why can't I just delete a post?

classes over

Hooray, my finals were today and I am done with classwork! I am happy to have some time to do all the other stuff I need to be working on, like finding out how you sign up for the GRE (details, schmeetails ) and that kind of thing, but it was really sad to say goodbye to my teachers today. Likewise, I am thrilled to be heading home soon, but I will be sad to leave all my new friends behind, mostly never to see them again. Last night I actually went downstairs to ask a real Korean person for some help with my language studying, and he was very nice and told me all kinds of good things, and I promptly burst into tears on him. :D It was completely pathetic. I will miss all these wonderful people.

But that is all the post you get for now, because I have postcards to write tonight and I don't know if I'll get done in time to want to write more stories. Mostly I just wanted to post this other person's website to keep you busy:

Http://web.mac.com/rasmusbm

Rasmus is a guy from Denmark that left early from the program today. We rarely crossed paths socially, but I thought you all might like to see his site here. He is 26 years old and has made a remarkably good start on travelling the world. Take a gander at his picture albums and see where all he's been! I think his government actually pays for most of this, too; I've heard that a lot of the European countries have that arrangement. I am jealous.

excuses, excuses

Ahem.

In case you are wondering if I have fallen off the face of the earth, let me assure you that the typhoons here have not been quite that bad. Mostly I've just been busy, and the rest of the time I've just been tired. I'll try to keep writing posts about my stories after I get home if I don't get them in while I'm here.

Tonight, Andy advises me to post an excuse for my failure to spend time writing. I meant to, but you see it's the last week of classes and the last week of seeing all the international people.

So instead I took part in a hot chocolate and skittles party.

hiking on Bukhan Mountain text

Blargh, again I could not make a window admit to allowing me to add text. I don't understand why it won't just act the same way every time.

You guys would not believe the thing I climbed up yesterday. I had the opportunity to mooch on another class's field trip to go hiking on Bukhan Mountain, which makes sort of a semi-circle around Seoul, protecting it in the old days. The professor told us that when the Japanese gave up their occupation of Korea at the end of WWII, the then-Governor-General was asked what he would most like to take back to Japan with him, and this mountain was what he wished for. Fortunately they did not move it, or I would have had less field trip this weekend. There are miles and miles of trails, and the path we took made an enormous circle, with a very steep climb straight up to one of the highest peaks, and a very steep arc down the other side. The professor told us at the beginning that it would be very steep for about fifteen minutes and would then get very flat. An hour later, we stood at the peak (yes, we climbed the blasted thing in one hour, and no, I am not in any kind of shape to do such a thing. Fortunately for my muscles today, we then had a lot of walking to shake out most of the soreness) wondering what exactly he meant by "very flat," and we never did find anything very flat for the rest of the trip. It took us about an hour to climb up and about two and a half hours to climb down, with about an hour in the middle to eat lunch and wander around this Buddhist temple that's sitting up there.

First is a picture of the peak we climbed in a measly hour from the bottom, before we started. Then is a picture of me at the top. I actually got farther up on the rock than I am in this picture, but the picture of me at the top top doesn't really show where I am, just me against a rock, so I posted this instead. You can't really see here exactly how red-faced and sweaty I was, but that's nice, because I was perspiring in buckets and was pretty disgusting. You didn't really want to see that anyway. I wish I'd been able to get some nice shots of Seoul from here, but it was cloudy and we couldn't see a thing that nature didn't put there. That was nice too, though, getting away from all the clutter of town. The professor told us that on a clear day, you can look right down into the city and practically see what people have on their lunch plates, that it's that clear.

I had to really work to get up that thing; I will admit that it was a little more than I'd bargained for when I signed up. If I'd gone on a class field trip to hike up, say Roan Mountain, like Mr. Mauldin's calculus hike or something, I'd expect to go up some fairly well-kept trails with some really steep spots and some fairly walkable spots. This was a little more rugged. Here, everything was really steep, up and down, and while the trails are obviously kept up carefully, with the vegetation cut back well and no litter anywhere, "walkable" is not a word you'd use to describe it. I had to look at the scenery between steps, not during, because I had to stare at the path the whole time, carefully picking where each footstep would fall, because otherwise I'd have broken both ankles about eighty times each. The third picture is of some of the trail we covered, with many lovely rocks in the way and much more vertical distance than horizontal. The fourth picture is also trail, but it's hard to tell because it looks exactly like some of the creeks running through the mountain. That's because we spent a good portion of our time with the trail actually following the creek right in it, i.e. picking our way down the creek bed, balancing on rocks, stepping from one to the next. It was extremely slippery, and several people fell. The water was incredibly beautiful, and you can see why people are fine with drinking it from those public fountains that I wrote about earlier. There's a pool of it in the foreground there, and you can see every pebble and speck of sand, right to the bottom. I didn't get a picture because my hands were busy holding on for dear life, but we also spent some time shimmying across and down rock faces that we'd probably have broken our necks on if we'd tried it standing up and slipped just a little bit.

