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.