Boryeong Mud Festival!

July 17th and 18th was the opening weekend of the Boryeong Mud Festival. Several of my friends, including Diana and Bosun, and I joined a poorly-organized and over-priced Daegu Pockets tour that took us four hours west to Daecheon Beach.

There is nothing traditional, or even especially Korean, about the Boryeong Mud Festival (Korea seems to jump on any excuse for a festival!), and more than half of those in attendance are foreigners. So is should come as no surprise that the event is mostly an excuse for expats and GIs to binge-drink in the daytime. The mud itself is supposed to be very healthy and full of good stuff for your skin, but no one really cares about that when the festival comes around!

The crappy tour arrangements (over 3 hours of waiting on a bus over two days) and shady sleeping arrangements (drunks from our tour group trying to break into our room all night, even attemping a window entrance, to use the bathroom) aside, the festival itself was pretty fun! When else do mostly-responsible adults have an excuse to play in "therapeutic" mud, as well as climb through a muddy obstacle course, be painted with different colors of mud, go down a mud slide, and engage in a good old-fashioned mud fight?!

Mud slide. The line for this was always ridiculously long, so we never tried it.

You can see, from the left, Diana, Bosun, and I. We're smiling and having fun, but those smiles are just masking our fear.

Some people are VISCIOUS mud-fighters, and that stuff really stings when it hits you!

Daecheon Beach is also wonderful. The best thing was to get absolutely filthy, and then run into the sea to scrape it all off and jump around in the waves.

Diana and I, taken through the protective shield of Bosun's vinyl bag.

Bosun and I, through the muddy camera bag.

Most of these pictures are stolen - I had a plastic bag for my camera but I was usually too afraid to take it out and use it. The top picture is mine; the mud fight scene is from Diana's blog; and the rest belong to Bosun. They're pretty tame compared to what you can find if you search for this festival on Google Images! And I usually provide a link to my full album, but in order to protect the dignity of a few people I won't be making this one public!

Pat Bing Soo

Here's a blog post for my favorite Korean dessert: pat bing soo. It's Korea's response to the ice cream sundae, and much better in my opinion! I've had dozens of varieties of this stuff, and I think every place does it a little differently. The basics are shaved/crushed ice with milk and a scoop of ice cream; red beans are also pretty standard, and there's almost always at least one kind of fruit, usually more. I've also had tomatoes, corn flakes, nuts, different sauces, jelly candies, and rice cakes in my PBS.

The genius of PBS is that you can get it absolutely ANYWHERE in Korea - nice cafes, bakeries, ice cream shops, and even fast-food restuarants like Burger King, McDonalds, or KFC. My co-teacher, Carrie, recently took me a new (to me) cafe in Daegu with the best, fanciest, and most expensive PBS that I've yet to see. I don't think any of the four flavors are exactly traditional, but they're so damn good. I made it my mission to sample each one, and last week the mission was accomplished.

Strawberry

Sweetened azuki beans with 'four berries' sauce

Green tea...and a random piece of cake

Milk tea

The verdict: it's a toss-up between the strawberry and green tea. I feel disloyal saying that because green tea is my favorite flavor of anything in Korea, but the strawberry was just fantastic. I think that, besides a rice cooker, I may need to invest in an ice-shaver when I get back to the States (yes, that's a Christmas present hint!).

Can you blame me? picture from Google Images

Jeju Island Part II: It's Time to Ride

While my sleep-deprived students were pulling their hair out over final exams earlier this month, I was able to sneak back to Jeju Island for another four-day weekend! It was equally amazing the second time around, but quite a different experience.

The difference was mostly due to the weather and my chosen mode of transportation. First things first: I rented a scooter! A pink scooter! It was definitely illegal (I have neither a motorcycle license nor any kind of international license, which in turn mean that I coudn't get any insurance) but SO fun and liberating. No more hop-on, hop-off buses for this girl! It was definitely the best way to see Jeju - the roads are good; other drivers were (mostly) nice and let me have my own lane; and everything is well labeled so even with my crappy tourist map I found my way pretty easily. I saw lots of beautiful little spots just by pulling over for a break, and driving again after so many months felt great!

I had to feel bad for the guy who rented it to me - he was so nice and politely listened to my b.s. ("...no, I don't have a license....um, no, I've never driven one of THESE exactly") but I could tell he was worried. He must have warned me a dozen time to be careful and drive slowly, and he drove me to a parking lot so I could practice a bit before hitting the streets. I was a bit shaky at first and surely inspired no confidence, but got the hang of it quickly - it's like a cross between a bicycle as far as balance goes, and a snowmobile as far as acceleration and braking go.