Next is my little lunch, which I ate sitting on a rock under some nice trees. It's called kimbop, rice and veggies and a little meat rolled up in seaweed, and we all bought these packs of it at a small take-out restaurant at the base of the mountain. This is a two dollar meal, and it was surprisingly satisfying after the big climb. It held up in our backpacks really well too, staying pretty cool till we got there.

I am a bit sore today, but not nearly as much as I thought I'd be. The massive muscle work my legs did on the way up the mountain should have had me just about immobile today, but the long steady climb back down appears to have shaken out most of it. My feet really hurt at the end of the day too, and I'm surprised that they don't feel bad at all from all the impact. They must be more flexible than I gave them credit for being. What has surprised me today is how much stiffness I can actually feel in my arms and shoulders; they must have done a lot more work than I thought they did, balancing me and finding grips in the places where you just about had to be a monkey to keep going forward.

The place where we stopped for lunch was at the base of a Buddhist temple complex, which we explored after eating. We weren't allowed to take pictures in the middle of all the shrines, but the next several pictures are of places before and after that area. This tall structure has a Buddha enshrined inside it, in the dark arch you can see at the front there. I don't know if you call it a pagoda or not; it's got that look to it, with the layered roof tapering up, but I feel like a pagoda is a big thing that a person could stand inside (if they do that; I know little about pagoda etiquette) and that this is more like a statue of a pagoda. If anyone knows better, do tell. The next picture is on the side of the structure, one of the Buddha's guardians. All the sides had different ones; this one's my favorite because he's holding a stringed instrument, one that looks like a mandolin but is probably something else. After that is a picture of the beautiful flat area in front of the structure, which you could get up on if you took your shoes off. It's a place to kneel and pray. Then there's me on the steps going up to the shrines, sitting next to a cow for the year of my birth. I checked with Moon-hee, one of the Korean students, and 1985 is definitely a cow year. They had animals for each year on tiles going up the stairs, and several of them had coins sitting on them. Moon-hee and In Young, another Korean, say that people donate money regularly by leaving it on the animal for their birth year. The last picture is a Buddha set in an enormous rock up above the temple complex. The temples are not that old, maybe only 500 or 700 years, but this Buddha has been there for nearly 2000 years, according to the best estimates of the few informational plaques around. People have been climbing this mountain since long before there were maintained paths to worship here at this Buddha, which looks out over half the peninsula. I am not Buddhist, of course, but I find that a really powerful bit of imagery. There was a cave, too, that one of the shrines is now set in, that has been a place of worship for that long, since way before the shrine went in.

The neatest thing about this place is that it's an active place of worship, not a tourist trap, despite the incredible old treasures of the place. It would have to be more accessible to become a tourist trap; there's no way up but to hike for about an hour and a half over the trail seen above. And lots of people do come here regularly to pray; it was very active while we were there, with people going quietly about their spiritual business. Another neat thing about it was that we happened to be there on a maintenance day, when they were trimming back the hedges and cleaning various things up. I didn't mind not getting pictures of the temples, since they were pretty much more of the same traditional architecture I've seen before, but I might have liked to have had a shot or two of the church guild ladies sitting in a circle polishing the lamps, chatting as they went, because it's such a normal human thing to do. It would be so easy, without seeing things like that, to suppose that this magnificent place just grew up out of nature, when in fact a lot of hard work and love goes into making it the beautiful location it is.

hiking on Bukhan Mountain pictures

samulnori

Technology kind of makes me want to stab my eyes out. I had this entire entry written, and I have no idea what made it go back a page and delete it all, but it has frustrated me, so apologies if my recreated entry looks like I hurried through. If it looks like that, it's because I hate technology.

Thursday (it was a busy week), I had my first samulnori lesson! Samulnori is a version of the ancient traditional Korean drum circle adapted for stage performance, and Nanta is based on it. Sa-Mul-Nori translates as four instruments playing, and it's basically a percussion quartet that you can expand for a bunch of people to play at once, doubling parts. When a lot of people got upset after the first culture workshop class and went to the office and complained about not getting what they'd expected, the staff called around and found this circle to teach us to appease the students. Interestingly, though there was a very good turnout, I don't think anyone I knew of complaining was there. Boo them, but I'm glad we got this opportunity.

