Art By Tali Landsman

It was Saturday morning when we left Seoraksan National Park and the road to the park was filled with cars driving bumper to bumper, coming to hike and hoping to score a parking place. I had heard that hiking is a national obsession in Korea, but I could not have imagined the amount of people that have come to hike Seoraksan on this weekend. I was pleased that without giving it much prior thought, we happened to have hiked on a Friday, and thus encountered many less hikers on our path. It was still busy on our hike, but not insanely busy as it looks to be on weekends. My legs, however, are not very pleased with me. For some strange reason, my legs who have carried me so well on difficult hikes, do not do well on climbing up and down steps. We climbed up and down thousands of high steps yesterday, and my muscles are stiff and achy. I hope they will loosen up soon, because I have scheduled another hike in two days, and I need to be in relatively good shape. We drove south t...

While still in Seoul, we rented a car with an English Language GPS and a mobile Internet that is called an Egg. They do not rent many cars with an English GPS, so renting a car took more than an hour and included sending an employee to get the attachment that connects the GPS to the car's windshield; apparently they had only one and it was in another branch. While we waited, the branch manager went over the car insurance details with us. By buying car rental insurance in Korea, we were only buying insurance for our own car with a deductible of $100 per event. An event, constitutes a scratch to the car or an accident. Three scratches means $300 etc. But all the insurance you can buy does not cover the OTHER car in case of an accident. The branch manager told us: "You only need to worry if you hit an EXPENSIVE car like a BMW, a Mercedes or a Ferrari. In that case you will have to pay $20,000,000 Won, which is roughly $20,000." As Jules and I sat there with our...