yangpyong house.

Monday and Tuesday we stayed at this guest house which belongs to the parents of our friend InKyung who lives in Nottingham. InKyung and her (British) husband are staying at the house for a month during the 6 week holidays (her husband Matthew is a school teacher) and they invited us to stay for a couple of days, along with InKyungs fried Justyna from poland who is also in Korea at the moment.
The area is called Yangpyong. Not many people live outside of the big cities and these type of places are mostly used as guest houses. people can book a room or just turn up. This place is pretty remote, there are just a few other guest houses nearby. The countryside is quite hilly and very green life out here is obviously a stark contrast to city life. There are a few rural households around so you can see people farming sweetcorn and other crops when you drive back to the nearest town.

There is a stream running out of the mountain which runs right past the guest house. We walked up the hill as there is another house further up, where an old man lives and spends his time practicing calligrapy (writing in the traditional way, with chinese characters). Unfortunately he wasn't in but you could see some of the work he had done in the window.

In the evening we had a barbeque and sat out until late. Koreans love bbq food so we took lots of beef and had samgyapsal which is bascially bbq'ed pork eaten with rice and wrapped in leaves. We also took some sausages along as a bbq isn't the same without hot dogs.
One problem with living in a hot country is the insects; there were huge mosquitos and huge ants trying to bite everyone and Matthew alreadyhad about 20 bites after one week. Being big mosquitos their bites swelled up to about 1 inch diameter on the following day. Although as you can see Tina isn't scared of bugs, she managed to catch two dragonflys at once!