First the club performed for us, which was super cool. They had all kinds of fantastic dynamics and stylistic things that would make a lot of musicians in Johnson City drool, but they're all amateurs doing it for fun, led by a peer. They didn't have enough English to scrape together for me to really converse with any of them, so I don't know how often or how long they usually practice. Then they let us all pick an instrument to learn. The pictures are of me learning bass drum, Juyung learning the high cymbol-y thing, and a bunch of my friends learning the treble drum. The fourth instrument is a bass gong, and it just acts as a drone so they didn't stick anybody learning it. I picked bass drum just because more people tried to pick treble drum than there were instruments availble, and I didn't care; I just wanted to hit something. They taught us three different basic rhythmic patterns that you stick together in performance, and let us practice hitting things for two hours! It was ten tons of fun, and great stress relief. They told us several times that there was little importance in being accurate, that it was all about the feeling of the thing. Everybody who went had a great time beating themselves silly. I could feel it in my shoulders for the next two days. :)

Afterwards, we went out for Mondu, and I thought I'd post a couple of pictures of dinner below because people and food pictures never get old, right? Mondu is a Korean food very similar to Chinese dumplings, and they make several kinds cooked slightly different ways and with different fillings. This restaurant sells whole plates of them for only 1,000 won, so what you're looking at is a whole store of Korean dollar menu. Yes, I have in fact gotten good enough at chopsticks to eat these with them. The people in the picture are, from left to right, Cindy, Moon-hee, Yoong Kyung, Jin, Juyung, Anna, and Wendy. Everybody you haven't seen yet is Korean, students from Ajou who are taking part in the summer school to meet people from different countries and to get better at English. They have all been delightfully helpful in ordering strange food, navigating subways, that kind of thing.

nanta

And on Wednesday, after the concert in Seoul on tuesday, I went back to Seoul on a culture workshop fieldtrip to the Korean equivalent of Broadway to see Nanta, which means "cooking." This was SO COOL, everyone reading this must pick up and come to Korea immediately to see it. It ran on Broadway in New York for a while, but I can't coerce the internet into telling me if it's still there. It was apparently received very well by American audiences, though. Doug and Mr. Stites and anybody else in charge of a group of high-school musicians should take their students there the next time they make a New York trip if it's running; they'll love it. The pictures are of the stage inside the theater, a cool sculpture of a cook made out of kitchen tools that was outside the theater, and the current poster advertising the show. Sorry about the head in the picture of the stage; I was sort of a little bit not actually allowed to take a picture, but there weren't any performers on and the usher looked extremely unenthused about enforcing the rule and ran away as soon as she told me not to, so I snapped one kind of quickly anyway and couldn't avoid the head. It was very bad, but I have not landed in jail just yet. Please don't reprint it. :)

Nanta is a non-verbal percussion performance, akin to Blue Man Group and Stomp. The premise of the show, which was delivered to us on a video screen right before it started, is that three cooks ("Head Cook", "Female", and "Cool Guy") are working hard to prepare a wedding feast by 6:00. The manager ("Manager") comes in and tells them they have to let his nephew ("Nephew) cook too, except Nephew is not a cook and doesn't know what he's doing. Hilarious antics ensue. The manager was not a big role, just came on stage occasionally to make it look like there was still a plot going on. Other than that, it was basically just a show of the four main characters, who were all athletic dancers and excellent percussionists, drumming on various kitchen things, having different sorts of drumming duels among themselves, and generally being side-splittingly funny. They had grilling and cutting-block apparati on the stage, and they really cooked there in front of us, chopping up chicken and cabbage and things and throwing them around in hot pots as part of the percussion. They also had a lot of great ways of getting the audience to participate, and they pulled two people from my group up on the stage, one to taste soup and act as half of the wedding couple, and the other to take part in the "dumpling challenge," in which he had to make a lot of dumplings really fast and lead the audience in cheers while all the actors ran offstage and disappeared. So it was great, and I had a wonderful time.

