Buddha, birthdays, bracelets, baseball

(This Buddha had the jewel in his forehead stolen sometime in the last TWELVE HUNDRED YEARS; the tiger's getting impatient, but they're not quite ready for the birthday party yet...)

Through a series of day-off swaps arranged at Heeduk's request and the big holiday this weekend ("It's Buddha's birthday, it's Buddha's birthday, and we would like to wish him all the very best..."), I ended up with yesterday (Tuesday), tomorrow (Thursday), either next Monday or Tuesday (not sure which yet) and next Thursday off. To tell the truth, working Saturdays, which all my non-LIKE friends have off, and Sundays, when absolutely everybody but me has the day off, is a pain. There's not a lot to do on the days I have off, when nobody I know is free. So I look for activities that will get me out of the apartment. I'm very fond of my furboys, but they're lousy conversationalists.

So yesterday, I went for a run outside! (I've always hated running on a treadmill, but that's where I do almost all my running now because it doesn't pound my knees.) Then I set of for Donghwasa Temple on Mt. Palgongsan.

I have become very fond of my wooden bead bracelet. It's actually a Buddhist prayer bracelet, it even has a little golden Buddha inside the capsule-shaped piece that comes apart to stretch the bracelet, but it isn't that for me. (Hey, if Madonna can shake her exoskeleton half-naked wearing a crucifix...) For me, it's a reminder of the serenity I feel when I'm out of Palgongsan, with the flowing water and the birdsong, and it helps me stay centered.

Anyway, I lost the bracelet on Monday, somehow. The fact that I lost it didn't upset me terribly, which is so unlike my old self. But I did determine to get another one, which involved a 20-minute bus ride downtown, a 40-minute ride to the mountain, and a steep 15-minute climb to the temple. That was worth it in itself for the quiet on the mountain. The bracelets themselves cost five bucks, so I bought a reserve too. By the way, it occurs to me that it might be a tad ironic that one of the things I've learned from Buddhism is a detachment from physical things, so I ran right out and got another bracelet... to quote good old Walt Whitman, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself." I've found that quote useful in innumerable ways. By the way, I'm sure that everyone's come to expect a parenthetical aside in every paragraph I write. (Here it is.)

I took the bus back to town and headed over to the ballpark. My first attempt to go to a game this year was not totally inerrant, as the game was in the sixth inning when we got there; this past Sunday, I showed up at 1:10 for an allegedly two o'clock start, entered a six-block-long ticket line that moved thirty feet in thirty minutes and gave up; the game was at five o'clock, at that! I don't get it.

So this time I got there at 5:15 for a 6:30 start, and it turned out I could have waltzed in at the time of the first pitch and picked any of 5,000 seats. The weather had been beautiful when I was at Palgongsan, but as the evening came, it got cool, windy, and intermittantly precipitatious.

So I sat and shivered a little in the sporadic rainage and watched three and a half hours' worth of sloooow baseball. The visiting team has the pathetic name of Heroes, and they're the only team in the league without a corporate identity. Perhaps depressed by this turn of events, their pitchers walked nine Samsung Lions and I swear to the ghost of Abner Doubleday they went to a full count on every single batter and threw over to first six times every time a runner got on. I was, however, filled with pride for the Lions (get it?! Gosh, I'm funny) when they won, 4-1.

I decided to sit in the midst of the rabid cheering section that is at every game, with the guy in the Lions uniform blowing his whistle, chatting up the crowd (that probably would have been more entertaining had I understood a single word), and leading cheers incessantly, the dancers, the guy beating the big Korean drum, and the fans constantly cheering, singing, chanting, and beating those inflated sticks together. Might as well get the full experience.

I realize that I just posted a couple of days ago about the status of women as shown by the dancers outside the stores, and it might seem a little hypocritical that I don't have a problem with the ones at the game. Do I contradict myself? Very well... ah, never mind. I do think that there's a difference between entertaining, and seeming to have a good time, when you're part of the attraction at a family event and endlessly gyrating in front of an eyewear store while nobody pays you the least attention. Maybe it's not a moral difference, but the dignity level somehow is higher. (And the little girls who got up that one time? Very cute.

By the way, I don't care if they fit Korean words to "Na na na na na na na na... hey, hey, goodbye" or Swanee River or Do Wah Diddy, but they could damn well leave This Land is Your Land alone.

