Korea

Fuzzy Elle has been very busy the last couple days.  We flew from Japan to South Korea on a C130 cargo plane, along with the explosives that my helicopters will shoot.  The plane ride was pretty fun, but very full.  We were all squished in tight.  We even had to crawl over the top of a big container if we wanted to go to the bathroom.  Fuzzy Elle posed for some pictures at the beginning of the flight, then slept for the rest.  She wanted to be a Marine like the rest of the guys on the plane, so she wore hat.  Do you think it is cute?

It was a much shorter flight than going to Thailand, so that was pretty nice.

I had to work on Friday, but I had Saturday off.  Fuzzy Elle and I decided to go climb a mountain.  We met up with Brian and his son's monkey Unggoy for the trip.  After breakfast, we hopped on the subway to go to the bus.  When we came out on top, we noticed that we were in the middle of a market.  We smelled it before we saw it.  They had a lot of fish and pork, along with pretty much everything else you can think of.  Fuzzy Elle was very curious.  We saw eels in a tank.

And octopus for sale

And a lot of fish

And grubs.  Dried bugs.  Ewww.

And even pig heads.  Not sure what you do with them, but they look happy.

We had lunch at the market, then were on our way again.  This time we were on a bus.  It ended up being about an hour bus ride, so we talked to you guys for awhile. We heard that Katie wasn't sleeping.  She made silly faces at us, so we made them back.  We got to see a lot of the city on our way out to the mountains.

We met a Korean guy at the bottom who talked to us for a while and invited us to hike with him to the top.  It sounded like he comes to the mountain pretty often.  He ended up being a really fast hiker.  Our first stop was at a temple for water.  The water was flowing from a spring in the mountain.  The Korean guy (Mr. Han) said it was ok for us to drink and offered us some.  It was yummy.  The water was even coming out of a turtle's mouth.  Cool.

This is our friend, Mr. Han.  He was a really fast hiker.  

We found some snow on the side of the mountain.  It must have been really cold last week.  It wasn't too bad today, but the snow was still melting.  This is Elle on the snow with Unggoy.  They were friends since they were about the same age.

We finally got to the top.  It was a pretty hard hike with a lot of stairs.  Mr Han didn't seem to have any trouble with it at all, but the rest of us were tired and ready for a break.  We said goodbye to Mr Han as he went down the mountain.  We stopped for a few pictures at the top.  

We balanced some yen on the side of a near-vertical rock.  The Koreans told us that it was good luck.

Fuzzy Elle was happy to make a new friend.

We enjoyed the hike down, then went to dinner in Daegu.  Overall a really fun day.