Raw fish and Stone Pagodas

I had one of the best weekends I've had yet in Korea. For some reason this weekend every experience I had was a new one and I saw a lot of new things. I ate raw fish this weekend, hiked a beautiful trail with some great people, saw Korean belly dancers, and walked through the fish market in Masan. I'm going to divide up my posts, since I have a lot to cover. I'll start with the raw fish and the stone pagodas today. And bring you the Korean belly dancers and the fish market tomorrow.

It all started Friday after work. I thought I was going to have an ordinary Friday night, doing dinner and then drinks at our favorite foreign bar, O'Briens. Instead, shortly after I got home Nolan called me and asked me if I wanted to hang out with Mr. Song. Mr. Song is Nolan's co-teacher.Don't let the goofy face fool you. He's super cool. Mr. Song treated us to dinner at this seafood place. I had my first taste of all sorts of raw fish here, and live octopus.

That's the octopus tentacles sitting on that platter in the middle. You can't see it in this picture but the tentacles were moving. It was hard to stomach at first. Really, I was just scared that once I popped one into my mouth it would stay sucked on to the inside of my mouth. Every time I went to pick one up with my chopsticks it would scuttle away. Once I tried the other fish, I made my way back to the octopus. This time I was determined to eat one. You're supposed to dunk each one in some soy sauce, wasabi, or the other red paste we had. I managed to pick up a squirmy piece and popped it into a my mouth. I chewed really fast, because I didn't want to feel it moving around inside my mouth. In all honesty, I have to say it wasn't bad at all. I'm pretty content eating seafood, even when it's raw. This was just a whole new level of raw. It was pretty chewy and a little slippery. All I want to say is, don't knock it 'till you've tried it.
This was our entire table. Covered with all sorts of sea creatures. This was a really big dinner. Before all the food that you see on this table, the waitress brought out a whole other batch of starters like kimbap, sweet potatoes, and pajeon (my favorite).
This is just another picture of one of the many types of raw fish on our table. I really had fun at dinner with Mr. Song. He was the perfect person to take to this restaurant. He explained what each thing was, and how to eat the dishes properly. We wouldn't even know what to order had we gone by ourselves.

Saturday, I was out the door by 12:30 to meet with Ryan, Zoe, and Nolan. Our destination was Paryongsan. It's the site of 883 free standing stone pagodas. One man has spent the past thirteen years building these pagodas. His goal is to build 1,000 pagodas in total. The pagodas were built as a symbol of reunification of families that have been split up between North Korea and South Korea.
We hiked up the mountain and started seeing smatterings of pagodas here and there. The higher we trekked the more we saw. It's amazing that they are just freestanding, and we were all thinking about how neat it is that no one has come and knocked them all over.Zoe and I are just standing in awe of what's right before us.The site was amazing to see in person. Especially when you think about all the effort one man has put forth to make these pagodas.

This last picture was taken by a nice Korean woman who was hiking along the trail. I had the most amazing time with these three people. And the good news was the day wasn't even over yet.

That's Nolan, me, Ryan, and Zoe. Stopping to document this hike. Once we went passed all the pagodas, we reached this quiet rest area. We sat there for a long time talking about the comforts of home, the food we missed, and how freaking amazing this place with all these pagodas was.


The fish market and belly dancers will follow shortly.

My stab at Nangmyeong

I've been exploring my Korean culinary side by experimenting with different dishes I start to fall in love with, from eating out at various places. My first stab at Korean cuisine was through making Pajeon. Pajeon is simply Korean pancakes filled with spring onions and other seafood. It's fried up in a lot of oil and makes for a pretty delicious snack. When I started making Pajeon my batter would always turn out real watery and I couldn't fry it in enough oil. This made for a pretty gluey pajeon. Although, it was still edible, it still wasn't real pajeon. After many trial and error runs I've finally figured out the right consistency for the batter and the right amount of oil to fry it in.

I made tteok-boki as well. But, I'm not counting that, because it's ridiculously simple to make. Tteok in Korean is rice cakes. So all you do is heat up the rice cakes in a pan and add the spicy sauce and cook it for 3 minutes. It's another one of the favorites here. It's good 2 AM-on-a-weekend food when you want something to soak up the alcohol.

