Per aspera ad astra

God, I’m going to miss my puns. Anyway, on Thursday I taught my last TPR classes *exaggerated tear* My Gold Writing class was actually really sweet; they cheered for me and my silent/serious student came up to me after class and shook my hand. But in general, I wasn’t too sad to leave the place.

Every day this summer, we’ve come home to some random restaurant advertisement on our door. We saved up and on Thursday night, did a little decorating.

After that, my night consisted of a quick round of packing, dinner with some teachers and Wall-E.

Ahn nyeong TPR teachers!

Ahn nyeong kimchi!

Ahn nyeong Pollapo (and Eunice, I suppose)!

Ahn nyeong Korea/Dok Do!

A bizarre Friday later (I woke up at 11 am Friday in Seoul and arrived in San Francisco at 11 am on Friday), I arrived back in Chicago and met up with my lovely mother at Starbucks (my first in two months!) And thus concluded my Korea adventure!

I’ve come a long way since my first Korean meal (a box of faux Ritz crackers, consumed about ten hours after my arrival in Seoul). Now when I walk into a restaurant and see the menu:

I’m no longer quite so intimidated. Being able to read Hangeul, again, is a great, great help. Of course it doesn’t help when I don’t know what Chanchi kuk (first food in red on the left) is, but still- I can recognize words like 라면 (Ramen) and 냉면 (Nangmyeon- cold buckwheat noodles).

No matter where you eat in Seoul, the server will bring you a set of side dishes, usually consisting of an assortment of some version of kimchi (yum!), seafood bits, beans/root bits, and/or lettuce. And probably some pickles, just for good measure (Koreans love pickles for some reason)

Starting off, I stuck with good ole Ramen. Korean ramen, like most other Korean food, always includes an egg, which is seriously a fabulous addition. Ramen can also come with ‘mandu’  (dumplings- see below), ‘tteok’ (rice cakes- my personal favorite), or other goodies.

The first Korean food I had (on Korean Air) was bibimbap and it was a dreadful experience. Bibimbap’s essentially just rice with random stuff (usually veggies of the root/seaweed/soybean variety) mixed in. I chalked it up to the fact that it was airline food and ordered it during orientation. Turns out, I just don’t like the stuff. *shrug*

Mandu on the other hand, I love. They’re dumplings filled with rice and/or meat that come fried or boiled and are essentially to Koreans what pelmeni are to Russians.

Of course no visit to an Asian country would be complete without some sushi. Sushi 990, a restaurant near my apartment, has some relatively inexpensive sushi that we enjoy from time to time.

However, you do have to be a little careful about what you pick up:

Crap roll? Mmm.

Despite the fact that it’s more often than not boiling outside, Koreans prefer their summer food to be boiling (this reminds me of my Russian host mother, who insisted I drink hot tea to ‘warm my insides to equal the temperature outside’). Samgyetang- literally, chicken ginseng soup, fits the bill perfectly. The chicken in the pot is stuffed with glutinous rice and the whole dish is healthy and tasty.

Samgyeopsal is one of my favorite Korean dishes- it’s a form of Korean BBQ that consists of barbecued uncured pork (Read: it’s bacon). At restaurants, the server will bring you out a slab of raw (or partially precooked) meat and you grill it yourself at the table with onion, garlic, etc. After it’s made, you can dip it in sauce and either eat it straight or wrap it up in a piece of lettuce with some rice and chow down. Nom.

Dessert time! This is probably my favorite dessert from Seoul: yogurt on top of a bed of mixed fruits and ice.

Green tea ice cream on top of red bean paste (which I still haven’t gotten accustomed to) and other random bits of yummy.

Or you can be a bit healthier and opt for some fruit. The prickly things are rambutan; the round fruits in the back are mangosteens, the latter being ridiculously tasty. Of course, figuring out how to eat them is the fun part.

The premise of Dr Fish: You sit at a cafe drinking overpriced coffee while a small army of fish nibble away at the dead skin on your feet. Having heard rumors about the strange-sounding Dr. Fish cafe from several American/Canadian teachers here, a group of us decided to try out this Korean phenomenon.

The fish part itself only costs about $2 + the price of coffee. We got drinks, waited our turn and then were called over to start the pedicure madness.

They look harmless, no?

Eunice tries it out; hilarity ensues.

Hilarity continues to ensue; Hannah’s feet are super ticklish and she can hardly control herself.