After the crowd had performed each of those songs about eight times each, I decided that I preferred the American style of fandom, where you go, have a relaxed good time, talk to your neighbor, and actually pay attention to the game.

Does that make me a cultural imperialist? Very well, then...

The glass is already broken

I went to Mt. Palgongsan again today, this time with Joanna and Leo (rhymes with Mayo), a new arrival from Ontario at the Samduk school. The weather was glorious, aside from some serious smog that eventually burned off, and the cherry trees lining much of the route were gorgeous.

Donghwasa Temple, near the base of Palgongsan, reminds me of two tenets of Buddhism that resonate with me. The first is compassion for all beings, which is what I decided to seek 18 years ago when I went vegetarian. The average Buddhist (at least around here) doesn't try very hard, as only the priests pursue a vegetarian diet. But compassion is a natural companion to the knowledge that we are all one, that (as somebody said) "There's only one of us here." And that's what I (who for so long believed nothing, really) believe.

The other is detachment, of letting go of desire. This has been a hard lesson for me; I've always been a grasping person, and I've hated goodbyes worse than just about anything. A couple of years ago, I read somewhere "The glass is already broken," that is, that eventually we lose everything physical: our belongings, the people we love, even our own bodies. Loss is inevitable. But if we see everything as only on loan to us-- like a drinking glass we love that, because it will be broken sooner or later, is in its essence broken already-- then we can appreciate whatever or whoever it is while we have it and not grieve when it's gone. This concept has brought a great deal of peace of mind to me.

Ironically, it was tested today. First, my aluminum hiking stick fell apart. Longtime readers of this blog (that is, me) may remember that in September I said I couldn't see much difference between the eight-buck sticks and the eighty-buck sticks. I guess I see one now. Anyway, I survived the hike without it. But I took a couple dozen gorgeous pictures only to find when I got home that my camera was on permanent strike, nothing working but the on/off button and the display permanently stuck in op-art mode. So I lost all the photos and a good camera. Here's the point: rather than cursing and stomping around, I said "Huh." So Not the Drama, as my friend Kim Possible says.

I've already replaced the eight-buck hiking stick with a nine-buck hiking stick and I'll have to find a bargain on a new camera even though I don't want to spend any more money, but the thing is, I feel free. Freer, anyway. It's the end of the glass as we know it, and I feel fine.

You prob'ly think this blog is about me

Okay. So. I'll try not to forget anything from the last four days. Hmm... let me see...

Oh yeah, did I tell you I got hit by a car?

Downtown traffic is bizarre. There's one long pedestrian mall, a fairly wide street (Rodeo Street, where Club That is) with sidewalks that everyone treats as suggestions, and a lot of little streets without sidewalks, where pedestrians coexist uneasily with cars. Walkers kind of casually sort of get out of the way of cars, when they feel like it, and cars ease through at five or six mph (that's eight or nine kph, for you more cosmopolitan, modern types).

A bunch of us from LIKE were walking down Rodeo Street on Friday, on our way to waffle euphoria (big, hot fresh waffle with vanilla and green tea ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, grapes, orange slice and tomato wedge [seriously]). Suddenly, what should I feel on my right calf but a car bumper! This guy had run into me at about 4 mph! (Okay, 6 kph, but stop asking for special treatment.) I whirled around, might possibly have loudly alluded to the title of Britney's new single If You Seek Amy, and stared at him. He looked blandly at me as if he and I had not just had a steel-to-denim encounter. I don't know if he did it on purpose to get me out of the way-- blowing your horn is rude, you know-- or didn't know he'd done it, or was too abashed to acknowledge me, or what. The older kids at school tell me they'd never heard of someone bumping someone like that on purpose, and I'm not sure that "abashed" is something that any Korean man has ever felt, so I'm guessing door number two, Monte. But I don't know. What I do know is, damn, you're not supposed to bump people with your car.

It was only later that I remembered Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark: "You can't do this to me! I'm an American!" But we just walked on; it would have been waffly dumb for me to have made a bigger scene.

After we finished our waffles and I finished (until now, anyway) my whining, I walked Joanna (Samduk LIKE) and Leo (newcomer to same) down to the YMCA at Banwoldang Junction, where they signed up for the entry level Korean course I'd just finished. Joanna has a linguistics degree, so I expect it will be about five minutes before her Korean is better than mine.