I don't think I have told the story of the culture workshop on here yet. Culture workshop is the class I was so excited about before I come, the one that I was talking up to everyone, having been promised sessions on bamboo flute and traditional calligraphy and tae kwon do. It has not been at all what was advertised and what we all expected, and in some ways it has been a frustrating disappointment. I'm not the only person here that was really looking forward to the things published about it and who based part of their decision to come here on this class, and I'm not the only one who's irritated about it, either. Partly my frustration just lies in not getting what I expected, but mostly I'm reconciled to that. The things we've done for the class fieldtrips--went to two art museums, visited the Korean Film Archive and saw a movie I'd like to purchase, went to see Nanta--are things that I've really enjoyed and definitely consider worthwhile. The two to four hours we've been asked to put in for lecture and discussion each week have been a waste of time that I've been really kind of angry about, and you all know that I am not generally a person to complain about classes. Our teacher is a well-meaning nice lady that I think knows her stuff reasonably well, but either nobody ever told her how to run a class before, or she didn't listen. I won't put the gory details on a blog, but basically, lecture consists of her rambling at the front of the room on and on about the same thing over and over, which often has nothing to do with the topic of the day's class. Discussion consists of her staring at a roomful of sixty people that doesn't want to be there because they've just had to sit through a stream-of-consciousness lecture, guilting a few brave souls into making up something to say so she'll stop staring, and then her repeating those persons' comments about eight different times, adding little or nothing, before moving back to the staring part of the cycle. I don't like it, I don't like it, and it's been the only thing about this trip I've been disappointed with. I'm trying to keep an open mind about it, though, because I really do like the fieldtrips, and I'm stuck with it whether I like it or not so I might as well try to be happy.

And I liked Nanta.

concert in Seoul

My roommate, Brittany, has a friend who studied at her university for a year and now lives at home in Seoul. Brittany went to visit her friend the night before leaving for the mud festival, and friend's mom told Brittany that she had just been given two free tickets to a concert at the Seoul Arts Center for the following tuesday and would like to give them to her and a friend. So she invited me, and I jumped at the chance and had a WONDERFUL time.

I was super excited about the trip, both for the chance to see a great performance and for something to do with my roommate. Brittany was born in Korea and adopted by an American family as a baby. I think her family lives in Minnesota, and she goes to school at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Clair. She and I get along reasonably well, but we have nothing at all in common. At all. So it was good to have a chance to do something together; she's invited me a couple of times to go shopping and clubbing with her and her crew, but that's just not me, so I leapt a bit to find a place to socialize that fit me better. It really didn't fit her usual comfort zone very well, but away we went. Neither she nor her friend in Seoul had any idea what the concert actually was--she had some vague idea that it might have something to do with some opera or choir thing--so we went in a bit blind, but it went fine.

We took a bus to Seoul and Brittany's friend picked us up and walked us home, where her mom drove the three of us to supper and to the concert. The picture is of the four of us at dinner, clockwise: me, Brittany, Yi Rang (the friend), and Yi Rang's mom. We had this wonderful steamed pork that you wrap up in lettuce with various hot things. I can tell I am getting used to the food here because my nose has quit watering when I eat spicy things; it shot up my sinuses really badly for a while. At this meal, Yi Rang's mother even commented that I ate a lot of kimchee. I was very proud of this from a native. I decided one day that if I was going to be in Korea, I was going to like kimchee, and it's been going splendidly ever since. (I've also been doing reasonably well with chopsticks in the last week. I tried asking for help from at least thirty different people for the first three weeks, and got at least thirty different answers that I just couldn't handle. Then this Dutch guy Peter reckoned that I wouldn't be able to eat noodles with them at one meal last weekend, and that got me stubborn, so I just picked the things up any old way and ate those noodles with them to show him I could too do it. And that too has gone well since. The moral of that story: if ever you visit an Asian country, don't ask for help on your chopsticks. Just use the silly things. Ahem.) This picture is also a good one of the eating-sitting-on-the-floor phenomenon here. Lots of restaurants are not this way, but plenty are. You take off your shoes and leave them at the door, and walk barefoot on a nice smooth floor to a table maybe a foot and change above the floor. There are small mats you sit on, and if you wore a dress because you're going to a concert, you sit sideways for the whole meal. I thought that was going to really kill my back, but after we started eating, I forgot about it and was fine.

The concert turned out to be a men's choir formed of all the top male opera stars in the country, and it was fantastic. There was also a really wonderful piano trio of young women that did two ensemble pieces and whose strings played with the choir on a couple of pieces. Yi Rang and Brittany were a little apprehensive about having to sit through opera, but there was very little opera on the program. Neither of them had ever seen non-pop music performed before, so this was a great first experience with it for them, since everything was high-quality and mostly very accessible non-opera. I tried to tell them helpful and interesting things through it, too, hoping that it would help them relate to the performance, and I think it did. They teased me a little bit, saying they felt like they had a dictionary along, but I think they appreciated the input. Yi Rang even asked some good questions about things, and they both perked up and looked like they understood more when I pointed out that the "stein song" on the program probably referred to a beer stein.