As far as the weather goes, Korea is in the middle of the monsoon season, which means: constant and crushing humidity, a lot of rain, cloudy skies when it isn't raining, and little direct sunlight. I was VERY lucky with the weather though - it was cloudy and really really foggy almost the entire time, but it only rained twice in four days, and both times it was just a sprinkle for about a half hour! Somehow there was even enough sun to give me a weird scooter tan - on the back of my neck and tops of my arms and legs only!

So for four days I mostly just puttered around Seogwipo and the southern half of the island, did a little beach-hopping, and saw some new nooks and crannies that I missed last time when I was just out to see the major tourist attractions. Check out my pictures if you want to know exactly what I saw! http://picasaweb.google.com/kristin.laufenberg/JejuIslandPartII?feat=directlink

The Beginning of the End

The blog posts are sure to be few and far between for the next few weeks. I need to write about my most recent trip to Jeju, but other than that I don't know if there will be a chance to write down everything that I want to. Which is a shame because there's so many things about Korea that I want to share with everyone and remember for myself, too. I'll do my best but I don't think I'll be taking a breath between now and October, much less doing a lot of blogging.

This coming week is the last week of the semester! I'll have some first- and second-graders in my summer camp and summer classes, but there are so many students I'll never see again after next week! And one of my co-teachers is leaving on the 17th for some training in San Diego, and I won't see her again at all before I leave Korea. So depressing.

Another reason to be upset over the end of the semester: I'll be doing summer camp and classes for the next four weeks straight, with no more breaks until I leave Korea (which I can't complain about, because my school has been more than generous with my vacation). However, these classes will require...drumroll please...69 LESSON PLANS AND 159 WORKSHEETS. All made from SCRATCH. Starting in 8 days. And on top of that I'll be planning a major backpacking adventure, emptying / cleaning my apartment, stopping utilities, transferring money, looking for a job at home, saying goodbye to friends and the place that has been my home for the last year, etc.

I feel like I'm in college again and it's finals week; but in college I was always dying to get off campus, and now I tear up everytime I consider that I have to leave this place in five weeks. I STILL don't know whether leaving Korea now was the right decision or not. Everybody here is just so good to me. The English department from Jeil had dinner together the other night, and I got these gifts - the tea set is from my co-teachers (I had mentioned to Carrie that I wanted a Korean tea set as a souveneir) and the mirror is from my principal. And that same night Hyun Ju gave me a book that she had specially ordered for me, just because she thought I would enjoy it.

I must be an idiot to leave a place where I'm showered with gifts and free time off on a regular basis.

On a more cheerful note, I realized just in time that the U.S. government is jacking up the price to add extra pages to your passport. The service has always been free and I decided that it would be a good idea for my up-coming trip. I probably could have made it with the pages I had except for stupid Malaysia: some provinces there are semi-autonomous, which means they stamp your passport each time you exit or enter a new province! There's a crazy story in my guidebook about traveling overland from one Malaysian state to another through the country Brunei, and this half-day trip will add 10 stamps to your passport!

When I checked the Seoul embassy's website, I discovered that the price is jumping from $0 to $82 on Tuesday! $82 just to staple in some empty pages! I bundled off my passport to Seoul with a courier service and they added the FREE new pages overnight. Pretty ridiculous...if I have to get extra pages added AGAIN before my passport expires and pay for them I will not be happy.

Seoul, the DMZ, and Cheonan

A few weeks ago four of us visited Seoul for a USO tour to the DMZ. Our tour was scheduled for Saturday the 5th, so we took the KTX up on Friday and stayed at Jin Guest House. The next morning we grabbed breakfast on the run and were at Camp Kim by a few minutes after 7am. We checked in, boarded the buses and set off for the northern border.

We signed our life away (the first sentence in the Visitor’s Declaration wavier: “The visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom will entail entry into a hostile area and the possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action.”) and started the tour. Here’s an overview of what we saw:

+ The Joint Security Area, or Panmunjeom, the only place in the DMZ where North and South Koreans face off on a daily basis. It is where diplomatic talks take place and we could see things like the Bridge of No Return, where POWs were returned after the Korean war; the site of the Axe Murder Incident; and the ‘world’s most dangerous golf course’, a one-hole course surrounded on three sides by live minefields. South and North Korean civilians are not allowed inside the JSA so we were escorted on this part of our tour by an American soldier stationed in Camp Bonifas (which is in the JSA).

+ Dora Observatory, which is the closest you can get to the North – you can use the coin-operated binoculars and see North Korea’s propaganda village, Kijong-dong, and the city of Kaesong, where North and South Koreans work together in the joint industrial complex.

