making kimchi

Late fall is kimchi season, and all I hear about from my students is how tired they are because their family made kimchi over the weekend. Since my culinary preferences have become fairly Korean, I've been intrigued by this sudden burst of kimchi stories.

Everybody is having kimchi parties! All the aunts, uncles, and cousins make a trip to grandma's house and make mass quantities of kimchi to last all of them for most of the upcoming year. I imagine mountains of kimchi from the way the students talk about it -- they have 15 family members helping, use 100-200 cabbages, complain of sore shoulders and backs for several days after.

I found out that not many people actually know how to make kimchi now -- grandma knows, but often not mothers, and rarely the daughters. I couldn't believe this, because the food is just short of a cultural obsession here. Realizing this made me want to learn how to make it more than ever, since it's sort of a dying art. Most kimchi is made in China and imported -- ironic, huh?

Then a student in one of the other classes that I've become friends with told me her family (just her mom, dad, and sister) would be making kimchi this weekend, and invited me along. Whooo! I was so excited: where and when would I ever learn to make kimchi again? And when would I get a chance to make such a colossal amount of anything?

So this afternoon I went to her family's apartment to see what this kimchi season is really all about. Her family was really funny and nice and since Ellie (the student) speaks English well and I've been learning more Korean lately, the language barrier wasn't even an issue. Really, I was in heaven.

As you can see, there's quite a bit of hot red pepper sauce and vegetables here...I was shocked by the size of these buckets! And I really didn't expect that much red pepper sauce -- where does it all come from?

It's made from crushed dried chili peppers, water, garlic, salt, sugar, boiled anchovies, miniature pickled shrimp, and I think some other stuff, but I don't remember it all.

To the red pepper sauce they added sliced radishes and some sort of leafy green (they didn't know the English name for it and I didn't recognize it) before putting it on the cabbage. While Mr. Oh (the dad) was mixing this sauce he was sweating a ton -- it was pretty thick and there was obviously a lot of it.

The cabbages in the buckets had been salted, rinsed, and wrung the day before. There were 50 in all -- you know, 4 people don't need too much kimchi.

Each cabbage had been cut into fourths. We took a fourth, put red pepper sauce between each leaf, bundled it up with the longest outer leaf, and packed it into the plastic bins you see stacked around. It wasn't that difficult, but the pile of cabbage just never ended. There was always another cabbage.


After I put in my quota of one large tub, they let me fill a little tub to bring home with me -- although this is actually a ton of kimchi. Good thing I like it.

The final product. They have two kimchi refrigerators, where they will keep all of this during the upcoming months.

So now my cultural identity is becoming blurred, as I look proudly the little bin of kimchi I made and anticipate all the kimchi jjigae I can make for many months to come. I told them I would be sure to make kimchi with my family when I go back to the States.

traditional wedding

I know I haven't updated this for ages, so I'm not sure if anybody's still reading it....

I went to a traditional Korean wedding with my boyfriend about a month ago but forgot to post the pictures. Since western-style weddings have taken over here, most Koreans have never even been to a traditional wedding, and there was someone explaining the significance of each part as they went along. It was interesting -- having a translator helped.

A lot of the ceremony was funny, because the customs have become obsolete. For example, the bride's father stood at the altar and asked the groom "Where are you from and why are you here?" before he (the groom) was allowed to come down the aisle.

The bride was carried to the aisle in a tiny and very decorative wooden box. Before she came down the aisle, she was supposed to be hesitant to show that she was modest and shy of the groom.

Later in the ceremony the groom was given two enormous chopsticks and a huge piece of tofu. He had to find a way pick up the tofu with the chopsticks to demonstrate his cleverness. It was really funny to watch, but eventually he abandoned the chopsticks and grabbed the tofu with his hand.

The altar was decorated with food and two live chickens, which used to be part of the bride's dowry (although that's not what they call it...I can't remember the Korean word). The chickens were tied up in baskets and surprisingly calm -- they didn't make a sound! At the end of the ceremony they untied the chickens and threw them up into the air.

Everybody was in hanbot, which is traditional Korean clothing. As you can see, it was beautiful, and made me wonder why anybody here would want a western-style wedding....

Anyway, here are the pictures:

The altar.

Bride and groom (my boyfriend and the bride went to college together).