Leave me a comment if you've got more questions. It's now saturday morning, I just woke up a little while ago, and I am weary of typing further on this story. Boo for not sleeping enough.

mud festival stories

The pictures below are in no kind of order at all, because I attached them really quickly to get them up before my internet was supposed to go down for two days for construction. The internet did go down briefly, but they didn't do the construction they were supposed to do, and now I've tiptoed around it for most of a week only to find out that on this continent, you should never trust computer people to do what they tell you they'll do in their very clear instructions posted on every flat surface available in the building. Asia has a couple of times surprised me with how backwards it actually is, and this is one of them. The fact that there is no way to dry your hands in 90 percent of the bathrooms here also strikes me that way. Anyway.

So I went to the Boryeong Mud Festival last weekend, and it was a hoot. We'll see how well I can contain my verbosity. I'd like to keep my stories here a little bit shorter becuase a lot of stuff happened this week that I'd like to post about tonight. I find that I really don't have the time I'd like to have in the middle of the week to post things; two classes keep me a lot busier than I thought they would.

So the mud festival was in Boryeong, hence its name, which is a fairly small city. It's right on the coast, and the muddy part of the festival backed right up to the beach, with other things like makeshift restaurants and karaoke tents extending further into town. They bring in tons and tons of mud from who-knows-where, and thousands of people attend to cover themselves in it. They say it's good for the skin; you can buy mud beauty products there, but I never found a place to shop for them. Many of the older folks there covered their faces in mud and nothing else, lolling around in the sun letting the mud do whatever it's meant to do to your skin. Well, I say they lolled in the sun; actually, the first day they just lolled in the lack of rain, and the second day it was pouring so I didn't go to the beach to see if they were lolling or not. The international affairs senior coordinator, Mrs. Kim, said that this mud festival is the most foreigners she's ever seen in one place in this country, bar none. There were tons of Americans around. I think a lot of them must have come from military bases here. It was weird to see non-Asian people walking around and hear English spoken by people outside our little group.

I had thought there would be like a big pit of mud or something that you were supposed to roll around in, but actually there were stations with bowls of mud that you painted on with paintbrushes or just scooped on with your hands. I did in fact get very muddy, if you are skeptical about that because there's no muddy Sarah picture up. There is a picture of me on Mrs. Kim's camera that I can put up when she emails it to me, which she hasn't yet, but alas it does not well depict my muddy state. Our cameras were locked up for safety on the beach, so I wanted to put off getting a picture until nearly time to leave to minimize out-of-locker time for the cameras. So we got really muddy, then we went in the ocean for a while, then we got really muddy again and played around some in the mud, then we went in the ocean for a big long time and played in the big waves, and then I wanted to get muddy again for a picture, rinse off quickly, and leave on time. Alas, what I found when I went to muddy myself for the third time was that they ration the mud they've brought in, making sure there's enough to go the whole festival, and that particular hour was one in which all the mud was used or dried up and they weren't putting any more out for a while. So I did my best to get really dirty with the muddy water that was sitting around plentifully, and that is what I could do. We ended up taking the picture with Mrs. Kim's camera instead of mine just to make life easier. The other pictures of the festival here were taken mostly before my playing in the mud started.

I usually do not like beaches that much because of the sunburn potential, but I had a great time with this. Perhaps it hearkened back to that day at the old Beech Drive house when me and James played and played in the rain and got incredibly muddy and I alas,was wearing pink. It was soon after that day that the "no pink or white rolling down hills" rule came. Sure was fun, though I recall feeling vaguely guilty watching mom with that outfit in the laundry room. I think that with things like playing on the beach, I often have trouble having fun because I feel like there really ought to be something useful I ought to be doing instead of frivolous relaxation, like catching up on my homework or practicing. With this group, though, I landed in the middle of forty people who have no such urge to be useful and were willing to drag me into the fun, and so I did enjoy it. We threw mud at each other and jumped over waves and generally were not useful at all for several hours, and it was great. I was, however, ready to be done when it was time to go, and when the weather the next day was nasty, I was not terribly disappointed not to go back to the beach. I had a long lunch with the staff and a few other students instead, and we had a nice warm dry pleasant time.

