Free bouldering and cheese cake bread with a bit of humiliation

So Chris and I made plans to go to the Mokpo International Sport Climbing Gym this morning. Unfortunately, last night I decided to watch a little T.V. before bed. I figured I'd watch one episode and then call it a night. Well, I didn't realize that the episode was on repeat. So after repeatedly dozing and not realizing that an hour or more was passing between me opening my eyes, and not the thirty seconds like I thought, I didn't fall asleep until past 4 A.M. So yeah, I was rather tired when I got up this morning to get ready.

I got my gear together and Chris and I walked out of our refrigerated AC rooms down to what felt like a steamer outside. Immediately we started sweating, but today we were biking across town, not walking. Chris jumped onto his incredibly nice mountain bike and I.... slowly and cautiously sat onto the (20 years? 30 years?) old, lady-framed, tiny, rusty beach cruiser that Kim was nice enough to let me borrow while she's out of the country. Now this bike only had one gear so getting around town wasn't bad. But near the gym it's incredibly steep so the last few hills I had to get off and push the damn thing. But oh, was it worth it. As we rounded the last downhill corner I got my first glimpse of it. A tiny square of red next to two cold-shuts bolted into a wall floated between tree tops off in the distance, the backs of stadium bleachers and awnings flashed between branches. Chris had brought me to a dream-like area within our metropolitan city.

Now what I saw from afar was actually only one route of 7 on an outside sport-competition wall put up for the international sport climbing competition held here in Mokpo a few years ago. The real treasure was the free indoor climbing walls and bouldering area. Once inside the three story gym, you are confronted with a square room with bouldering routes going around it in a circle as well as sport routes ranging from verticle to over-vert to overhanging slabs. Everything was shiny and well maintained and there were even free weights to use in a connected weight room! All of this was free to use provided you signed in at the front desk. Once we started climbing, a married couple and their daughter showed up to climb, they immediately came over and handed us a package of cheesecake bread from a chain cafe called Paris Baguette (equivalent of starbucks here, one on every corner). I was glad that even here the activity of climbing could press through barriers. When we did a difficult bouldering problem they were happy and when the dad put up a particularly impressive dihedral sport route he was happy to see us watching and clapping. I think I'll be spending a lot of time here. Chris took a TON of pictures and some time lapse shots too, so as soon as those are ready I'll put them up.

On the way back, Chris's pedal broke off his bike, the second time since I've been here. When he pulled off the new pedal, the inside of the arm was just stripped bare. We took it back to the same bike place as last time but the dude wanted to charge Chris for labor and the arms he tried to sell were over $200! So we said f^%* it and left, I think Chris is gonna buy a replacement part online (already saw a few for less than $40) and get it put on at a different bike shop.

On an unrelated note, after four days of horrible constipation I got my first experience with foreign-exposure diarrhea... not a pleasant part of my morning...