tea diaries ~~~~~ groooooovy

Hey everyone. :)

Well, it's been two weeks since I arrived here in Chuncheon. I thought it would be a good idea to give it a little time before I cracked open the ol' blog. I feel like I've lived a year in the past two weeks, and writing about everything would have probably taken most of my time. Anyhow.

Korea is, in a word, amazing. I'm having a terrific time so far. I'm living in a dormitory with 59 other English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) and we've been attending language classes and otherwise absorbing the culture of the city of Chuncheon, which is a moderately sized city (but huge by my standards). We're living in Kangwon National University, in a dorm right next to the dining hall. Thank god. Yeah, you guys know that's the first thing I'm going to write about.

The first week here we had language classes for 5 hours a day. It's down to 3 in the morning now, but we still get about 2 hours of homework every day and now we're starting cultural workshops and teaching workshops that take the whole afternoon. We're all learning Korean like mad - right now we've already past the mid-semester's point of knowledge if this were a college class. We've also been paired up with members of the English club on campus here, and they've been showing us around the city and helping us with our hangul (Korean characters) and conversation. They're also super cool people, and a lot of fun to hang out with. :D

This past weekend the Fulbright program, led by the illustrious Mrs. Shim (a really sweet old lady who already learned my name[?!] and who likes to send the ETAs buckets of watermelons) took us to Songnisan, a mountain resort town in the center of the peninsula. It's the home of Beopjusa, one of the largest templexes in the country, which was built back in 553 AD and has one of the largest Buddhas ("bool" in Korean) in the world. I could literally talk about this place for days ... I got to meditate in one of the monks' buildings for a while, watched the drumming ceremony, and then the next day hiked up to the top of the surrounding peaks and visited some of the hermitages on the side of the mountains. There were little gardens everywhere, and fresh spring wells for weary backpackers. One monk met us at the entrance to his hermitage and showed us his meditation platform in the clouds, and a stone cave grotto with one big Buddha in the center and hundreds of smaller "children of the Buddha" from floor to ceiling on the sides. I've never seen anything like it. I'm actually glad my camera ran out of batteries at that point, I felt like I could enjoy it instead of just trying to set up the perfect shot. I can't wait to arrange a temple stay ... it's a popular pseudo-tourist / meditation retreat in Korea, and it sounds like it would be easy enough to arrange.

Everything in Korea is super cheap. The exchange rate is roughly 1,000 won to a dollar - you can get ice cream for 800 won, patbingsu (fresh fruit, sweet beans, ice, and soft serve ice cream mixed in a big bowl) for maybe 1,500 won per person, and a gigantic pitcher of beer for 10,000 won that would fill maybe 7 or 8 cups. The local drink here is so-ju, which is a 50 proof almost-vodka-tasting rice drink that's served from a bottle into little cups (and the Koreans will say "ONE-SHOT!" and just down it). My personal favorite so far is the macicola, a creamy rice wine served from a cauldron with plates and plates in the Korean traditional pubs for what seems like pennies. We all feel like we're cheating when we go out at night, but being poor post-college students, we really appreciate it. ;)


Right now the big question on everyone's minds is our placement for the year. We're not guaranteed to get what we request, but everyone's got preferences in terms of rurual/sub/urban, geographical location, high/middle school, coastal/inland, etc. etc. My only requirement really is that I'm close to the coast and close to a Buddhist temple, but I think I'd prefer rural to anything else. I'm considering being placed on the subtropical Jeju-do island, which has some of the best hiking and beaches and local culture in Korea, but is also a little isolated. We'll see, I'll let you guys know how that turns out.

Korean food is, by my standards, absolutely brilliant. We eat kimchi (spicy pepper cabbage) and rice 3 meals a day. There is no cheese and no cereal I think, in the whole country. I haven't seen one sandwich yet. (I'm in heaven.) Korean food contains a lot of unidentifiable mushrooms and roots, and sometimes it's a guessing game (is this ... squid? no no, that's a radish. you sure?!) We had these little baby octopuses the first day, that pretty much set the tone for everything after. My favorite food so far is spicy kimchi soup with sausage, needless to say any inclinations toward vegetarianism have been dismissed as utterly foolish. The consciousness around that sort of thing is so different here, group mentality is a lot more important, and expressing one's ethics apart from the group is considered anti-social and undue deviation from the standard. My own jury's still out on the more radical bits of neo-Confucian culture here (repression of women's voice, corporal punishment in school, etc.) - we're encouraged to be as open-minded as possible as this is a cultural exchange, and I'm making a concerted effort to do just that.

Let's see, what else. There's a small cute lil dog that lives outside the dormitory that my friends here and I have named Friend. He looks a lot like Ein from Cowboy Bebop. Korea seems to be under attack by large squadrons of dragonflies, we see swarms of them high in the air over the dining hall, and on top of the peak in Songnisan there were literally hundreds. I've been playing a lot of sports over here - last week I placed basketball with some Koreans and learned how to say "good game" like maybe 5 times (I still couldn't tell you what it is), and over the last few days we've gotten a bunch of pickup soccer games that have lasted into the night. I was going to join the gym over here but there's really no need. We have two 10-minute breaks during our morning language classes and a group of us rushes out to play hacky sack with a fervor in sharp constrast to our bleary-eyed hangul studies. I've made some really really good friends already. :)

OH! Tea! But of course. Coffee is a lot more popular in this country unfortunately, but yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a tea ceremony demonstration by some of the former ETAs from 2004. She gave us all a taste of loose leaf green tea, which was delicate and delicious. I forgot how much I'd missed it over the last two weeks. Hahah, just kidding. I bought some green tea from what looks like the most popular Korean tea distributor, but I'll be looking arond for some loose leaf and a tea pot as soon as I can - I think one of the 2004 ETAs is going to lead a little tea expedition next week. We also learned a little about the tea plantation culture here in Korea, apparently there are some good spots for touring in the southwest and on Jeju-do.

I just posted some new pictures on my Flickr account, so check those out if you're so inclined. Thanks to all of you who emailed me in the past two weeks, it's been really nice to hear from you and to come back to something familiar at the end of the day. To those of you who I haven't responded to, don't worry, I haven't forgotten!! I'm sorry for the long post, I know I hate reading things of this length online, and I'll try to post in shorter bits from now on. Anyway, be well and know that I love and miss you all. :)