Also on the second day, during the rain, we visited the Coal Museum nearby, which was a neat museum about the history of coal mining in Korea. It would have been a lot more interesting if they'd captioned their exhibits in English, but just seeing their things was neat, and they had a few things I could read. They had a lot of mining artifacts and photographs, and some displays modelling what miners would have looked like on the job. The museum is built on an old mining site, and it had an elevator you could ride down into an old mining tunnel. It was of course all fixed up with walls and stuff so that we didn't breathe coal or anything and couldn't really see what the tunnel had looked like in the old days, but it was neat to be down there. My personal favorite was the archeological exhibit they had, with a bunch of fossils, some of which they'd found while mining (apparently, since it they were imprinted in pieces of coal, but of course I couldn't read most of the captions) and some of which Samsung had purchased to display there. Samsung owns the world here. Boryeong I think was a port town rather than a mining town; this was in a mining town a few miles away whose name I did not catch. The mountains and the locals' living conditions reminded me of rural Appalachia, though they had little places with Korean tile roofs instead of trailers. It was a very poor area in a beautiful setting.

Side note about Boryeong's being a port town: at lunch on the second day of the festival, I almost followed good sense and ordered a seafood dish since we were on the coast. However, the restaurant at which we ate offered a pork chop, and I just couldn't resist it. I didn't know I missed pork chops till faced with the chance to eat one. What I really miss is sandwiches. One of the first things I'm doing when I get home is heading to Atlanta Bread Co. for a chicken pesto panini.

Pictures. First is me in front of a mud wrestling pit. These were pretty wild, so I did not try it for fear I would return as Flat Sarah. They had all kinds of inflatable mud activities, including an obstacle course I ran and the mud slide you see in the last picture, which I rode. The mud slide was big fun; it went very very fast, and I couldn't control my path of travel, so I actually ended up flipping over a few times and sliding into the path of Connie, the German girl I slid with (you went in pairs). I don't have a picture of Connie for you, but I like her very much and ran around with her for much of the festival.

After the mud wrestling pit is a view of the mountains outside the coal museum with clouds sitting on them. It reminded me of home and made me feel happy. I think I'm a lot happier here than I would be if I was studying abroad in a flat country, like exotic Iowa.

Then there are two more pictures of festival festivities. There's the crowded beach, where you can see some of the waves we jumped around in crashing into the shore. This doesn't really show how big they got; they grew enormous as the tide started coming in. I have not figured out how so many people managed to body surf in those waves while still holding their beer in hand, but they made it. I avoided those people. Then is the big concert that was going on on the beach kind of continuously. While we were there, they played exclusively American music, which struck me as incongruous for a national cultural event, but the crowd liked it well.

After that is a fossil of what has got to be the largest snail ever, from the coal museum. I really wished I could have read about this one. This is one of Samsung's purchases, not something they found in their mountain, but I thought it was just ridiculously cool and just had to share it with you. The case it's in is several inches wider than me, squared, and it filled the thing.

Beside the snail are Delina, Michelle, and Olivia, from left to right. Delina is from Canada. She did not spend the night for the second day of the festival, but she hung out in our room while we cleaned up post-mud and pre-supper. Michelle and Olivia were my roommates for the night. Michelle is a full ethnic Korean who lives in California. I believe she was born in the states, in D.C., and has moved around a bit in the US but has never lived in Korea before. Olivia is Chinese, from a town in eastern China that is fairly close to the border with North Korea.
I sat next to her on the bus to the festival and she asked me about what we eat in America, which was sort of a funny conversation. I mentioned pasta, and found that I could not for the life of me explain what it was. They either don't eat pasta at all in China, or they eat little of it and it has some Chinese name that I couldn't clue in for her to translate. She had also never heard of turkey, so I delivered to her a very entertaining description of an enormous ugly bird with a neck thing like this (motioning) and a tail that goes like this (motioning) and wings (waving arms) that don't fly. She was just fascinated, and has resolved that she must try this turkey one day.

Arch over the street on the way to the festival. No big story there, just more festival.

Finally, two pictures that cover the entire area of the room I stayed the night in while festivaling. Our rooms were upstairs in a lab building of the Ajou Motor College, which seems to be a technical community college of some sort that is affiliated with Ajou University. I think students stay in these rooms full-time during the semester, though I had a little trouble believing it. You'll note that in the full area of the room, there, there are no beds. Instead, there are a mat, a blanket, and a couple of pillows folded up in one corner. You sleep in a room like this by unfolding the mat and sleeping on it under the blanket, snugged up on the slightly less than double-sized mat with both your roommates in tow, no sheets necessary. The lack of sheets is nothing new from my experience with the bedding I received at the dorm and the hostel we stayed in the first weekend, but walking into the room and not seeing beds was a piece of culture shock. The mat was certainly as comfortable as the not-much-mattress that I sleep on every night in this room, so it really turned out fine for comfort, but it was a weird thing to walk in and have to figure out where the sleeping quarters were hidden. There's also no closet in this room, which was fine for our weekend but would be less than desirable day-to-day full time. There are a few lockers in a corner and two big bars across one wall, which you can't see too well because of my effort to get the entirely empty floor apparent. The skinny desks were maybe the least desirable part of the room. A desktop pc would never fit on those things, and they didn't look strong enough to support me if I fell asleep over homework there. Normally I might do my homework in bed, but... :)

