Saturday, September 07, 2019

walk: canceled

I was supposed to meet up with my buddy JW for an 8 p.m. walk tonight, but when I sent him the text to make sure we'd be meeting close to my office, JW texted back, "Oh, shit. I forgot." He sounded tired and/or drunk when he called me to apologize for forgetting; I told him we could reschedule for tomorrow evening, an hour earlier. I had thought I would be going for a walk with JW and his son in the blustering wind and pouring rain tonight, but by 8 p.m., there was no bluster, and the rain was little more than a light drizzle. Alas. Tomorrow evening, there's a 20% chance of rain, but the forecast is mostly for cloudy weather, heat, and some humidity. Lovely. Can't wait for the end of September.

Meanwhile, I have Chuseok break to look forward to: this coming week, we're in the office only until Wednesday: we have Thursday and Friday off, with Friday as the official day of Han-ga-wi,* i.e., Chuseok, the traditional, family-oriented harvest celebration that some Westerners equate to American Thanksgiving. I'm going to walk out to Yangpyeong and back over the four-day weekend—120 km with my backpack so I can get in at least one full-scale practice hike before I embark on the real thing. I also need to get a good read on the pain levels for my feet because I need to know whether this is going to be merely an achy journey or pure torture. Assuming my backpack is light enough, I'm hoping for an achy journey.

The actual walk will begin two weeks after that.



*Sorry for the hyphenation, but without the hyphens, people who don't know Korean might mispronounce the word as "hang-ah-wee." This is one of several problems with romanization: the phonetic ambiguity caused by contiguous letters.



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