I'm in danger of not posting and running amok instead, so I'll recap a little jaunt I had yesterday.
Chuseok (pronounced like in my title) is in full swing over here, effectively this is Thanks Giving Day, and runs for three consecutive days. The holiday is celebrated in the 8th month and on the 15th day, all within the lunar calendar, and most young people site the number one stress of it as having to go home and endure questions about their work, status, and romantic life (Get a spouse and get some kids). The questions and focus on evaluation is very much a product of a Confucian model that society is run by over here. Other ways that the Confucian model manifests: women are of lower status then men (my brother points out that in this regard it's sort of like America in the sixties over here), elders are superiors despite what their accomplishments might be, one tries to avoid openly displaying their inner emotions (faces can be pretty blank), your friends are all the same age as you, and contacts can be more applicable than experience.
So back to the jaunt. With Chuseok at fever pitch most people are gathering with their families and making with the food, celebration, and evaluation. My brother and I went for a short hike over what you might call a hill. Elevatory climbs are sharp here and mountains abound. Even hills, while not yet mountains, are far steeper than what I'm used to. Now nobody builds on these hills or on mountains, at least not much past pylons and maybe some small military or observational site. This lends Korea a sort of well blended and moderated feeling; you can see massive developed cities, but they're broken up and surrounded by rich towers of green and rock.
This wasn't planned though. For one, it's impossible to build anything major on these things. Just not gonna happen. And second of all, hills and mountains are primarily for the dead. This is where burials occur (their is now a push for cremations due to limited space and for the first time cremations out number burials). Walking along any of these areas you are nearly gauranteed to come across a handful of cleared spots where a raised up half-circle of grassy earth surrounds another raised mound or a stone circle with a pile of earth a top it. There can be several in one spot or just one, sometimes there are stone posts with writing or just stone lantern statues. They are supposed to be well kept and trimmed by the family they belong to, but some are overgrown; either because their family fails to participate in this form of reverence, is incapable of doing so, or is not even a living blood line anymore.
The string of hills my brother and I hiked the other day was dotted with these graves on the second half and also intermixed with farmland, literally graves and chilipeppers or cukes all in the same spot. When we finally reached the end of the path, we had to cross through a farm and then came to a major highway. Not wanting to simply return the way we came we chose a new hill without a path. When doing this there is one major necessity: a stick, at least one and a hlaf feet long and preferably strong enough to be agitated repeatedly. Very common over here is an insect I just deciphered as the
Korean Golden Orb Web Spider. They're large, I'm sure harmless, beautiful, and spin webs 3-4 feet across between trees. You think you would spot these but you don't. Then you don't keep calm. Then you don't stand in one place and then you freaking rip at your clothes. Then you might mash the glorious spider. Not the best result, but you do get surprised. I've gotten some webs on me, but I don't think one of the spiders yet. My brother apparently hit one a while back, cleared the webbing, and sometime later felt the pin pricks of tiny, yet huge, legs on the back of his neck. Each step I'm sure was thunder in his ears. So, the Golden Orbs--they're prolific and you can look very hard and miss stepping into several, but you cannot avoid them all. I know that in the woods, anywhere, you always trip webs and rip them down, spiders rebuild frequently. The stick is more about making sure I don't lose my ever-loving composure and then accidentally kill something I never would want to destroy in the first place. By the by, these giants down't spin webs like you think of classically. They're more like huge silken parachutes that became caught on branches and now lounge there in the wind. The webs are incredibly tough--lots of give--and are littered with large plant material as well as mass graveyards of lesser bugs. I do confess, often my brother and I wasted our sticks when our mouthing off to each other quickly fell into slapping at each other with branches in a thick wood. Promptly following this we often ate web.
So, at the peak of this first uncharted hill we found a stone pillar, a small rectangular thing that one often finds stateside and is a demarcation of state boundaries, private land ownership, or was once a hitching post for horses. It had some Korean etched into it and my brother copied that down. We figured it would be the same as back home, or maybe something far cooler. Later, SunHee translated it and informed us it was a sign saying that you needed to stay out of the area you were in. Her recaction, her dismay at our having been there, leads me to believe that this is actually rather serious. Yet, it should also be noted that Koreans don't really travel off the path (you can most easily decipher this by noting how much litter is unfortunately strewn on established pathways but not anywhere off of them). I think it was just a foreign and radical concept to SunHee.
However, we then kept the power terminal we found a secret from her. A large power terminal was on the otherside of the hill and we had to scale it's eight foot barbed wire fence twice to get through it and over to a populated area close to home. We had to because food was cooking and we were hungry. That and slushies had been discussed; these being strictly the province of children in South Korea, as my brother put it, and something he is routinely giggled at for purchasing. So we strove onward.
