This last weekend me and 44 other people from around where I live went to High1 Ski Resort to go skiing. The trip was organized by the Waegook Cook bar in Gumi. This trip had more Koreans and Military guys than it did English teachers which was a little disappointing but it was still a great time. It seems that lately the Waegook Cook has had a lot more military guys from Waegwon, a ton thats next to Gumi. This isn't the worst thing in the world but these guys tend to be a little young and some are not the most mature people in the world but many of them are great guys. It also needs to be noted that as more military guys show up this usually means that more English teachers wont want to.
Anyway the Ski trip was great we left around 6:40am, we were suppossed to leave at 6 but as usual someone or several people were late, we ended up leaving 2 people behind, but they caught a bus there later in the day and met up with us. The bus ride took about 5 hours, it should have taken less than 4 but as usual on a Waegook trip we stopped every 40 minutes for drunk people to pee. We went to a ski rental shop first and got our equipment and then headed off to the condos. We arrived at the condo area around 12:50am and the afternoon session started at 1pm so it was good timing, it would have been nice to be there at noon but it was better than I expected. After getting suited up and buying our 30% lift tickets my friend Mike and I headed for the gondola. We should have taken the lift but we didn't have a map until after we had been in the gondola line for 1/2 an hour so we decided to stick with it at that point. After this we always took the lift and this saves you 20 minutes to get to the top, live and learn.
We took 2 gondolas to the summit and then started our first run down. I believe this resort is the largest in Korea. It's very new and has 18 runs. One combination run is over 5000 meters long or around 3 miles long. There is a individual run that is 2,328 meters in length or almost 1 1/2 miles long. These are some serious slopes, I lived in Denver Colorado and have Skied the Rockies and this is comparable but not as good. The runs were well maintained but the beginner runs were very crowded and the intermediate and advanced runs were empty. I think this is because many Koreans do not ski often so most of them are beginners. When I was skiing the beginner hills they were very difficult because you had to constantly make last second turns to avoid falling skiers and snowboarders, at slow speeds this isn't a problem but I was going faster than everyone else by a good margin. Most of the intermediate hills emptied out into the beginner hills for the last parts of the runs,this area was also quite dangerous as most of these skiers didn't seem to have a proper understanding of slope safety and etiquette.
I skied a 4 hours session on the first day and a 4 hour morning session on Sunday. The conditions on Sunday morning were perfect until 11am when a snow storm came in on the top half of the mountain, it was a white out and led to some icy conditions on my last run, but all the rest of my morning runs were powdery perfection. The slopes ha a lot of restaurants and shops on them too, at the top their was a fancy Chinese restaurant with a 360 degree all glass view of the mountains, it was very nice.
After skiing I changed and went to the casino. The Kangwon Land Casino, this is the only casino in South Korea where Koreans are allowed to gamble, the rest of the casino are for foreigners only. I prefer the other ones. This casino was to small and crowded and it only had 6 types of table games and no poker. When I first arrived I asked about poker and due to a language mistake I was taken to the VIP floor where I thought there was poker. It turned out there wasn't but I had to buy $300 in chips to gain entry so I figured I would gamble there for a bit, I played a bit of blackjack and broke even after about 1/2 an hour. The minimum bet up there was $10, so I decided to go down to the main floor and gamble with my friends. The min bet there is only $1, not that I would bet that low anyway. The problem was that it was too crowded and I couldn't get a seat on a blackjack table after waiting an hour. So my friends Mike, Sung He and I decided to play roulette. We played the wheel for over an hour and when I was finished I was $60 up. Sung he decided she would bet some of Mike's money and lost it so he wasn't to happy but it was only like $20.
After this we got on the bus and went home, the trip back was the usual drunken rowdiness I have come to expect on these trips. I did manage to meet some new people on this trip and had a great time. I would highly recommend this experience to anyone in the Gumi area or just the High1 ski resort experience to anyone in Korea. Theres a link for the Waegook Cook website on the links section of my blog, contact Derrick for details bout this or any other Waegook trip. Theres also a link for High1 ski resort below in English,the Korean site has a really cool flash map.
High1 Ski Resort and Kongwon Land Casino
