Gimheh and Mehwah Village
It's been a while since I posted anything to the blog for a couple of weeks. Between teaching, swimming almost every night, and my social calendar, I'm a very, very busy boy. Every time I turn around it seems I'm being invited somewhere.
On Tuesday, February 28th a couple of my teacher friends came to the school and kidnapped me. The kids and teachers were on spring vacation, but I only get winter and summer vacation, so I had to be there. One of the teachers talked to the vice-principal and asked him if they could take me out for the day. He said yes, and off we went. We went to a couple of places, but my favourity was a place called Gimheh, which is just outside of Busan. There's an international airport in Gimheh, and a naval base. It's there that I landed when I came here from Japan. It's also where I'll go when I go make my trip to Cheju Island this summer. We went to a museum where I saw lots of aritfacts from the earliest Gaya kingdom.
The king of the first Gaya kingdom was a man named, Kim Su Ro and one of the highlights of the trip was the tomb of King Su Ro. Like the other Gaya kings, his tomb is a large mound. King Suro who reputedly lived to be 158 years old and died in the year 199. The tombstone in the picture below was placed there in the year 1647.
My friend Jeh Hyawn Yong
King Suro's Tomb
Guarding the king
Tombstone (placed here in 1647)
One more picture
On Sunday, March 5 I was invited to go to a Korean sauna for the first time. They're really cool! (lol, you know what I mean!) They're open 24 hours/day. First, you shower, go into a hot tub, then to a small hot room, then to a large room where the walls are encrusted by salt rocks. It looks like a cave, except that there are traditional bamboo mats on the floor and a 12 inch television inset into one wall. You wear clothes in this room and there are men and women. It costs $4/day for the sauna. If you want you can pay an extra $1 and you can sleep in the room all night. I don't think I would do that as waking up dead would be a drag. My clothes were absolutely soaked when I came out of there! I had stayed in there too long and very nearly fainted when I came out. Oh, they give you clothes to wear...shorts and a tee-shirt, but since there's was no way I could fit into them, I wore my own clothes. I could lose 40 pounds and probably still not fit into them. Koreans generally have very, very small frames.
Last Saturday I had lunch with friends. My friend has a beautiful apartment! One thing I noticed is that there were baskets of charcoal in every room. Some rooms had several of them. I guess it's a common thing in Korean homes...they put them all around to purify the air.
Yesterday (Sunday, March 12), was cold as hell! Well, maybe not quite that cold, but it was far from the sunny +22 weather we had last Friday. With the wind I'm sure it must have been around -15. Nevertheless, some friends invited me to go with them to a place called 'Mehwah'. It's famous for it's plum trees, the blossoms, and its plum products. There's a drink called 'mehshil' which comes from plums but it's made in a special way. It comes in both alcoholic and non-alcoholic formats. There are some clay jars (see picture below) they use for making this drink. I got to hike up a mountain! Now, I really am 'ole mountain Pete' because not only am I old, but today I hiked up a really, really old mountain.
Dancers in traditional clothing
Making Mehshil in Mehwah Village
View from the mountain (Ole Mountain Pete lives!)
Cultural Notes...
I think I've noted before how hard Korean students work. I don't know what the exact percentages are, but a fairly low percentage of North Americans ever attend university. However, a very high percentage of Koreans do, and the universities are full, so, competition to get in is very stiff and only the best make it. I was talking with my neighbour's daughter, Sung Ah yesterday. She wants to be a doctor. She gave me a rundown of her daily schedule ...
She gets up at 6:00am, has breakfast, gets dressed and goes to school at 8:00. She starts school at 9:00 I think. She stays at school till 9:00pm. The school provides both lunch and supper. Then, she goes to something called Academy, and studies there till 11:00pm. She gets home at 11:30pm and goes to bed at midnight. This girl is only 17 years old and her day to day routine is not at all unusual.
I think our kids have way too much freedom and spare time, but on the other hand these kids have far too little.
Of all the food I've tried here, I think my favourite has to be something called "Sam gyup sal". The tables in restaurants here all have gas cookers in the middle of them. The tables are low and you sit on a cushion on the floor with your legs crossed. After about an hour my legs tend to fall asleep. I wonder if I'll get better at that with practice?
Anyway....the servers bring out pork that's been cut into long thin slices (a little thicker than bacon). This is cooked at the table with some garlic and maybe some peppers. They eat a couple of variety of leaves here. Some of the leafy stuff is just a type of lettuce, but there are leaves that clearly come off some kind of tree and taste a little minty. The leaves are arranged in a basket on the table. You take a leaf, and then as pieces of pork are cooked you grab one with your chopsticks, dip it into a sauce in front of you, and put it on a leaf. Then, personally I like to add some red pepper sauce and maybe a piece of garlic. You wrap it all up in the leaf as if you were going to give it someone as a gift, and then you just stuff the whole thing into your mouth. That's the way it's done. It is sooooooo good! Of course that's served along with various other vegetables, noodles, soups and the omnipresent, rice.
More food...on the way back from school today I bought some strawberries from a guy who was selling them from the back of a truck on the street. I love Korean strawberries!!! They are absolutely the best strawberries I've ever eaten!!! The price was certainly right too...for $7 I bought what must surely be a few quarts contained in a medium sized plastic bowl. I thought he'd empty them from the bowl into a bag and keep his bowl, but I get to keep the bowl too. Bonus!
In other news....
I had been going to that bar a couple of times a week and having one or two beers each time. But the main reason I continued going is that I wanted to smoke. I told myself that I would only smoke when I drank, so the evil weed had me drinking more and more. Anyway, I had been leaving my cigarettes at the bar and the owner would put them in a drawer behing the bar for me. But a couple of weeks ago I brought them to the apartment and decided that I had been drinking too much in order to smoke, so I figured I'd smoke at home so that I wouldn't feel like I had to go drink. There was a stroke of pure genius! (I'm kidding.) That went on for about a week.
Seeing that I was indeed on my way down that slippery, disgusting slope, I bought myself some Nicorette gum and haven't had a puff or a beer in over a week. I really don't want to get fully re-addicted again, so for the next few months at least, I'll keep Nicorette within easy reach. It was just too damn hard to break that chain!
I made a stupid mistake tonight... as I was leaving the swimming pool one of the swimming coaches came up to me and introduced himself. He said his name is Shin and asked me my name and where I worked. I told him my name and that I work at the elementary school. I did all this in Korean and was doing okay and then thinking I'd really impress him I told that I teach, 'Yongwa'. Unfortunately, that was a brain fart and I should have said, 'Yong aw' which means, 'English'. What I actually told him was that "I teach movie.". Oh well!
In January I was on tv and today I saw a picture of myself from January in a magazine that's distributed all over Haman county. The adventure continues!
|
