Boseong

Last weekend was a 10k race (for me and Sloane) and a 5k for Carol, Vanessa and HangBin (and Vanessa's first 5k race!) in Boseong, a small town on the east side of Jeollanamdo. Boseong produces about 40% of the green tea consumed in Korea, which is a heck of a lot of green tea. The small town's other claims to fame are its proximity to Jirisan (the Jiri Mountains), Daewonsa (Daewon temple), that it is Hangbin's hometown, and that it is where Vanessa spent her first two years in Korea.

Sloane and I left Mokpo on Saturday afternoon to make it to town, grab a hotel room, and then to go see the tea fields.


We then ate green tea ice cream and went to meet Vanessa for dinner in town. Carol was coming down with an evil cold, so didn't come over until the morning of the race. But how rock-star of her is it that she still ran!?

The next day, we did the race. It wasn't my best run and I felt tired through the whole thing - not sure what was going on. The race DID have more hills than I'm used to running, but I don't think they were as bad as I thought they were. It felt like most of the first half was downhill and I kept dreading the second half of the race. At the end of the day, it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be and while I was faster than my training times, I'm pretty sure it will be my slowest 10k to date.
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After the race, we went to the Green Tea Spa just outside Boseong, where I had my first scrub. Basically I paid a burley Korean woman to scrub about five layers of my skin off, and it was kind of awesome.

That night, we stayed at a cottage owned by Hangbin's family near Daewonsa.
HangBin picking lettuce from the garden for samgyupsal: . The air was clean, there were almost no people around, and it was great to be able to hang out with good friends.

Monday was Buddha's Birthday and we went to Daewonsa for the celebrations. Daewonsa is one of the temples I like the most here, so it was really nice to be able to go there for the celebration.

It got a little crazy at one point with some photographs turning all paparazzi on us. Imagine this, but aimed at us instead of the performers, and (I think) more photographers:


Yes, we stand out. I get it. But instead of taking a snapshot and moving on, there were many people pointing these high-powered cameras at us. We tried to ignore them, but every time we looked back there were more! Finally, HangBin told them to leave us alone (in Korean), and they at least moved back.

The only downer about this weekend is that it was Carol's last race with us. Monday she heads back to Canada for a few months before starting as a teacher in Kuwait! Without putting too fine a point on it, these races have been a really important part of my time in Korea, and it has been so exciting and inspirational to run with this awesome group of people. Carol, you will be missed.

The next race is June 1st, in Jeju. It will be the anniversary of my first 10k race! I can't believe that it was almost a year ago!! Yikes.