Okay, so my next big dish that I tried to make yesterday was Bibim Nangmyeong. I found all the ingredients at the local grocer. Nangmyeong is comprised of Buckwheat noodles, a tons of vegetables (mostly cucumbers), and kuchu-jang (another one of those really spicy sauces) . It's a fairly simple dish and you don't really have to cook anything aside from the noodles. You'd think that I could handle that. Well the noodles are supposed to be be very chewy and I wasn't sure how long to cook them for in the water. I ended up leaving in the first batch of noodles a wee bit too long. I thought I could salvage the noodles after draining them out, but too bad I didn't have a colander. It just turned into a disgusting goop of gelatinous buckwheat sitting in my pot. Nolan suggested after it congealed together we could probably slice it up and make it into our own version of Nangmyeong pie. But I wanted real Nangmyeong.

After pouring the mush of buckwheat noodles into a plastic bag, we ran over to Top Mart to buy a colander. My second attempt ended up being pretty successful. I forgot to take a picture of the final product. But I hope you can take my word for it, that it turned out pretty good and there were no left-overs.

A dangerous game of baseball

The roads in Korea are scary as they are, whether you are on a bus or in a cab you're likely to be jostled around in your seat because of the bumpy ride. How about adding a TV in the car into the equation? A lot of cab drivers have little flat-screens installed in their car, right up front in fact, so they don't miss a moment of the action. I was on my way to the center of town, and catching a cab seemed quicker than waiting for a bus. So I got in this one and the driver had on the baseball game between Korea and Cuba. The two countries were fighting it out for the gold.

My cab driver seemed distressed. Cuba had hit a home run and this upset the driver. I told him it would be okay, and that Korea would pull through. I'm sure he didn't understand a word coming out of my mouth, but he probably understood from the tone of my voice that I still had hope.

That cab ride was the scariest cab ride I've had yet. The driver definitely seemed to be more concerned about the game than the road in front of him. His head would shift from looking straight ahead to looking at the flat-screen on his dashboard to check if anyone had gotten out. I was happy to reach my destination safely. I think before leaving the cab I told him "Go Korea!" or something. I wish I could have spent a longer time in that cab. Although, instead of moving I would have preferred just being stopped at the red light or heavy traffic for an hour and watching the game with the nice cab driver. Korea ended up winning and getting the gold. It made me pretty happy.

I've had a pretty lazy weekend. I went on my first real shopping expedition yesterday. I went to an underground mall named, Daehyun. The mall is in Hapsungdong, which is this busy part of Masan. I did some good bargaining at some stores and scored a few deals. I like shopping here since it's more of a challenge because of the language barrier. When you do find something you like and something that fits properly, it feels much sweeter.

This is part of the underground mall. It's stretches out for a while.

This is one of the entrances to the mall from above ground.

Sunday night was spent shopping for some groceries the the local grocery store here called Top Mart. Koreans pronounce it TAAP-MATEUH. I like saying taap-mateuh as well now. It just sounds cool. Anyways, I got a few Korean ingredients that I'm going to try and make some Korean dishes with. I came across this package in the seafood section. There are a lot of odd creatures in that section. I'm guessing this is just dried squid.
Yummy.

Jim Jil Bang

I took another trip to Busan over the weekend with some good friends. The trip consisted of everything we usually do in Busan, except this time add in the Jim-Jil-Bang (Korean Bath House). We arrived fairly early on Friday. Nolan and I discovered a new Indian restaurant near Sasang station, which is the place the bus drops you off in Busan. After finishing our lunch/dinner we went back to Sasang station to meetup with our friends Shawn and Stephanie. We had to take the train to Haeundae Station so we could get to the beach. It was a long ride to the beach. I'd say about an hour.
This is one of the ads in the train station. It reads, Small Face/Lovely Breast. Despite all the American friends I was with, this is was just another marker of the fact that I was still in Korea. Once we met up with everyone else that was already by the beach, we purchased our beers from the nearest convenient store and claimed our places on the boardwalk and hung out for awhile.

We realized we should get ourselves over to the JimJil Bang and make sure we have a place to stay for the night. Jim Jil Bangs are public Korean bathhouses. It's about the cheapest place you can stay other than spending night away on the beach and hopping on a bus the next morning. The Jim Jil Bang gives you pajamas that you dawn on for the duration of your stay at the spa. They have showers, baths, and saunas -- I saw lots of naked Korean women that night, who just walked around without a care in the world. At first, it was a little weird, but after awhile you just see so many naked bodies you get used to it.

Anyways, to take a step back our first try at reserving a spot for all of us at the JimJil Bang failed. We wanted to pay and then leave so we could go downtown and visit the bars. But the lady at the front desk said once we paid we could never leave. NEVER. So we got our money back and said we'd be back around 2am.