Then I decide to test out the waters myself.

Did I mention the hilarity? Or that I’m also extremely ticklish on my feet?

Once you lower your feet into the tank, the innocent little fish swarm around your flesh and start nibbling. It’s almost the equivalent to how you feel little tiny (painless) pinpricks when a limb falls asleep.

Photo quality is limited, but I couldn’t use flash on account of the water. Suffice it to say they were hungry little buggers. Hannah and I kept giggling for most of the 15 minutes our feet were in the water.

Eunice and I tried to stay still for a serious shot.

The idea is that the fish nibble away all of your dead skin and then you have fresh, healthy, smooth skin, but I’m fairly sure most of that is a hoax. My feet felt a bit tingly for a while afterwards, but it was no spa pedicure. Nevertheless, fun times!

After four weeks of teaching (and two of coughing, sneezing, and being in various stages of sick), Eunice and I decided to get out of Seoul for part of our four day break. I had looked up the Templestay program and three days of relaxation and meditation in the non-Seoul part of Korea sounded lovely. Golgulsa Temple (near Gyeong-ju) was the only temple that responded quickly with an “of course we have space!” and so we were off. After a minimal snag (Gyeong-ju and Gwang-ju are NOT the same place at all), we were off on our four hour bus ride.

We had initially intended to leave in the morning, but finally actually got up and made it to the bus by noon. Halfway through a long trip, Korean buses make a pit stop for folks to bathroom/eat/buy books; here was our stopover locale:

Not bad, eh? Once we got to Gyeong-ju, we needed to transfer to a city bus to take us out of town to the temple itself. I am so incredibly glad I learned Hangeul (the Korean alphabet); otherwise, finding the stop would have been tricky. We hopped on a bus; a few stops later, a monk got on and we decided to get off where he did, which ended up being this lovely road:

A fifteen walk later, we arrived at Golgulsa, found a semi-English speaker and checked ourselves in.

Eunice and I shared a room with a middle-aged French woman who was vacationing in Korea to practice traditional Korean painting (normally, she’s an accountant). Here’s our room (naturally, there were a few more blankets for Eunice and I- the back room there is the bathroom)

We also got to change into these incredibly attractive prison-style orange tank tops and switch from jeans to yoga pants. Om!

I remembered seeing some sort of itinerary on the Templestay website, but assumed they were just suggested activities for people to take part in. Since Golgulsa is known for Sunmudo, a Korean martial art form, we got to practice that as well as meditation. Most of the activities the Buddhist at Golgulsa do are part of “active meditation”: walking and thinking, yoga and thinking, kicking ass and thinking, etc. This didn’t exactly fit into my R&R plans, so I skipped a few activities to nap/meditate on my own. Oops.

I did, however, participate in the 108 bows activity I had read about in Eat, Pray, Love. Here’s a basic summary/explanation:

That doesn’t sound awful until you realize that a Buddhist bow and a Jane Austen hero-style bow are not exactly identical. You start a Buddhist bow standing straight up, then eventually end up on all fours, your head touching the ground and your hands raised to the sky. Stand up again and you’ve finished one bow. Though my legs felt a little like spaghetti afterwards, it was actually quite rewarding, both physically and mentally, thanks to the amount of focus it takes.

Inside the temple pictured above:

After bowing, Eunice and I bravely hiked up a little more to get to the temple Golgulsa is most famous for- the only cave temple in Korea.

It was incredibly peaceful up there; Eunice and I did a few bows each and took plenty of photos.

Of course there was teatime at 11 with this amazing green (ginseng?) tea and conversation with a monk (who, of course, was wearing a Nike shirt and ruined my entire monkfantasy).

Between yoga, the clean air, meditation, crazy stretching exercises, vegetarian food, and hikes up and down the hills, by the end of our adventure on Saturday afternoon, Eunice and I were feeling significantly less phlegmy. So of course we decided to show our appreciation to the big (literally) guy.

After returning those lovely tops, Eunice and I trekked back to the bus stop to Gyeong-ju, bought tickets for the next bus to Seoul and spent a couple hours watching the scenery go by (okay, Eunice slept and I read Atlas Shrugged. But you get the point.)

Now the first week of new classes has come and gone (I’m teaching 8:30-7 now) and I only have a little more than two weeks left before I return to the States and jump back into Cornell work again. Next up: trip to noraebang (karaoke bar) and Dongdaemun (a huge downtown market).