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.