Wieczorne imprezy

Sang-une preparing the squid.

Dinner hosted by Jung-hee and Sang-une.

 

 Hello! Did you have a good weekend? My weekend was big. We were suppose to go camping on the island of Udo, and we kind of did, if you count staying in a hotel as camping. My friends, Ashley and Aaron, are friends with another couple that lives on Udo. They’re the island’s only organic farmers. Aaron was going to be helping them out to harvest some garlic, so they went ahead and booked a room for the weekend as a thank you. No camping, but they like to cook, eat, and drink soju by the gallons, so there was plenty of fun to be had.

The impression of my first rice wine filled weekend in Seoul has left a lasting mark, an experience I’m not eager to duplicate, although the donuts on the day after aren’t so bad. I managed to survive this weekend by keeping my soju cup turned upside down, and was happy to just watch people turn a little tippy while I had a beer or two and chowed down.

 Our hosts, Jung-hee and Sang-une, know how to do it right. I have never experienced this kind of cooking before in my life. Firstly, everything we ate was literally gathered or raised within a couple of miles from where we were eating it. Jeju has really impressed me with the way in which locals utilize the natural resources. The table was full of fish, squid, and crustaceans that had just been pulled from the water that day. When I went to use the bathroom, the tub was full to the top with green seaweed that went on the table shortly after. So cool! I feel lucky to have been invited. I ate all kinds of things that I never would have known, thought, or probably even wanted, to order on my own.

The next day Ashley and I were going to leave Aaron to the dirty work in the field and go tour around Udo, but plans changed a little and we ended up helping out for a few hours too. Props to farmers, after only three hours in the field my body is wrecked, hunched over piles of garlic, with no real solution to a good posture for getting the work done. You often see little old ladies walking around, permanently bent over at a ninety-degree angle. Now I know why.

The word for foreigner in Korean sounds like way-gook, and you hear it all the time because whenever Koreans see a foreigner, they announce it to all their friends. Word spread around the small island of Udo pretty quickly that there were three way-gooks working in the field, and neighbors started taking breaks from their own harvest to hop on their tractors and drive by to have a look. At dinner that night Jung-hee said people were asking her how they could get those kind of servants for themselves. Ha.

Jung-hee has a bus that’s parked out on the beach, in front of a little white lighthouse. She’s converted it into a small restaurant where she fries up pajeon (onion and squid pancakes) and noodle soups for all the tourists floating out to Udo. We went there and had lunch, seaside, along with soup bowl sized “cups” of makgeoloi, a milky colored fermented rice wine. It’s actually more like rice beer, full of bubbles and less alcohol than wine. Dang, that girl can cook. I don’t think I’ve had a period of more than twenty minutes pass while here in Jeju that I’ve gone without eating. I’ve forgotten what hunger feels like. I have become well acquainted with the feeling of being a stuffed pig.

Koreans don’t do the thing where you just go out for drinks. Drinking is always accompanied with massive amounts of food. Go out and ask for just a beer and you will surely cement their opinion of you as a crazy way-gook. Last night we stuffed ourselves full of beef barbeque, and then decided we would go do some noribang, private room karaoke. We were just going to do some wailing and order a couple pitchers of beer. I was having doubts about being able to even fit just beer inside me. Our friend, Jenny, who is Korean, was recommending a set menu of drinks and food. No one wanted to even look at more food, but Jenny ordered us a fruit plate because, although there’s no rule that you have to eat, it’s kind of uncool to rent the karaoke room and only have a few drinks. The fruit plate came, and then multiple plates and bowls of all this other stuff started trailing in behind it. Bowls of noodles, dumplings, salty snack stuff, bean/ice/cornflake desserts, and who knows what else, they just brought it without anyone asking for it. They call it “service.” The thought of not having food with your drinks is so egregious they would rather just pay for your food out of their own pocket than see you go without. What do you do when you’re stuffed beyond the limits of comfort and there’s a table full of food sitting in front of you? Eat it, of course.

Tomorrow I set sail on an overnight ferry to Busan. Ashley has already arranged a place for me to stay! She has a friend from high school that lives there. Way-gooks are everywhere. A friend of mine was doing some research on South Korea and discovered that there’s a really big hip-hop, breakdancing scene here. Busan is suppose to be one of the good spots for it, so I’m going to go on a B-Boy treasure hunt and check out what’s hot.

Next week I’ll catch a boat to Japan. It’s strange, this whole moving from country to country thing. I spend enough time in each place to get an intermediate sense of what’s going on culturally, how to say please and thank you, get myself fed, and navigate the public transportation, then I move and have to forget everything I just learned and start all over again.

My birthday is coming up, June 15th. I think I will buy an entire cake of something and eat it in one sitting. What kind of cake? Chocolate cake, bean cake, fish cake? I suppose it depends on where I end up on the 15^th. Let’s hope it’s somewhere tasty.