I'm just not getting it; on Saturday morning, Luke, Joelle, and I had our second session of the next level class and I'm lost two-thirds of the time and frustrated three-thirds of it. Part of it is flaw number 739 in my personality: I loathe feeling stupid in class, especially when everyone is called on to speak. I've been thinking seriously of just leaving the class; now I'm considering going in a half-hour early every week for the in-case-you-missed-class catchup session, but Joanna thinks I might better go to EJ (the director), tell her I'm not getting it, I paid my money, can't I take entry level again (with Joanna) and then go on to this level, with her, next time. Dunno.

After class, some of us went to lunch at that little Mexican place, then Joelle and I walked to the Bell Park to meet Ray from school, Joanna, and Justin from Writer's Group and trivia, whence we took a cab to the art exhibit at the Daegu Design Center. I'd discovered that there was a show of art, mostly etchings and engravings, by people such as Dali, Warhol, and Manet (rather eclectic bunch) at the Design Center, and sent out a bunch of emails, which resulted in the trip. I've never been into art, never really understood, or frankly cared, much about it, and I discovered two things: I still don't, and it's okay. I'm just artistically tone-deaf, so to speak. It was good to go-- I'm trying all kinds of things I haven't done before-- but I'm at peace with the knowledge that I don't get it. It's like trying to explain Facebook to my cats, or personal responsibility to George W. Bush.

I did my six-hour teaching stint on Sunday, and got the awful news from Heeduk that he wants me to do an extra eight hours of proofreading each week, dozens of academic essays by kids who've only been learning English for a few years; it's, if I remember my Inferno correctly, what they do in the third level of Hell, just below an eternity of paper cuts and just above eternal reruns of Howard Stern. That also means postponing taping my video lessons, which I was looking forward to. Later, at dusk, I went for an hour-long walk and talked to the first Westerners I've ever seen in my neighborhood, three middle-age, USAF, shaved-head guys. (Have you ever noticed that white guys who shave their heads look like roll-on deodorant?) I also refreshed my memory that it doesn't matter where you walk in Daegu, because it's exactly the same everywhere: convenience stores, tiny little restaurants with tanks of doomed sea monsters in front, signs for PC bangs and noraebangs (places where, respectively, teen boys gather to play endless hours of computer games and drunks sing karaoke in little private rooms). But it was a beautiful spring afternoovening.

And today, Monday, was a gorgeous spring day, sunny, high in the mid-60s/upper teens, depending on your scale of choice, God's or Celsius. I'd asked bunches of people if they wanted to go out to hike Palgongsan with me. Luke was in Seoul, Kristen and James in Busan, my non-LIKE friends working. But I went out with Joanna and we had a lovely time. For some reason, the bus and the mountain were not packed with septuagenarian Koreans, as they usually are, and we had a quiet, peaceful ascent, descent, and walk around Donghwasa Temple. By mutual agreement, neither of us (chatterboxes both) spoke for ten minutes on the way down, and it was lovely. I always feel an incredible sense of serenity at Donghwasa, and I laid out 5000 Won ($3.50) for a little wooden bead bracelet to remind me to keep a peaceful heart. Then we came back to town, ate pasta at Italy and Italy, and I came home and took a nap.

'Cause, you know, I always like to lie down for a bit after I'm hit by a car.

Pop Goes the Weasel

I went back to Mt. Palgongsan and Donghwasa Temple on Wednesday. (Actually, that sentence belongs in the Departmental Bureau of Repetitious Redundancy Department, as those names mean Mt. Palgong Mountain and Donghwa Temple Temple, and you can see the photos.) (And yes, that's a picture of the spot where I tripped; I told you the sidewalk was bad.)

I was supposed to go with Micah, the newest guy at work. For me, teaching in Korea is a huge adventure; for him, it's the Ritz: he's spent several years tramping around Afghanistan, Pakistan, and a bunch of other places that end in stan, sleeping on the locals' floors. Be that as it may, Micah contacted me that he'd barely slept the night before, so I went alone.

I learned something about myself on the ride out. The bus was packed to the gills, and I ended up standing down in the stairwell at the exit door. Every time we came to a bus stop, I'd come up off the stairs to let people out; at one stop, everyone around me (but me, for a moment) noticed that I'd step up, someone would disembark and the door would start to close, I'd step down, and the door would open. I'd step up, it would start to close, I'd step down, it would open. This happened three or four times. Inside of five seconds, everybody in the back of the bus was laughing.