We went to Gwangali, the other beach in Busan. It was 11pm and we decided it was time for dinner. One of our Korean friends, Jeong Ah met up with us luckily. It was a good thing for us because she helped us navigate through the streets, and helped us order our food. And overall, she's just a fun Korean to hang out with. We stayed out pretty late.

This is a girl on a weird looking skateboard that we spotted. The skate board is kind of split so one half kind of tilts when you put more weight on it. I guess it's not captured here in this picture. This girl was awesome. She was playing her little game and skate boarding back and forth on the streets.By the end of the night, it was Nolan, Shawn, Malcolm and I that were ready to go back the JimJil Bang. We were afraid that they wouldn't have room for us, but we lucked out. The place was still packed. There are no beds at the JimJil Bang. You sleep on the floor. Shawn, Nolan, and I stepped our way through everyone sprawled out on the floor, and found a spot where the three of us could sleep for the night. We laid out our thin mats and conked right out.

The next morning we woke up to this.
This was the view from the floor we were staying out. There was a huge window overlooking the sea. There was also a balcony on our floor. We went out there and enjoyed the scene from the balcony as well.

This is Gwangali from the balcony.

This next set of pictures are of just two girls I was observing that morning. They were absolutely adorable in their bright yellow pajamas. They were running around with the block pillow the bathhouse provides, and building towers and trails with the pillows. The girl on the left started crying and the other girl was trying to console her.


Eventually the girl on the right side of the picture built her friend this fort, so she could sleep soundly.

Lost Keys and Chocolate Pebbles

I lost my keys the other night after a drunken night out. For a while I thought the longer I keep digging the faster they would magically appear. But digging deeper did not produce any keys. So I gave up for the night and the next morning I was knocking on Ajumma's door on the fifth floor hoping after a game of charades my lost key problem could be resolved. Luckily, the charades weren't even required in this situation. Ajumma's teenage daughter answered the door. She knows a bit of English so I explained to her that I lost my keys and she handed me this.

Yes, you are looking at the keys to everyone's apartment in my building. She just handed it to me and said bring it back after making a copy of my own. I still don't understand why she didn't just take off my keys and hand me those. Instead her trust in me ran so deep that she decided to hand over everyone's keys in the building. I found a locksmith pretty quickly and got a copy of my keys made. It was rather cheap and I was amazed at how quickly my problem was solved. So next time your in a foreign country and you lose your keys, try not to sweat it. It'll all work out.

Next I'd like to introduce you to chocolate pebbles. Nolan (aka the boyfriend) felt bad after telling me to get on the wrong bus which he thought would bring me to the center of town. One of our main meeting places. While I caught a cab back in the right direction, he was in E-mart and stumbled upon a package of Korean trail mix that contained chocolate pebbles.
I first discovered these delicious morsels of goodness when I went to go smoke hookah with some friends. One of the snacks they give you is chocolate pebbles. Sudeshna and I devoured these pebbles and realized they were our drug of choice in Korea. They have a hard, yet thin and sleek outer coating. And of course, the middle has all the chocolatey goodness. NO they are not like M&M's. I don't think they are like any bite size chocolatey treats found in the states.

Nolan stumbled upon this bag that had a few pebbles in it. He scavenged the pebbles from the trail mix package and created a little container from the E-mart receipt. When I arrived at E-mart there was a makeshift mini container filled with chocolate pebbles waiting for me.

Haeinsa

I got a knock on my door 8:30 in the morning last Saturday. I was skyping with the parentals and had no clue who on earth would come visit me eight in the morning on a weekend. I opened my door and it was my sweet land lady. I could not have asked for a better land lady. She's like my mom away from home. My land lady who I call Ajumma handed me a piece of paper that had the history of Haeinsa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haeinsa) on it.

At first when she whipped out her phone I thought she wanted my number. But then she started dialing numbers and I quickly figured out she's trying to get someone that speaks English on the phone so that she will be able to communicate with me. By this time I had also figured out that she wanted me to go to Haeinsa with her and her family. She got her little nephew on the phone and he told me they we're planning to go sometime over the weekend. But I had already planned a trip to Busan with my friends. We did a lot of back and forthing with the phone and her nephew told me she wanted to take me so since I can't go this weekend she'll take me next weekend! So this past Saturday I spent an entire day with Ajumma and her family.

It took two hours to get to Haeinsa , which is famous for housing the Tripitaka Koreana, the Buddhist Scriptures. The scriptures are carved into wooden printing blocks. Haeinsa has these wooden storage units called, Janggyeong Panjeon. More than 80,000 of the wooden blocks are stored in the units.

