As a South African living in Cape Town, I had never been skiing before. We have snow on our mountains and in our very coldest inland towns, but I always opted to stay along the coast and seek out the sun instead of sub-zero temperatures.  So when I moved to Seoul to teach English and had to endure -12 degrees in the winter, I decided I might as well take advantage of the cold and do something that involves snow.
- South Korean skiingKOREA.NET – Official page of the Republic of Korea / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
I discovered Bearstown was a ski resort a train and a bus ride away from the big city. I packed the warmest clothes I had, albeit not bonafide ski gear and headed for the hills. What I did not do, was research the website or the resort carefully enough or else I would have discovered some crucial things.
Firstly when it states that it has a rental capacity of 1500 skis per hour, I should have gotten some sense of just how many Koreans would be careening down the mountains at the same time. No doubt, other places rent out way more skis, but this was not the Swiss Alps. Secondly things like ‘lift lental’ would have persuaded me not to believe the staff when they said they provided English speaking instructors.
But I didn’t notice these things and I believed every word they said as my family and I handed over our Won. Our instructor could speak English all right, all four words of it including ‘hello’, ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘good’. Warning bells should have gone off in our heads and we should have just abandoned it all then. But we were eager and gullible, so we also trusted him when he pointed us in the direction of the slope for beginners.
How we all survived that day I’m not entirely sure. We took the ski lift up the mountain, past a dense forest on the right and to the not-so-high peak. From the top, it really didn’t look that high or steep. But when my cousin volunteered to go down first and she veered violently to the left whilst involuntarily doing the splits, we knew we were screwed. He had not taught us how to stop effectively, this was the Intermediate hill (which we only realised when we spotted the beginner hill) and we had totally underestimated it.
The rest of us fell in the snow laughing before fearing that she might be hurt. Angry and hurt, she took her skis off and trudged down the hill never to return again. As for the three of us we swallowed our earlier pride and humour and attempted to do better and not crash. If the slope did not resemble a crowded street in Seoul then we may have had a fighting chance. I crashed royally halfway down the hill whilst snow burn made me bleed. In total, I probably only chanced it twice and agreed to leave with my limbs intact whilst my younger brother took to skis like a camel to a desert even though it was his first time too. All in all, I learnt that South Korea was probably not the best place to learn to ski and next time I’ll make sure to follow the beginners to the top of the hill.