I thought it was funny too, and I was laughing as much as anybody. Not long ago, I would have been humiliated because I thought they were laughing at me; now I just felt how funny it was. So here's what I learned: I've shed a lot of my defensiveness and ego. Knowing my ego is shrinking makes me so proud of myself! (Wait; what?)

The trip up the mountain was challenging and uneventful, so I'll skip to the trip down. I just kind of struck out on a new trail, which ran out, and I blundered about a bit, sharply rightward and steeply downward (kind of like the Bush administration).

Within ten minutes, I made two unexpected acquaintances. A big ol' ferrety animal popped out from under a rock and froze when he saw me. I froze too. We stared at each other for quite a while, then he skittered under a log. When I came home, I searched the 'net and determined he's a Siberian weasel; I don't know if he tried to google me. (I've been trying to upload a picture from the Web, but apparently the tech department at Blogger is also run by weasels. You'll have to search for Siberian weasel images yourself, or take my word for it: he looked like Frank Burns.)

Then, way out in the woods, I was greeted by a Korean lady who knew some English. I thought at first that she was taking pity on my befuddled expression and was going to help me find my way, but then she said she was Jehovah. I was pretty impressed till I realized that none of the bushes was burning. She meant she was a Witness. She asked me if I could read Korean and wanted to give me a J's W tract. I played dumb (that is to say, acted naturally) and went on my way.

I finally found a real trail and the way to the Donghwasa complex. It's hard to encapsulate how I feel about it. There are many buildings of various degrees of religious importance, and a mixture of worship and rubbernecking going on. I saw a monk in an Adidas track suit, and people touching their heads to the floor in a pavilion facing the giant standing Buddha (which, the brochure says, encases two pieces of the historical Buddha's bones.) As I've said before, I find the icons and music offputting, and there was a deep tuneless chant, which I thought sounded vaguely menacing, playing over loudspeakers the whole time.

But I still feel very peaceful there; I don't know if it's the setting, with the mountains looming above and all around the courtyard, or the earnest belief of the pilgrims, or what. But, for whatever reason, it's one of the most serene places I've ever been. Afterward, on the walk down to the main road, I passed three women kneeling in front of a Buddha image carved into a boulder; the sign said the image was carved between 1200 and 1400 years ago. St. Augustine calls itself the "Ancient City" because it's 443 years old; I guess it's all a matter of perspective.

Then I walked down to the bus stop, checked for blood on the sidewalk and found none, and came home.

Don't fall off the mountain

(The bottom two photos are part of the "trail" up the mountain.)

My first class wasn't until 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, so I decided to go back out to Mt. Palgongsan, 15 miles north of the city, and hike by myself. I had just read a quote by some old dead white Romantic poet who said that if you walked with somebody, you weren't really walking, you were chatting. Sounds good to me. I believe I think I'm considering mulling over hiking Palgongsang or Apsan every week; I always feel alive when I do.

(For what it's worth, I bought a scale today from a street vendor for about six bucks, and it claims I've lost 12 pounds in the six weeks I've been here. Despite all my walking, that seems ludicrous, as my four food groups are carbs, carbs, carbs, and really really sugary carbs. But Ray tried my scale and his reading matches the one on his, so I guess walking really is a miracle remedy for pudge. I don't look any skinnier, though, as far as I can see. But as the saying goes, I'm in shape; round is a shape.)

The friendly lady at the visitor info phone number had told me that not only the #1 bus with the pink sign (with which I'm familiar), but also the red #1 (which goes within a block of my apartment), goes north to Palgongsan, albeit to a different temple area. So I hopped the red #1, which promptly set off to the far south. This is a big, big city and I'm not sure how far south we went before I gave up and hopped off, but the people all had Australian accents. (Hey, I can get lost going through Palatka, Florida, and people there speak English.) (Sorta.)

So I got a bus and then the subway back north to downtown and got on the pink #1. It got pretty crowded on the bus, but nothing like when I went before, probably because this wasn't a holiday weekend. The old coots will go any day of the year, so the bus was still pretty crowded, but I was able to get a seat.

The weather, as it has mostly been lately, was fall gorgeous, and the air outside the city was as clear as it's likely to get. On the lower part of the climb, your ob't svt., armed with his trusty aluminum walking stick and wearing his lovely new hiking boots, sailed past a lot of people; all those years in Ithaca are still paying dividends. The walking stick really does make a difference in negotiating the steeper bits; nearly everyone on the mountain had one. Higher up, amid the rocks. most of the people whom I'd passed returned the favor.

