so let me get out in front of this first. Two minutes after we got into the bus on Friday night, I made a joke referring to how it was all white people on the bus. There was another bus on the trip so I said "It would be funny if there were all Africans on the other bus." Of course, the one black girl on the trip was sitting right next to me. Needless to say, I didn't speak to that girl at all.

On a side note, before I made that terrible video blog last night, I saw Min Hye at a bar. This is the girl I met a few weeks ago and then I was supposed to meet up with her last Sunday to eat nasty Korean pizza, but I was tired and going on a date with Bender. I was actually having a decent conversation with her, but then she mentioned her ex-boyfriend again. That's when I did something just downright cruel. I told her that her ex-boyfriend had made out with a guy. At least that's what I had heard. Man, I've never seen a girl freak out like that. She kept screaming oh my god over and over. Then she would say "No, my boyfriend is not gay." To which I would reply, "Well, maybe just a little gay." I also told her that I thought he was gay when I first met him. So yeah, I'm an asshole. She did tell me to call her as I was walking out of the bar, so maybe she likes torture.