mud festival pictures

stories when I get my internet back

real korean people

Real Korean people are actually not uncommon here. (Duh.) And I've actually got a number of Korean friends that are students in the international summer school, but friday night some friends and I went out with some new real Korean people in Seoul that are not attached to the international program, which was kind of different. Debra, Anna, Azusa (whom you haven't met yet), and I rode a bus to Seoul and met Joseph and He-won for supper. Then we walked around a little, had ice cream, walked a little more, and then they helped us find the right bus home and off we went.

This is the four girls, Azusa, me, Anna and Debra, from left to right. Azusa is Japanese, but she has lived many places. Her father is in the military, and so she lived in Japan when she was young, then moved to Bahrain for a while, then lived in Washington D.C. a little while, then somewhere in California, then back to Japan, and maybe some other places in between that I'm not remembering. She went to five different high schools, with four of them in the last two years. Her English is excellent, with so little accent that I at first thought she was an ethnic Japanese American, but no. She said that she had studied English a little bit in Japan when she was young but hated it and quit, and actually picked it up mostly while she was in Bahrain because the only school to send her there was an international school that was run in English. I am surprised that her accent is that good, starting that late; I think from the times I've met Ayumi Fukuda, if you're a reader that knows her, that Azusa's accent is much less than Ayumi's, and Ayumi came to the states at a fairly young age.

Next are Joseph and He-Won, in that order. Joseph is Debra's friend. He is the brother of a girl who is studying in Maryland and lives in an apartment downstairs from Debra's. He studied for one semester in Maryland at the same school as Debra and his sister, and now he lives and works in Seoul. He-Won is Azusa's friend, and I didn't get the story of how they met, but I'm sure she found him somewhere in her many moves; besides, she has actually visited Korea briefly before. All Korean males have to serve two years in the military, and he finished his a year or two ago, so perhaps they met through that somehow. He is currently interviewing for jobs in and around Seoul.

Joseph and He-Won picked out a good local restaurant for us for supper. They ordered for us, which was a little odd to me because I don't think I've ever let a guy order for me in my life except for Daddy, but naturally I can't order for myself any better in Korean. It wasn't weird, though, because it was a meal that gets served in the middle of the table that everyone eats from. In Korea, eating is very communal. Usually you have your own rice dish, and you get a small bowl you can use to set things in while you cut them into smaller pieces or let them cool from a hot serving dish, but you don't get a dinner plate that you put your own portion of food on and then eat from. Well, sometimes you can order an individual meal that comes on its own plate, but you always share side dishes unless you go out to eat by yourself. Anyway, everybody takes their bites straight from the serving dishes, from chopsticks to mouth and back to another dish. (Unless you are me and afraid of starving, in which case you use the big spoon that they give you for soup. I am trying valiantly to use the sticks effectively, but it's not going very well most of the time, and about twenty different people have given me instructions, and every single one has been different. I give up when I am very hungry and have already dropped a piece or two of kimchee before I could get it to my mouth. Fear not; if you ever come to Korea and need to use the spoon to get by, no one will make fun of you, and if you look obviously foreign like I do, occasional waitresses will even dig up a fork for you.) Korean meals, depending on their exact nature, are sometimes a personal plate for you and sometimes a big pot of meat and vegetable on a grill or in a skillet that you serve yourself from as described above. Then you always get a variety of small side dishes, from three to eight or ten of them depending on how fancy the place is. The side dishes include kimchee, Korean coleslaw, pickled yams, fried cucumbers, eggs cooked around pieces of fish, and a variety of other things. There are no rules about what's standard in side dishes except for the kimchee, which everyone eats with everything, including breakfast. I didn't take a picture of this meal, but I think I have an earlier one of a meal like this that I'll try to attach. This meal was pieces of pork that cooked on little grills on the table. You took a piece of pork with your chopsticks (or spoon), dipped it in pepper sauce and/or salt if you wanted, then wrapped it in a piece of lettuce with pieces of kimchee or slaw or any kind of side dish you wanted to add. Then you wrapped the lettuce up all the way and ate it with your hands. It was extra delicious, mmmmm.

