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?
Here's the cover of another English diary. And below is another diary entry that cracked me up (from a different diary, unedited, the subject was "Summer"):
And summer's foods are nice too.
Chicken soup, dog soup and ice cream..!!
Many Koreans eat a dog soup.
but I can't eat a dog soup.
Because I think those dogs is so poor...
On a completely unrelated note, I was in a department store yesterday and went into the bathroom. As soon as I walked in I could smell cigarette smoke. Most bathrooms have No Smoking signs, but for some bizarre reason Korean men love sitting on toilets in foul-smelling bathrooms and smoking (although to be fair to Korean men, Japanese men do it frequently also).
With public bathrooms, my goal is to get in and get out as quickly as possible, but I guess we're all different. Anyways, as I was using a urinal, one of the stall doors opened behind me and a boy of about 13 or 14 came out. He looked way too young to be smoking, but then another boy came out of the same stall, then another and another. There were four of them crammed into that stall (I have no idea how they fit). I guess it's one place where they can try smoking without anyone seeing them. I wanted to smack them in the head to smarten them up, but I figured a foreigner assaulting a bunch of Korean kids probably wouldn't be viewed too well by the cops.
Some workers came in yesterday and tore down the garden in the lot beside my apartment. Then an excavator came in this morning and started scraping the earth. After it finished, these people (I don't know any of them, but I assume the owners and their friends) came and prepared some kind of feast.You can see on the white table a pig's head and what looks like some kind of fish. I assume they are part of some Korean tradition meant to be lucky, but to me it just makes me think of Lord of the Flies. If anarchy breaks out, I'll let you know.I went out a little later in the day to get some groceries, and only a few of the workers were remaining when I got back. One of the guys kept trying to give me some of their leftover food that had been sitting out in 30 degree heat for a few hours (mmmmm, food poisoning from tainted pig's head). I declined, and he seemed puzzled why I wouldn't want it.
I had a few hours before catching the ferry back to the mainland so I decided to go for a hike to the Lighthouse on the south coast of the island. It was nice because I had the whole trail to myself.
The lighthouse was actually a pretty big complex. There was housing for probably 15 to 20 people. They can't need that many people just to have a light go around in a circle, so I assume they've got some kind of research station there.
On the trail I saw the biggest spider I've ever seen, on a web that I almost walked into. Its body was huge, almost as big as a tarantula, however none of the pictures turned out.
I just had my 3 day summer vacation, which combined with the weekend gave me a 5 day break. I decided to head down to Yeosu, on the south coast, and took a ferry from there to Geomun Island. The ferry was supposed to be around 2 hours, but we made about 4 stops on other islands, so it ended up taking about 3 hours and 40 minutes. I was somewhat concerned about getting seasick, as I spent a 1 hour trip to Koh Tao in Thailand in January puking my guts out, but I felt fine most of the time. I saw many of the South Koreans were wearing a patch that looked like a bandaid behind their ears. I don't know if they're effective or just a scam, but I'm going to look into them anyways for my next trip.The first picture is of the main harbour area, taken from across the bridge. The town is quite small, and I think there's probably no more than 1,000 people living on the island, so most of the people work in either fishing or tourism.As I arrived at the island around 5:30 in the afternoon and didn't have a reservation, my first job was to find a hotel. My Korean is still really low, and English is not used very often (I was the only foreigner on the island at that time), so there was a bit of a communication barrier, but I ended up finding a hotel for $40 for the night. I wanted the room for 2 nights, but he told me in English, "Tomorrow, bye bye," and with a bit more awkward communication I discovered that I could only stay for 1 night, as he was fully booked for the next night. Below is a picture of the room, including the bedding, and yeah, it was as comfortable as it looks. I spent the night having to shift positions every 10 minutes to ease the pain.
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.
