Two weekends ago I took a bus to Geumsan, which is about 45 minutes south of Daejeon. The area around Geumsan is where most of the Korean ginseng is grown, so they were having a festival to celebrate its importance. There were hundreds of booths selling ginseng in every imaginable form including deep-fried ginseng.
They had an area set up for the kids where they had this huge inflatable head of a traditional Korean dancer. You can see the elastics coming out of his ears (similar to those used in bungee-jumping). The kids would attach them to their waists, and then see how far they could run.
Chuseok is the biggest Korean holiday. It's importance is comparable to our Thanksgiving and Christmas combined. So I ended up with a four day weekend. I would've loved to have gone somewhere, but apparently all the highways throughout the country become like parking lots as 50 million Koreans travel to their hometowns, so I decided to stay home.
It's customary for Korean employers to give Chuseok gifts to their employees. All of the grocery stores have big displays with women wearing traditional Korean clothing, trying to get you to buy overpriced boxes of crap. I even saw a gift box made up entirely of cans of Spam. I am not making that up. I forgot to check the price, but I'm sure it wasn't cheap.
Anyways, Korean pears are quite popular here, so my boss gave us each a box of pears. The box was 7.5 kg, with 10 pears in it, meaning 750g per pear. They're huge!!! They're not shaped like our pears either. They're a similar colour and the skin is similar, but they look like a really big, heavy apple. And to be perfectly honest, I don't understand all the fuss. Their peaches are WAY better. So I've still got 8 ridiculously gigantic pears that I'll probably never be able to finish.
I've lived here in Korea for about 5 months now, and I've looked at this shelter on the top of Gubong Mountain many times from the top of my roof. However, because of the humidity, I was waiting to go to the top. I finally decided that because the humidity has slowly started becoming less oppressive, it was time for me to go up. Although they call it a mountain, in my mind it's a hill. It's only 264 metres and I jogged/hiked to the top in about 50 minutes from my apartment.
I've seen a lot of English used in advertising in Asia, so it doesn't really surprise me anymore. However, usually it's words like "love", "happy" or "super" - English words that most of the locals understand.
But "ubiquitous"? I happen to like the word, but how many Canadians even know what it means, let alone Koreans?
Two weekends ago I took a bus to Geumsan, which is about 45 minutes south of Daejeon. The area around Geumsan is where most of the Korean ginseng is grown, so they were having a festival to celebrate its importance. There were hundreds of booths selling ginseng in every imaginable form including deep-fried ginseng.
