Weekend In Daegu

First things first: if my co-teacher's reading this: you don't need to shout into the phone to make it work. The person on the other end will be able to hear you if you speak at a normal human volume, despite them being a long way away. That's what a phone does.

With that passive aggressive rant out of the way, I can tell you about our trip to Daegu. Daegu is one of the bigger cities in Korea and we've heard good things, but getting there takes five hours, two trains, and a bus, so we hadn't managed to get there until this weekend. Anna and Lauren had Friday off school so they went and checked out an amusement park. Anna might write about that, but it seemed like it caused more injuries than fun. I went after school, and after a couple hours being lost in Daejeon (I can't recommend the maps app on my iPod) and a superfast ride on the KTX, I got to Daegu in time for dinner.

Anna and Lauren have developed an insatiable appetite for dakgalbi, a dish of chicken, cabbage, carrots, and spicy sauce which is cooked at the table on a big round hotplate. When you finish this they cook rice or noodles in the pan with all the grease and sauce still in it. It's no bi bim bap or barbecue, but it's not bad. We looked around for one of these places near the Dongdaegu train station, but everywhere seemed to be fried chicken or dwaeji galbi (Korean barbecue pork).

After threats of tantrums if certain people didn't get fed (I'm not saying who, but only one of us was smart enough to go to Costco in Daejeon on the way for a slice of their incredible cheese pizza) we settled on a pork place. These places normally serve pork belly or rib meat which you cook on a tabletop grill and wrap in lettuce leaves. This was probably the best barbecue pork we've had in Korea, the meat was tender and really tasty. There were three different types of pork, none of which weve tried before. The owner tried to explain what they were but he didn't know the English names. He was really nice too, cooking the pork for us and chatting away. There were also some unusual side dishes, including some delicious preserved peanuts. 

Too delicious to photograph before most of them got eaten.

On the way back to our motel we wasted a few thousand won on one of those claw machines. Included in the prizes were a wide range of lighters and a miniature of Hennessey, and it says something about how long I've been here that I've only just realised how strange and dangerous (strangerous?) that is. The machine was rigged up to make a big jolt when the crane reached the top, leading to many dropped prizes and some angry faces. I eventually won a lighter, which I was stupidly happy about.

The next day we went to the Yangnyeongsi Market, a long pedestrian street in the middle of town lined with shops, clinics, and pharmacies selling various natural remedies. There was also some sort of festival going on, with big tents all along the streets selling all manner of strange foods (deep fried ginseng, anyone?) There were also police officers walking around on stilts and people volunteering to paint things on your nails, hands, or face. While I was waiting for Anna and Lauren to get their nails done (typical), a man pulled me over to the hand painting tent and insisted I let them paint a "snake" on my hand. 

You be the judge.

On our way out we realised that one of the gardens in the middle of the mall was full of tiny rabbits. I don't know the significance of this, but it was kind of amazing. There were heaps of them hiding under the plants, but I couldn't really get a good photo. I did get this video, however.

Insert your own "like rabbits" joke here.

Next we went to Suseong Lake and rented a pedal boat shaped like a duck. We pedaled around until we got tired, made friends with a Korean family, and crashed into a tree. Good times.     

Korean Things I Have Eaten

In an effort to make myself blog, I'm going to write about things I eat. As we've been here for over 8 months I forget that some of the food I eat on a daily basis would probably be considered weird by anyone outside of Korea. Here's part one: Sunny 10 Chocolate Flavoured Soda.

I found this at a stationery store in Gimje when we went to visit our friend Lauren. I asked Tom to take a picture but he videoed instead so here's my comprehensive review.

맛있어요!

Sunday in Seoul

We went to Seoul to eat fish and chips, and drink cider, open a bank account and get out of Buan. In transit to one of the many places we visited this weekend we saw this person dancing in the subway. There is so much I want to say about this video so here's what I got.

The song is 'Shy Boy' by the band 'Secret' - click on this text to watch the music video.  Tom and I haven't really talked about K-Pop on the blog because it messes with our Indie Music Cred, but it's a big part of the culture here especially considering I spend most of my week with people under 14. The K-Pop industry has been booming since the early 90's, and there's a set formula.