Palgongsan is easily the hardest uphill climb I've ever done, if you don't count marriage. Long ago I did the three-waterfall climb in Yosemite, and that probably had a bigger vertical rise, but Yosemite doesn't have boulders and loose rocks all over the trail or a section with a rope to help you along. For that matter, Yosemite has a trail; about halfway up Palgongsan the trail is mostly a rumor.

In a warmup for what was to happen after I came off the mountain, I bashed the top of my head pretty good on one of the aforementioned boulders. On a particulary steep, rocky stretch, I had to look down to negotiate a tricky, twisty area of rocks and didn't notice the huge rock bowing out just above. However, it noticed me. My head hurt like hell, but I checked, but I wasn't bleeding. I don't think it caused any dain bramage, but I've noticed that I can no longer type the letters and .

The weather, as I've said, was beautiful, mid-seventies and sunny, and I was the only person on the mountain appropriately attired: t-shirt and shorts. Everyone else was wearing long pants and windbreakers or sweaters. It might be because 75 degrees for me is 24 for Koreans; who knows? Also, every single woman on the mountain was wearing some shade of pink or purple, for some reason.

At the restaurant that was the terminus for this "trail", I began to appreciate the warmer gear; it's kinda windy up there. I settled down to a lunch of bibimbap and a bottle of well-earned beer and marveled at the view, which included much of Daegu. The city sprawled out under its own soup of smog: you could literally see a blanket of haze, held in by the mountains, sitting on the city like a blanket. The air was much cleaner over the first range of hills around the town.

The restaurant is also the upper end of the gondola ride, which in a moment of madness I considered taking back down. Then I recalled that I get nervous standing on a chair and decided to pass. So I headed out and around and down. (My odds of surviving the descent on the same route I ascended would be about the same as my chances of being voted Miss America.)

I struck off up and down and up and mostly down a different trail. At a couple of points, squirrels let me know in their best rodent Korean that they didn't want me in their neighborhood. Korean gray squirrels look like American gray squirrels with just a touch of Romulan. Their fur is a dark charcoal gray, their bellies snow white, and their ears long, pointy, and tufted. They look as if they're wearing two little party hats with tassels. (Sadly, I didn't take the squirrel picture above.)

I had gone 95% of the way down toward Dongwhasa Temple, the place I mentioned in my last Palgongsan post, close enough to photograph some of the temple complex's roofs from just above them, when I came to plastic tape across the road and hundreds of yards of fresh cement, covered in plastic. There had been no sign in any language on the descent to say the temple was off limits. So I had to climb back up for three-quarters of a mile, cross the dry river bed, and head back down again toward my original route.

I saw something really touching on my way back: a fortyish woman was backing down a steep, rocky stretch, holding the hands of a twentyish man, presumably her son; he was blind. They were going at a decent clip, too. I almost got a little tear in my eye, then I laughed out loud: as they neared me, I called out "AnnyeongaSEYo!" (hello) in my best Korean. The blind guy's face lit up and he said, "Hi! How are you?" in English. Apparently my accent isn't fooling ANYbody.

I finally made my way back down. I had a very strenuous workout, and a wonderful, interesting time, until...

Climb ev'ry mountain

Gale, who will be returning to her family's Oklahoma ranch in a few weeks, guided Luke, who just arrived from his Idaho farm, and me about Mt. Palgongsan on Friday. We have a three-day weekend (my first, because I worked over Cheosuk weekend) due to National Foundation Day, the commemoration of the nation's mythical founding 8000 years ago. (I wonder if the really, really conservative Christians here celebrate it, since fundamentalists believe that the earth is only 6000 years old... but then Buddha's Birthday is a national holiday, too, so I guess they have to deal with a lot of stuff.)

We crammed into the bus downtown at 9 a.m. The bus was almost literally bulging, as we were packed in like sardines' more jammed-in cousins-- hiking Palgongsan is apparently the local, regional national pastime, and it was a holiday. We should have started at 8:00. After a very uncomfortable 40 minutes of standing with my neighbor's daypack pressed into my giblets while the driver careened around curves at an alarmingly high speed, we arrived. I wished I hadn't seen that awful House episode with the highly realistic bus crash...