The guys taught us some interesting and useful things about table manners in Korea. In Korea, you never pour your own drink (well, you're not supposed to, but if you're a dumb american among other dumb foreigners, it is easy to forget and try to take care of yourself). You pour other people's drinks for them, and then they take the water pitcher and pour for you. When you pour for someone else, you always use your right hand (left hand is very disrespectful even if you are lefthanded; kids get pressured from a very young age not to exhibit signs of lefthandedness), and if you are being very polite and formal, you use touch your left hand to your right arm, supporting it at the elbow. When someone pours for you, you also always use your right hand to hold the cup, and for extra politeness you can either support your right hand with your left or hold your cup with both hands. You never set your glass on the table for someone to pour into. You also never hold your glass in your right hand to recieve a drink while holding a half-finished lettuce wrap in your left hand, which I tried; no double-fisting. It seems like they also told us things that did not have to do with drinks, but I didn't take notes and I'm afraid I don't have any immediate tidbits for you on food etiquette. All of us girls made mistakes about at least one thing, like my lettuce-holding. Joseph and He-Won were very nice to us, telling us clearly what was wrong and what was the proper way to do it. Normally a Korean would never comment on an impolite action; they were clearly making an effort to pleasantly educate us, and it was very nice of them to tell us these things so we'll know next time.

By the way, one thing about Korea that's sort of pertinent here is that trash cans are very difficult to find in public places. There are never trashcans sitting around, and yet there is no litter. I thought perhaps Koreans just have no trash, but Dave told me last week that it's because it is rude to eat in front of other people here. You don't need a place to throw away your hamburger wrapper because you'd never get a hamburger and then walk away eating it was you went; you'd eat it right there, close to where you bought it, and throw away your trash in the same place before you left. Except it wouldn't be a hamburger, it would be a kabob of some sort or something like that. So now I know not to get doughnuts downstairs at the hospital and eat them on the way back to class, but that's a pity because I really really am enjoying the occasional doughnut here. Comfort food, you know.

And while I'm on the subject of things that are hard to find in public places, there are no paper towels in restrooms here. I've seen them in 3 or 4 places on this whole trip. They don't have electric hand dryers either. This is just a country full of people with wet hands. Also, they do not have napkins for laps. When they have napkins at all, it's little square napkins like you set your drink on in the states, and you just dab your fingertips on them.

Then we walked just a little bit around the area, went in a couple of shops. Debra and Anna bought a couple of bootlegged dvds. Seoul at night is all lit up. The area we were in was much sleeker and less busy-looking as far as the businesses went than most of urban Korea that I've seen so far, though it was packed with as many people. A lot of the cities remind me of what I saw of Hollywood some few years ago, busy and dirty. This was more like New York but clean and new, with tall walls of buildings lining the streets.

Then we went to an icecream shop, which was amazing. I'm not sure how well you will be able to tell in the picture of the place, but it was cavernous, like a big cafeteria, and it was packed. The boys sat us down to save a table and went and ordered the ice cream for us. It was lucky that they ordered, because we would have come back with single scoops in cups. What they came back with immediately was a small round buzzer like you get in restaurants at home that tells you when it's time for you to be seated. It took a while for it to go off, and when it did, they returned with three dishes of absolutely amazing stuff. It was soft serve on top of fresh fruit on top of snowcone-like flavored ice. The green dish pictured also had a type of sweet red beans in it. It would never in my life have occurred to me to put ice cream on top of beans, but it was good (believe it or not). The second picture of the dishes is after we mixed them all up to get them ready to eat, so that every spoonful had some of everything in it. He-Won said I mixed ice cream better than Azusa; congrats me. All three were different, but they were all really really good, and definitely more exotic and more fun than a single scoop in a cup. The guys said it would be their treat, so I have no idea what a dish like that costs, for those interested in prices here.

Then we shopped a little more and went home. The line for the bus went for a whole city block, but the buses coming to that stop were arriving mostly empty, so many people were able to load at once and it didn't take too awfully long to get one. We got to the head of the line just barely too late to catch one bus, but that worked out well because it meant we all got seats on the next one. We rode standing the whole way down to Seoul. They pack as many people into things as they can in Korea, with a different notion of how much personal space you actually need, so it is not uncommon to have lots of people standing for long times on public transportation. Elevators are really ridiculous for that. Claustrophobic people should perhaps beware of Asia, but actually I think they'd do better to just get over it. Probably easier said than done, but Asia is a whole different world and everyone would do well to come try it on for size. It's size small, is all.