It was certainly not my first time experiencing winter. In February 2012, I went to Beijing. The temperature dropped to -2 degrees Celsius at night, the cold was biting, the rivers were frozen and kids were skating on them, but there was no snow. Apparently it rarely ever snowed in Beijing.
In the same year, I went to New Zealand close to winter time. The days were getting shorter and the temperature was dropping fast. A friend and I drove to Mount Cook. We saw just a teeny weeny bit of frost by the roadside, looking more like shaved ice than the powdery type that I imagined snow to be. A week after I left New Zealand, the whole country was covered in white.
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| Me checking out the frost by the roadside. |
Then, January this year (2018), my partner and I went to Seoul, feeling certain that this time we would finally experience snowfall. We had watched some Korean soaps, so we knew for a fact that it does snow in Korea.
Alas, it wasn't meant to be. The receptionist at our hotel told us it had been snowing steadily the previous week, but for some reason it had stopped. Meanwhile, a friend of mine who was in Tokyo at that time, posted pictures of herself being stuck at a train station because of heavy snow. And Tokyo was actually a lot warmer than Seoul! What a cruel joke it was.
Not wanting to let the lack of snow dampen our holiday mood, we just went on with our planned itinerary, visiting all the places that we wanted to visit, even going as far as the North Korean border (still no snow).
On our last day, we decided to go to a ski resort. If we were not going to experience snowfall, at least we wanted to see snow on the ground, and lots of it. It didn't matter anymore if it was real or artificial. There were several ski resorts in the vicinity of Seoul. We chose Gonjiam Ski Resort, because the rate was cheaper and it was the easiest to get to. (For more info on how to get there, please read my post on going sledding.)
As the bus dropped us off, we saw a few tiny flakes floating down from the sky that we would have easily missed had we not been staring heavenwards the whole time. There were lumps of leftover snow on the sidewalk, probably from the previous week. They were grayish and rapidly turning into sludge. In the sledding field, the snow under our feet was the shaved ice type. We tried not to let our hopes up. Sledding proved to be a lot of fun with or without snowfall. It was only when the day grew dark that suddenly, it snowed!
It was a weird feeling, like being in the rain, but not quite. The droplets were not as heavy or as wet. They stuck to my hair and my clothes like a really bad case of dandruff, but for the first time, I was not embarrassed about having white flakes on my shoulders. It didn't feel so cold. As the wind picked up, bringing more and more snow, and as we whizzed down the slope on our sleds, we felt the sensation of being in a blizzard (not that we knew what a real blizzard felt like). It was the perfect ending to our holiday.
As the bus dropped us off, we saw a few tiny flakes floating down from the sky that we would have easily missed had we not been staring heavenwards the whole time. There were lumps of leftover snow on the sidewalk, probably from the previous week. They were grayish and rapidly turning into sludge. In the sledding field, the snow under our feet was the shaved ice type. We tried not to let our hopes up. Sledding proved to be a lot of fun with or without snowfall. It was only when the day grew dark that suddenly, it snowed!
It was a weird feeling, like being in the rain, but not quite. The droplets were not as heavy or as wet. They stuck to my hair and my clothes like a really bad case of dandruff, but for the first time, I was not embarrassed about having white flakes on my shoulders. It didn't feel so cold. As the wind picked up, bringing more and more snow, and as we whizzed down the slope on our sleds, we felt the sensation of being in a blizzard (not that we knew what a real blizzard felt like). It was the perfect ending to our holiday.