The first time we crossed the fence we found a low gap and crawled under. That was easy except my brother accosted me with a branch when I went through. A good ten minute battle ensued following that little misstep of his--a battle where two large sized, caucasian Fool Apes, as they're best known, battered one another in the leaves. Sticks were thrown and a cessation to hostilities was called when the sticks got too big and we noticed we could be seen by a pair of windows. Remember that Chuseok business? Hopefully the workers were home, the place didn't seem very alive and we weren't noticed, as outrageously conspicuous as we were at this point. We kept to thicker vegetation just in case. While you get certain leeway with the law for being a foreigner (Korean officers don't like the effort of trying to get past the language barrier and often let you go for smaller infractions) it should be kept in mind that business is big over here. Top companies like Samsung own some 70+% of the private land and others like Hyundai have often become synonymous with the Korean mafia. Back home we might know Samsung as electronics and Hyundai as cars, but here they and a few others do it all: construction, security, stores, food, and electronics again. Potentially, you're more often on their turf than not it seems.
We used these facts to give ourselves a heightened sense of adventure. Eventually our game got us to the otherside of the enclosed area and this time there wasn't any gap to cross under. Using some trees and the concrete poles securing the barbedwire, we began to cross. The trouble was not the wire, the trouble was the vines at the top. Vines, no prickers. That's right, now I remember, huge, awful, hooked, bountiful prickers. What I wouldn't have given for large, yellow striped spiders at this point. The thorns I found at the top hooked into me everywhere. I'm accustomed to being pricked by thorns out in the woods, but much smaller ones that only scrape you. These had the repeated habit of getting into my flesh and pulling it into a conical shape as I resisted. Worse for wear we made it over.
On the otherside we found another grave yard/farm and a path. Down from there was an apartment laden area and a family sitting outside and eager to practice some English. Following them came a vegetable vender who had been echoing throughout the forest at the end of our trek. He traveled next to his truck, the flatbed sporting his wares, and announced his merchandise via megaphone. I swear, he did this the way you announce propoganda when you occupy foreign soil during war time. I thought, "I should buy his vegetables. It's over, he won." Later on he would also travel to outside SunHee's apartment as we sat and ate. He'd conquered us. Do you know what came next though? That is, I mean, after the initial propoganda of vegetables? Slushies? No.
No slushies came at all. Only pain. You have a dream, then you get prickers, and then the dream dies. You suffer heartfelt, stinging pain as a result. If you remember how Chuseok is a holiday I mentioned above and that the power terminal workers were probably absent because of it then maybe you already know that the slushy vendors definitely were absent. With kids out of school for the holiday there is no profit filtering past the slushy sellers in the morning or afternoon and that means no slushy filters out at all. It was humid, I had been exercising. I was hot and tired. I was thirsty. I got juice instead. It was okay.
Returning to SunHee's apartment was our salvation though. She'd made a soup, a sort of stew I can't recall the name of, but it had onion, spring onion, mushroom, egg, potato, and thick, doughy pads of square noodle. Very, very good. The other night I had cooked for them, pasta and a red sauce that turned out well, so it felt very good to be exchanging cultural and culinary knowledge and experience with one another. I figure that if sharing food is important over here (eating out of the same bowls, paying for meals, ordering for groups) then this has to be too. It was a great finish to the hike. The food, after all, has been a constant point of pleasure here. Kimchi, a smell which permeates the country, I do love. Kimchee is a fermented (for 1-3 years) concotion of chili peppers and vegetables, often Chinese cabbage, and is either served as a side with most meals or used as an ingredient in many dishes. It does vary all over, I've noticed, and the best I had remains to be the serving I had the night I landed. Even a Korean who ate with us that night exclaimed that the restaurant had particularly good Kimchi.
I never mentioned this meal before, so quickly: it was onion, mushroom, and some kind of pork strip (think giant bacon) cooked on a heated metal disc in front of you. You then took pieces of these ingredients and wrapped them in a leaf with other ingredients and side dishes spread across the table. Or you could take this white-green radish like half-circle soaking in some green liquid, soak that in a brown, watery sauce and then take a piece of the pork, dip it in an almond colored powder, and place the pork on the radish piece, wrap it up, and eat. A very good meal.
Okay, the jaunt was covered, I've digressed into food and am now going to go get some. Maybe some Jook, a hot rice porridge (rice congee) with vegetables coming in an assortment of flavors such as chicken, beef or pumpkin. Everybody go enjoy yourselves...it's what? Maybe 9pm over there? I think you're something like 14-16 hours behind. Bryan and people not in the New England or East Coast area, I haven't even tried or thought about what the time difference is for you. Anyways, it seems I might keep posting and not just peter out into madness, or a Ginjaban.
Much love,
-Nick