Aspiring stars are selected and 'apprenticed,' put through a 2-year grooming process where they are coached to sing, taught choreography and physically sculpted - whether through exercise or plastic surgery. They are made into a band (some of the bands are HUGE, like Super Junior with 13 members) and the Magic Power of the Internet helps make them big. 

K-pop songs are formulaic too, there's a catchy chorus (usually including a few English words), weird fashion decisions and a dance routine which is faithfully memorised by the fans. I've used a few k-pop songs in my lessons and the kids go nuts for them, usually they leap up and sing and dance along. I haven't really been clubbing in Korea, but a friend told me that young adults will dance along to the videos during a night out. If you want to learn more about k-pop I utterly recommend www.eatyourkimchi.com and their Music Monday videos.

The next part I want to talk about may not be as obvious. The person dancing is male. I'm by no means an expert on LGBTQ rights and I usually leave the social commentary up to Tom, but in South Korea I imagine it's a bit like the 1950's. There are only a handful of openly gay celebrities, one transgender star who was the SECOND person in South Korea to legally change her gender (in 2002!) and any gay bars are generally restricted to Jongno, Shincheon and Itaewon in Seoul.

Queer couples do exist but frequently will get married to cover it up. One of my friends told me that his coteacher talked about the apartment he shared with his boyfriend, when they were away from their respective wives. My own coteacher has expressed shock that I know queer people (let alone having friendships with them, scandalous!) so when I saw this guy dancing I just had a huge flood of WTF. He'd made a real effort to cover his face and continually adjusted the mask while he danced. We saw a few expressions of disgust in the large crowd of subway patrons gathered around but I didn't really know what to make of it.

Confucian culture values homogeny and conformity, and Korea does Confucianism better than anywhere else in Asia. Anyone considered 'different' is generally treated like an outcast. Tom and I (and all of our Waygook friends) get stared at when we're out in public. Disabled people are either ignored (like the deaf pupils in my classes) or seem to work as beggars, selling small things on the street or pushing music players through subway cars. To cross-dress, dance and be out in a public place during daylight hours is just so un-Korean. It reminded me a little of Cuba Street at home, which was kinda nice.

So, apologies for the unholy mishmash of k-pop and queerness. Back to talking about food and travel, eh?

A Little Bit of Culture

The main purpose of our trip to Jeonju was to have a 'Korean Cultural Experience,' whatever the hell that means. The Buan Office of Education organised an overnight trip to the Jeonju Hanok Village for all of Buan's Guest English Teachers and their Korean co-teachers.

Part of the 'Cultural Experience' meant staying in a Hanok, a traditional Korean house. This was our first experience sleeping on the floor, Korean-style, although our 'Western' bed is fairly similar in terms of firmness. Tom and I got special treatment - a hanok of our own, which was nicer than our apartment.

The weekend was full of activities, but first we got to dress up in Hanbok and prance around for a bit. I am too fat for Korean clothing but Tom looked pretty dapper.

Steph Face, Hanbok Style

My favourite part of the weekend was making kimchi. It's Gimjang season here - the time to make kimchi before the long, cold, depressing (I'm really not looking forward to it...) winter. There was a huge pile of salted cabbage and we donned some plastic gloves and coated it with spicy red pepper sauce.

We got to eat the fruits of our labour for dinner that night, but we certainly didn't eat all of the kimchi we'd made - a pretty sweet deal for the proprietors. I like fresh kimchi but my coteacher says that most Koreans enjoy the older, more sour stuff.

The next morning we went on a tour of the village and then we got to try our hand at making rice cake and bibimbap. 

The most interesting part of the tour for me was the paper making. Below are some short videos I took - one of the pulp being pressed, the second shows the 'toasting' of the new sheets of paper.

To make the rice cake, freshly cooked sticky rice was put into a huge stone mortar and we used a heavy wooden mallet to pound the rice into submission. Personally, I thought about my sixth graders as I slammed that hammer down.

My coteacher, thinking about the sixth graders too, no doubt.

The bibimbap-making was a far more delicate procedure. Jeonju Bibimbap is the best around as the dish originates from here. A very composed Korean woman in Hanbok showed us how to place the varied ingredients in a circle on top of the rice - the colours aligning in a perfect harmony of yin and yang. The bibimbap was topped with a raw egg, and a ball of raw beef mixed with gochugang. The end result was beautiful.

However, ours looked nothing like that, and we cooked the beef and the eggs. It tasted amazing, nonetheless.