+ Inside the Third Infiltration Tunnel, one of four tunnels that have been discovered so far (it is believed that there are several more undiscovered tunnels) that were dug by the North for use in a surprise attack on the South.

+ Dorasan Station – “Not the last station from the South, but the first station toward the North” which was used for transporting supplies to Kaesong in the North and the finished products back to the South. The border is closed now but in the event of reunification Dorasan Station will be used again.

Even given the recent tensions between North and South Korea after the sinking of the Cheonan warship, this tour wasn’t really scary, just very surreal and a bit tense. We had to observe a dress code and even behavioral codes in some places – walk in two straight lines, no pointing, waving, or other gestures, and no pictures allowed in several places, even from the bus windows.

I was left with two main impressions from the day. One is that North Korea is just weird. Some of their judgments are just so screwy. Like the constant attempts to one-up South Korea and prove how much better they are: South Korea builds something in the JSA, and the North adds a faux third story to their own adjacent building so that it’s taller. The South puts up a flag pole in their village in the DMZ, Daeseong-dong, and the North puts up a taller one in their village, with a flag so big that it can barely wave even in a gale (it’s the world’s tallest flagpole, at 160 meters, and the flag itself weighs 600 pounds!) Anyway, this village – called Kijong-dong but better known as Propaganda Village in the West – is weird enough even without that flag. North Korea maintains that it is fully inhabited with schools, hospitals, etc. but no one actually lives there. Lights regularly go on and off and people clean the streets but the buildings are all completely empty! They face loudspeakers toward the South and deliver Communist propaganda for hours every day. And those tunnels – the North denied digging them, but structurally it’s obvious that they were built from North to South. And when we visited the Third Infiltration Tunnel, we could see places where North Koreans had painted the tunnel walls black to support their story that they were mining coal, even though there isn’t any coal in the area! And finally, a South Korean I know told me something that he saw when he completed his military service in the DMZ: the North can’t afford tractors for their farm work, but to keep up the pretense that they’re a rich country, they would have one tractor come out once a day and make a lap around the field! There are so many weird stories like that.

The other impression that I got from the DMZ, and also from the Independence Hall we visited later, is just how sad it is that this country is split. I’ve always thought about them as two separate countries, and I guess right now that’s what they are. But only a bit more than 50 years ago they were one country, with one homogenous population, until they were divided by outside powers. Especially considering how far the South has come in the last few decades, both economically and democratically, just imagine how powerful it would be today as one country twice its current size, with twice the working population and resources. It’s really depressing to compare the two now and imagine what could have been.

We arrived back in Seoul around 3pm (the border is only an hour away from the capital). We headed straight for the Changdeok Palace complex. Since we got there so late in the afternoon we didn’t have nearly enough time to see everything. We made a beeline for something called the Biwon Secret Garden, and arrived at the entrance just in time to buy tickets for the last tour of the day. A tour is the only option for seeing the Garden so we didn’t even care that it was in Korean. It was different than we expected – not really like a Western garden, but more like a huge grotto. We had a two-hour tour through beautiful roads and enormous ancient trees. There were also a few old buildings used by the royal family and a really pretty pond. We kept walking and walking, saying ‘Where’s the garden?’ and didn’t figure out until the end that we were in it the whole time.

The next morning, Sunday, we got on the train and headed south to a suburb of Seoul called Cheonan. We spent the entire day at the Independence Hall of Korea. This is a huge history museum – there are eight buildings plus several outdoor memorials and statues. One building was closed when we were there, but we managed to get through all seven of the others before almost missing our train back to Daegu. One exhibit was about prehistoric Korea up through the end of the Joseon dynasty in 1910, but all of the others dealt with the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945) and Korea’s movement for independence from Japan. It was a really good museum – at least as interesting and informative as the DMZ – and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone visiting Korea. This part of Korean history is really interesting because it’s still relevant, and affects feelings between Korea and Japan even today. I won’t write it here, but if you’re curious, email me and I’ll tell you what one of my middle schoolers said to me about Japan.

So that was probably the most productive weekend I’ve had in a long time – we knocked out three major touristy things and I had a lot of fun hanging out with my friends the whole time. I’m so lucky to have an awesome huge group of fiends here; even when we have insane long hot weekends like that we’re always laughing and having a good time. This post is long enough so I didn’t include pictures, but here’s the link if you have the time! http://picasaweb.google.com/kristin.laufenberg/SeoulDMZBiwonIndependenceHall?feat=directlink

World Cup Fever aka 대한민국!