The Temple is on top Gaya Mountain. There was a lot of walking up hill and walking up a lot of steep steps. This is Ajumma looking up at another set of steps we had to take as we got closer to the main temple.

This is what we found after climbing the set of stairs in the previous picture. A courtyard full of storage units and little temples .

If you look closely enough, or enlarge this next picture you can see the golden Buddha through the doorway. I got to go inside the main temple, where you're not allowed to take pictures. Stepping inside was really calming. I don't know whether it was because everyone there just seemed so relaxed, bowing to the statue of Buddha repeatedly as they were offering up their prayers, or whether it was just the fact I was inside this really pretty temple with a statue of a large golden Buddha right in front of me -- but there was definitely a different feeling in the air. I remember when I went to go visit the the Hindu temple back in Lilburn I had similar feelings towards it. I like to think visual and auditory stimulants from my envirnoment affect me a greater deal than most other people -- but that's just me. Regardless I think it's something everyone should get a chance to see and experience.

This picture is part of the roof of the temple. Everything surrounding the temple was real ornate and colorful

After finishing our temple tour we ate lunch at a local restaurant that sits on top of a hill and overlooks the city. I kept thinking after our lunch was over that the trip would also be over. But since, I don't speak Korean, and Ajumma doesn't speak any English the trip started to become a guessing game of what we were doing next. After lunch we went to the near by river and found ourselves a few huge boulders by the water to sit on. We played in the water trying to catch little fish in the little cups we had and then we just ate our fruit and admired the river. It started raining so our time with the river was cut short.

But, our day would still continue with other activities. We visited this pottery shop where we all got to make our own cups and vases using clay. Rolling out the clay was tough but working with it was a lot of fun. I ended up making this -

I'm not sure what it is exactly, but I was proud of it. I love making stuff and I'm even happier when they turn out semi decent. This is one of Ajumma's nieces making a bowl with her block of clay.

This was another one of those all day exhausting trips I seem to be taking every other weekend here. I'm sure more trips are on there way.

Weekend in Busan

I don't think you can ask much else from life when you've got friends, good food, some alcohol and the waves crashing. That's exactly what I got this weekend and aboslutely loved it. Over the weekend I visited Busan for the first time. I went with 5 of my friends and had an amazing time. Busan is about a 40 minute bus ride from Changwon, which makes me happy because I definitely want to go there often while the hot summer weather lingers on for a few more weeks. Haeundae (hey-uhn-day) beach is the famous beach in Busan, and packed with people. It was insane seeing a sea of yellow and blue umbrellas across the sandy beach as people tried to block out the sun.
We arrived in Busan after a long and uncomfortable bus ride. Once we formed our plan of checking into our hostels and meeting up again for dinner, the boys, Nolan and Paul, went their seperate ways, and the girls Lindsay, Zoe, Sudeshna and I caught a cab to our hostel. We had a pleasant time in the cab. Our cab driver put on some mixed tape he had of corny English music. We got to listen to a little Micheal Jackson. I think the driver was having a good time. I definitely saw him bob his head to the music a couple of times.


In order to get to the hostel you have to go down a set of steps from a bridge on the main road. This is the view looking down from the steps.


And this is the view from our room on the 13th floor

To my left is Sudeshna. She is Bengali. We do our our fair share of communicating in Bangla. Two Bengali girls in the same town is a lot for people to handle. We're a pretty sweet duo. And we were about as happy as can be because we were about to go get some Indian food (a rarity in Korea, as you can imagine) and go chill out on the beach after wards.

After checking in we headed towards to subway where the boys were going to meet us so we could all head to the Haeundae station together. We had a few mishaps on the subway, almost going the wrong direction, missing one of our stops to switch trains, getting the ticket machine to accept our wons so we could get our tickets! We eventually made it back to the main strip of road near the beach and headed to the restaurant. The food was okay. The naan could have been fluffier, and the curries could have been spicier, but getting Indian food in Korea was a gift in it of itself.
Okay so I swear its not pizza were eating, but naan which was pretty delicious even though I still think it should have been fluffier! After our ethnic outing we went to the store got ourselves some soju, and KGB beers and made our way to the sand. Even at night the beach is packed with people. It just doesn't look as bad because everyone is not hiding under their huge yellow and blue umbrellas to avoid the sun.
That's Lindsay, Paul and Nolan enjoying their alcohol as they were watching the waves crash. We chilled on the beach and it was amazing. I had the beach, my friends, my food, my alcohol, and I was completely satisfied. We decided to leave the beach around 12 and head over to another part of town to go to this club called the Vinyl Underground. We saw some pretty crazy dancing going on. It was pretty empty in there when we first arrived, but people started trickling in and some of our other friends showed up so it made for a pretty good time.