Part of the ceremony, but I don't know what he was doing. The main point is his Nikes.

Getting ready to toss the chickens.

The groom carrying the bride on his back after the ceremony. See the chickens? One on either side of them.

view from the roof

Here are two shots from the roof of my apartment building. I'm not sure if these pictures really capture it, but the view really is good. Also, it was cool because the air is always so hot, still and sticky down on the sidewalks, but up on the roof the wind was very strong, yet still warm. I loved it!

Daecheong Dam

I decided to bite the bullet and upload pictures from my camera.

Here are some shots from a ride I went on to Daecheong Dam just north of Daejeon. It took me a while to find the road that went above the dam, but I'm glad I persevered, because it was well worth it.



Wow, yes, I need to go back there. It's beautiful!

update

I haven't written on here very much lately, because nothing exciting has been happening. I go on day trips on my scooter sometimes, but usually forget my camera. But to be honest, after 7 months much of the novelty of living here has worn off and not a lot is interesting or new anymore. That said, I'll try to continue to look at each day with fresh eyes and find things to write about.


Anyway, here is the update for those of you who want to know since some things have changed. I quit my job and will start a new one in October, which means I'll be here until October 2008 now. Hard to believe, but I've already been here for seven months, so apparently time does pass.

My new job sounds like it will be really awesome. I'll be working at an academy for adults, so I promised my boss I wouldn't try to bribe any of the students with stickers. One of the downfalls of teaching adults is that I have to work a split schedule, which means I will teach in the morning and evenings, but not during the daytime. At first I was hesitant to consider the job for that reason, but then realized the main issue with my previous job was lack of freetime during the day, so I signed.

One of the perks of this school is that they get requests to temporarily contract their teachers out to teach at companies. My boss called me this morning asking me if I would be interested in such an opportunity when I start in October. I agreed to it, so 3 mornings a week I will go to a vaccine research clinic and teach English to doctors that work there rather than teach regular classes at school. We'll see how it goes, but it sounds interesting and is considered a sort of bonus since it's good to put on a resume.


In addition to the better job, my new apartment is sweet! It's in a very central location, and much nicer than anything I would hope to live in at home: 11th floor, good view, a loft, counter space (which I didn't have before), a SHOWER STALL and even a DRYER, both of which are basically unheard-of among teachers. I mean this place is sweet. I even have roof-access and this is one of the tallest buildings in the city so the view is awesome from up there. And all this included with my contract!

I haven't had to work at all of September, because my previous job replaced me a month early, which was unexpected. I only had a week's notice to move out of my apartment and find a new job. It took me about a week to recover from the stress of suddenly being homeless and unemployed in a foreign country. Once I got everything sorted out I wanted to travel, but couldn't afford it since I'm out a paycheck this month. It's been nice having a break, but I'll be happy to start working again.


Tomorrow, I am meeting Mom, Dad, U Tom and Madeline at the airport. They'll be here for about a week, which will be awesome. I'm a little worried about the food, since it's common to find octopus tentacles in many dishes, and everything is very spicy -- not to mention the chopsticks, which are metal (heavy and slippery). Well, I guess we'll see how they do.

So that's generally the update. Again, I'll try to work on posting more pictures, etc. (All the pictures in this post are unrelated to anything I talked about -- for example, I don't live in one of those apartments.)

Bathhouse

One nice thing about Korea is that you don't have to make hotel reservations anywhere, because you can stay in one of the ubiquitous jjimjilbang instead. They're open 24 hours, you just drop in whichever one is closest, and they're cheap, too.

A jjimjilbang is a public bathhouse, which some of you may not have experienced before, so I'll walk you through it:

First you go to the women's sauna, where you get nakie in front of everybody, shower, sit in hot tubs (or cold tubs), or the sauna or whatever -- for as long as you want. Then you put on the little pj uniform they give you (pink for girls, greyish blue for boys) and go to the common room, which has a marble floor and bright overhead lights, a snack counter, a kimbop shop, video game room, manicure counter (closed), etc. Great sleeping environment, right?