Korea’s first World Cup game, against Greece, was Saturday the 12th. After a big dinner downtown, a big group of us set out looking for a bar where we could sit down and watch the game. However, every business that we passed that had any kind of TV screen – from bars and restaurants, to cafes, bakeries, ice cream shops and clothes retailers – was packed. People were sitting on folding chairs, shelves, countertops and floors. So we proceeded to the main stage in the heart of downtown, where there’s a huge outdoor screen. The area was absolutely wild – the main road was blocked off and people were sitting on the street; the ones near the front had probably been there for hours. Every time the Red Devil’s scored a goal, the crowd went crazy. Our huge group got split up, and Jeannine and I watched most of the first half there and then slipped off for some ice cream. We were lucky enough to find an ice cream shop with some seats and a TV, so we watched Korea kick Greece’s butt in air-conditioned and seated comfort.


After the game we re-grouped and enjoyed some celebratory drinking. The streets were full of people yelling and car horns blaring out the rhythm to the Korean chant 대한민국 or dae-han-min-guk, and everyone was dressed up in the Red Devil’s shirts, bandanas, blinking devil’s horns, and the Korean flag. I’ve never seen so many people riled up over the same thing; I can’t think of anything to compare it with in the States, except maybe New Year’s Eve in NYC. Certainly none of our sporting events even come close.

We attended the second game, Korea vs. Argentina, on the 17th at Duryu Park. If possible, it was even crazier than the downtown area had been. We arrived two hours early to find a spot on the grass in front of the big screen, and when the game started people were still coming in and the park was full of thousands of people. There were lots of vendors with chicken, beer, water, and all the necessary accessories – t-shirts, bandanas, flags, various horns and noise-makers, and temporary tattoos. There were so many people moving around that sometimes it was hard to see the big screen, so we watched parts of the game on our awesome Korean cell phones that come with free TV channels!

Unfortunately Korea lost this game. However, they tied the next one against Nigeria, which was at 3:30am yesterday (I didn’t stay awake for it, but a lot of my students did. Way to make me feel old, guys). That means Korea is advancing to the final 16, so the excitement will continue! If only I were as well-informed or excited about the American team....

Weekend Goings-On: Jirisan Edition

I'm so busy using this blog to write about the fun stuff I do on the weekends, that I don't have time to write about my day-to-day life in Korea. Stuff like my work, the food, Daegu, the culture, etc. just gets left out. I'm gonna have to work on that, but probably not anytime soon because I have too much to catch up on (sorry to get your hopes up, haha). Here goes:

My last post was about the Seoul Lotus Lantern Festival, which is sort of a prelude to Buddha's birthday. So Buddha's actual birthday was on Friday, May 21st; since it's a national holiday, we had a lovely three-day weekend on our hands. On Friday morning seven of us met bright and early at the bus station. We bought tickets for the two-hour bus ride to Jirisan National Park, only to find that the bus was full. Our options were to stand on the bus, or wait almost two more hours for the next one. We decided that it was all part of the adventure and chose to stand for two hours. We passed the time by playing Twenty Questions, trying to keep our balance and not topple onto any seated Koreans or annoy anybody too much.

We arrived in the town of Namwon and decided that the easiest way to reach the park was by taxi (traveling in groups like we do has its advantages, like splitting the cost of everything!). It was a beautiful ride into the park - curvy and hilly roads, trees and greenery, and the best air I've tasted since visiting Jeju Island (I think I probably complain about this a lot, but after living in Daegu I will NEVER take fresh air for granted again). Jirisan National Park is huge - the biggest in South Korea - and with over a dozen peaks it is famous for hiking, camping, waterfalls, several temples, and even a population of wild bears!

We were dropped off in a little parking lot and after a few minutes of hiking, found Guryong Waterfall. I think the original plan might have been to do some hiking that day, and even find a temple and pay our respects (it was Buddha's birthday, after all), but the weather and location were too perfect for us to resist. We ended up sitting at the waterfall all day, eating kimbap and drinking beer, playing games, soaking our feet, and exploring the area (which for a few of us included some awesome climbing - Mark, Dave, Jayson and I decided to explore downstream a bit, and it was so much fun to climb up and over all the rocks).

At the end of the day we made a quick detour to explore some of the nearby hiking trails, just for a few minutes, and it was SO beautiful. I didn't want to leave - I really like hiking and climbing, and the scenery was just breath-taking. I'd love to go back and hike the mountain properly, and even stay overnight in a tent or something to see the sunrise on the summit. Between the weather, the scenery, and the company, this was easily one of the best days I've had in Korea.


The first two photos here are mine; the rest are from the talented and generous Jeannine. To see the rest of mine, click here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kristin.laufenberg/JirisanNationalPark?feat=directlink