I don't remember what time it was by the time we got a cab to go back to our hostels but needless to say I was exhausted. Oddly enough, I woke up the next morning at 8 and started chatting with one of the other girls staying in one of the rooms in the apartment we had. Aside from just being in Korea, this is probably my other favorite part about this entire year in Korea. Meeting complete random strangers that I will probably never see again and just chatting about the adventures we've had so far in this country.

Sudeshna and Lindsay left at this point so it was just Zoe and I left to our own devices. We got on the train to meet back up with Nolan and Paul. When we finally reached Haeundae beach again, we decided we needed some food. So we found some restaurant and ordered what they called a potato soup. There were only a couple of potatoes in the soup, but it was mostly ribs and other leafy vegetables. I think the two ladies that were running the place enjoyed having us there. When the soup was done one of them came over and served each of us and then she came next to me and started shredding my meat for me, and before I knew it she ended up feeding me like a little kid. Everyone started laughing. But she did not just stop at feeding me. She made her rounds with each of us at that table.It was Paul's turn to be fed.This is the sweet lady. She was adorable. We started referring to her as our Korean mom. I have every intention of going back to Busan and finding her again. We left there with full stomachs and started strolling towards the beach. During the day it was packed from shoulder to shoulder. The weather was pretty nice outside. If it was a smidgen hotter, I think it would have been better. Zoe and Nolan were brave enough to go pretty far out into the water. I was being a wimp because it was freezing cold.

And finally, I'd like to leave you with this. It's a sign we saw on our way to the subway station. I'm not sure what the place is, but you can judge for yourself.

My Clever Kids!

I've been teaching an English summer camp for the past week. Yesterday, I made my 5th and 6th graders do an exercise where I had them pretend that they were going shopping. They had to greet the salesperson and ask for an item they wanted to purchase. Most of the boys wanted nintendos. One of the boys in my class forgot how to say one hundred thousand won -- so when asked by the customer how much the nintendo was, he blurted out it was FREE! Everyone burst out laughing. I have to say some of my kids are pretty clever, but they're so shy and don't realize it.

The girl on the right side, who's name I do not know, because I call her Harvard girl, is my brightest student. She's extremely smart and wants to move to Boston so she can go to Harvard.

I have a set of 5th and 6th graders in the mornings and a set of 3rd graders in the afternoons. The 3rd graders are . . . well like any 3rd grade children, no matter what country they live in. They have short attention spans, they're extremely energetic, and it's hard to discipline them because they're so cute. But, luckily that's what I have a co-teacher for, she gets to be the bad cop.

My 5th and 6th graders on the other hand are extremely curious, they love asking me questions about America, and they like to have fun. A lot of our communication occurs through drawing pictures and then figuring out the Korean and English words for what we are trying to say to each other, and there is always a lot of hand gesturing going on -- yes the charades are quite helpful.
I love this duo. They sit right up front. The boy on the right reminds of of a little cute Asian Harry Potter. They always partner up with each other and they're always doing there best to help me out in the classroom, but don't let their cute faces fool you. They can be extremely mischevious.

I gave out my e-mail address to my older students and told them they should write to me -- I thought it would be good practice for them and it's a good way to get to know them and some of their names. Which is still nearly impossible for me. They all have generic English names, like Julie, Samantha, Joey, Jack so on and so forth. But I really want to learn they're real Korean names -- at least the names of some of the kids who have quickly become my favorites. I'd feel like it was a cop out if I didn't.

I wanted to share some of the e-mails with you because they're funny to read. Below are two of my favoirte e-mails I've received so far.

정혁진 <*********@hanmail.net> Jul 31 (14 hours ago)
to ********@gmail.com
date Jul 31, 2008 5:57 PM

subject : Trishna~~~~

Hello Trishna My name is Felix ^^Do you memorise me?
____________________________________________________________

from ☆레니☆ <********@naver.com>
hide details
9:11 pm (11 hours ago)
reply-to

☆레니☆ <********@naver.com>

to ********@gmail.com

date
Jul 31, 2008 9:11 PM

subject : teacher

teacher hi
my name is sim min joo
i am teacher's student.
english letter is fun.
you are english is good.
expressions dictionnary find is write.
may i be honest with you?
teaher is very very very very beautiful.
and you have beautiful eyes.
well, see you later. good bye.
p.s answer please★answer easy

So remember, next time you are replying to an e-mail, answer easy!