After reading for about an hour and a half and eating a bowl of ramen, you try unsuccessfully to sleep on the marble floor with a little softish block for a pillow like everybody else is doing. Then, since you're smart, you venture to explore the stairways which (yes!) lead to dark sleeping rooms. But since you're not entirely smart, you find the MEN's sleeping room but don't think much of it, cus it's labeled "cinema", not "men's", and you lay down and try to sleep.

Then one of the workers comes in and tells you you have to leave, so you muster up a few Korean words so he'll show you the women's room. THEN, you're really excited because not only are there little sleeping pads there, there are also blankets!! woohoo! So you lay awake for the next three hours because it's too hot in there to sleep, and finally wake up the next morning resolved to go home and take a nap.

inspiration

Most of the notebooks here have some sort of cheesy inspirational message on the front of them. These two are unique in that they actually are cool and they're grammatically correct:

How to enjoy your life:
Do something new for a change
Don't forget you're special

While the circumstances of life are
such that everyone must undergo
a certain amount of temporary defeat,
you can find hope in the knowledge
that every such defeat carries with it the seed of an equivalent benefit.

tried and true

In general, it's easy to discipline my younger classes, because they all have sticker charts they want to fill. They can get a maximum of three stickers a day, but I take stickers away if they're not behaving well or speaking Korean. Kids who lose all their stickers two days in a row shape up pretty fast.

But I run into a lot of trouble with the classes who are too old to care about stickers, so I'm constantly trying to come up with good ways to discipline them. I recently tried having them write sentences, and it worked really well -- especially when I told them I would send the papers home with their evaluations at the end of the month. I get a total kick out of it, so the trick is to not laugh while they're writing.

Jeju-do: Day 1

After 5 months of teaching, I finally got my summer vacation. I would actually call it a long weekend (we only got three days off of work), but we were all very grateful for the break. My coworker, Jaime, and I went to Jeju-do, the island off the southwest coast of Korea. It's a pretty small island, so we rented scooters once we got there and cruised around the whole time. Thursday evening we took a train from Daejeon to Mokpo, and then took a boat to Jeju the next morning.
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Some very fancy street lights in Mokpo.
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Mokpo city lights.
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A bell at the top of a little "mountain" -- they call everything a mountain here, but seeing as how we reached the top in about 5 minutes, I'd say that's a pretty piddly mountain. The sky really was that red, though.
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One very common sight in Korea (as you will see), is people sleeping on benches. Foreigners here stand out very well, so Jaime and I thought it best to try to blend in, which quickly became the theme for our trip. Jaime blending in with two men who came to hang out at the little park. They were pretty cool; the one dancing spoke English, but I liked that they weren't really phased by seeing us there and didn't try to talk to us the whole time.

Day 2

Waiting to board the ferry, and these pictures aren't even posed. One of the workers at the terminal actually had to wake us up to board. But as you can see, we weren't the only ones sleeping on benches that day.
(Jaime)

This is the room we were assigned to for the entire 5-hour boat ride. Of course we could get up and walk around the boat, but this is how almost everyone on the boat was stowed. Jaime and I felt like we'd really found our people on this ferry -- nobody thought twice about sleeping wherever they found a good place.


Once we got to the island, we rented scooters and the couple we rented them from gave us all this awesome gear. Remember, it's all about blending in.
A good shot on our ride to the southern end of the island.

Day 3

Saturday morning we headed east to check out some sights listed in my travel guide.
. Sanbangsan, a mountain with a cave halfway up that was turned into a temple (Sanbanggulsa). The temple is as far as you can climb, because the mountain is considered too sacred for anyone to climb to the top.
. A view from the mountain.
. A fountain in the temple, which is filled by constant drips from the ceiling of the cave. The water is said to be medicinal so I drank some (three cup fulls, like the monk said). However, now I have a cough.
. Part of the southwest coastline.
. Across the street from the Sanbangsan was the Yongmeori coastline. It was a pretty small area, but the cliffs were beautiful. It was one of my favorite parts of the trip.

A shot of the cliffs from near the water.
. There were a lot of women along the water selling raw seafood and soju (cheap Korean hard alcohol, which people drink all times of the day). We passed on the snack.
. One of the women getting fresh water for her produce.
. More Yongmeori coastline.

Two more blending in pictures, haha: The world-cup stadium on the way back to the hotel that night. It really fits the sea them of the island, doesn't it. I liked it more every time we drove past.