The little suburb we disembarked in reminds me a bit of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, although it's smaller: a collection of hiking shops and hotels at the base of the mountain. At a distance, I saw a long, futuristic building with a sign reading "Korean Safety Theme Park". Fortunately, like so much here, it showed no burning need to be understood by me.

Gale, Luke, and I started up the trail. I had envisioned a long, steep dirt road or a trail with perhaps an occasional tree root to stub my toe on. Wrong again, Tofu Breath! The struggle up the mountain was astounding: long, steep, mostly dirt, all right, but it was mostly tripping over roots and climbing up thigh-high rocks; at one point, there were some very long, very steep stairs because it was too hard to climb any other way. There was a section with a rope to pull yourself up with like Adam West and Burt Ward, although I admit there was less chance that Milton Berle would stick his head out a window in the climbing surface than in the original. (What am I talking about?! I must be crazy.)

I never did get out of breath, as I was going fairly slowly to stay with Gale, but my running shoes kept slip sliding away (perhaps they should call them "No Balance"), my knee started to twinge, and my calves got awfully stiff. What I was scared of was the thought that I might lose my balance and fall on my butt on a rock. Once, thirty years ago, I saw a guy fall and hit his tailbone square on a sharp rock at Seneca Rocks, West Virginia. He screamed. I wished not to emulate him.

The funniest thing: there were scores of other people going up, a lot of them a good deal older than I, and they sailed up the mountain. Little old ladies who look like half-dead sparrows were doubling our speed. At the top, right near the upper terminus of the gondola (yes, we could have ridden the whole way up) we found a cafe among the pines with a gorgeous view and we sat for awhile.

As you may know, I love birds, and my favorite is the chickadee. My spirits were lifted even higher when, sitting at the cafe, I saw and heard two Korean chickadees. What a great surprise! I looked them up when I got home; they are actually called marsh tits, no kidding. (Don't think it was easy to not word the last couple of sentences as a joke.) But they were chickadees, all right; they looked exactly like American black-capped chickadees, except that their backs and wings were chestnut, not gunmetal gray. And no, I didn't take the picture.

(An aside, as if I ever stayed on topic anyway: I'm writing this on Sunday afternoon and I've been thinking since Friday how almost every single person going up the mountain had an aluminum hiking stick. Such a stick is collapsible for carrying and storage, has a pointed end that you cover with a rubber tip when you're on pavement, and really does make walking easier in up- and downhill trips, as well as possibly when somebody is, oh, I don't know, in his mid-fifties with arthritic knees and walks on a lot of hard surfaces. Some people used two of them, and I restrained myself from telling them that somebody stole their skis. Anyway, I've been checking them out at stores: they range from $8 to $80, and I don't see a lot of difference among them, so I bought an eight-buck model today.)

We went down a gentler route. Even so, there was one steep bit where I probably would have fallen if I hadn't grabbed onto some poor Korean guy's arm at the bottom and do-si-doed. I bet he'll be glad I bought a stick.

Near the bottom, we visited the Donghwasa Temple. It was originally built in 439 a.d., though the current buildings seem a bit newer. There were many hundreds of paper lanterns with paper slips-- prayers, I think-- attached to them, fountains with dippers for the cool, clear water, pavilions with golden Buddhas and other statues, gift shops selling prayer flags and prayer beads, and a 110-foot-high stone Buddha, the tallest standing Buddha in the world.

Having already offended fundamentalist Christians in this post, let me now say that, although many of the tenets of Buddhism, such as letting go of attachment, resonate with me, I find a lot of the doctrine, the Noble Eight-Fold Path and all that, bewildering and unpleasant, and the art ugly and almost frightening. Nonetheless, I felt a tremendous sense of peace throughout the grounds. Despite my reservations, Buddhism has always seemed to me to be supremely peaceful, and that's something I've aspired to for years, so I found the experience delightful.

The bus ride back was relaxed and uncrowded, as most people leave the city early and make a day of it; there are many trails and one of them (along the ridge, I think) runs for 12 miles. All in all, it was an exhausting, exhilarating trip. I'm in a very polluted city of 2.5 million every day, so breathing the mountain air and hearing the chickadees sing (still avoiding the cheap jokes, as you can see) was worth every minute. I'm going back-- maybe every week, maybe every other month, but I'm going back.

Don't argue with me; I have a pointy stick!