Long Weekend Monday

It's the final day of my 6 day holiday, and I've had a great time! I did the Chuseok trip on Wednesday, which I wrote about below, and then on Thursday I spent the day at home skyping and crafting. I skyped with Amy in the morning and Jen in the afternoon, which was great. It was excellent to catch up with them both.

Then, I made these:

They're canvases cut with a craft knife. I got the idea off Pinterest.

On Friday I headed into Seoul to see the Alphonse Mucha art exhibition at the Seoul Art Centre. He's one of the founders of the Art Nouveau movement, which is one of my favourites.

I couldn't take photos inside the exhibition, but here's some from outside. I bought some cheap prints that I'm going to frame and hang up as well :) It was really cool to see the original works - he's an artist I really admire, and a style I'd love to emulate sometime.

Then, in the afternoon, Jay and I met up to go to another exhibition at the Seoul Art Museum (different place from the Mucha one I was at). We went to see a huge selection of Gauguin's paintings (who'd I'd never heard of, but he's pretty famous). His stuff isn't my cup of tea, but I was with Jay, so it was fun :)

On Sunday I went hiking with a group to Gwanaksan. It was supposed to be an easy hike, but turned into a nightmare. It was pretty steep from the get-go, and just got worse. Eventually we were literally crawling across rock faces and hanging onto ledges by chains and ropes. It was very scary - like one miss-step and I'll fall off this cliff and die kind of scary. I was really unimpressed with the organisers, who are experienced hikers, who obviously had not considered the route when saying the course was 'easy and suitable for beginners'. It was totally inappropriate.

So, it was really difficult, and scary. And then, one of the girls in our group fell about 15-20 feet down a rock face and badly injured her knee. The emergency helicopter was called and she had to be air-lifted out to hospital. That put a real damper on things. Then, because that took so long, we only had a couple of hours to get get off the freaking mountain before it got dark and we couldn't see any more so we had to haul ass and get the hell down as fast as we could. Not so fun. Luckily, there was short-cut trail that only took two hours to get down and didn't involve death-defying crawls of rocky doom.

Yeah... not cool.

The rescue copter

Dinner after we got off mount doom.

I was extremely pleased to get off the mountain, and it'll be a while before I go hiking with that group again. I've got two more hikes coming up, but they're with a different, WAY more relaxed group, so that should be fine.

Today I've just been relaxing, done some work, went to the gym, and am now doing some cooking. I'm attempting to make eggplant chips with the ageing eggplant in the fridge :) Tonight I have a date with some popcorn and the movie 'The Great Gatsby', which Jay kindly lent to me. Good end to a great holiday.