a quick weekend trip, good times...we woke up before dawn on a saturday morning in order to be on a bus way too early in the morning...after 6 hours on the bus we arrived at our destination...a fishing village not so far from namhae...(for those few of you who have any idea about korean geography)...the village is built onto the side of a steep incline, so no matter where we went, we were going up or down...for all the hiking we did in north korea, this was tougher...
as we got off the bus we got our first glimpse of the village and the people who lived there...
we were all staying in homestays, so the people we were staying with met us at the bus...since they are outdoors a lot more than most people in seoul, their skin was a lot darker...i stayed with the two girls i traveled with, as well as four scandinavians...(one fin, one swede, one norweigan/korean and one dane)...our ajuma (mother/older lady) led us to her house, which had a bright blue roof...every house in the village had a brightly colored roof...i saw red, orange, green and blue...really bright, i loved them...
anywho, our house had a great ocean view, and looked out over the terraces that the villagers had built into the hillside...the terraces were fairly small, and still tilled by cows...
after getting settled in our rooms, we went down to the beach area for some fishing...as i'm super squeamish, i made one of my friends hook the worms for me...and, as usual, i got bored fairly quickly and had more fun watching others try to catch fish...a couple people actually did catch something...there were tv cameras along with our group the whole weekend, from the arirang tv channel, documenting the whole trip...i'm terrified i'll end up in some program about the trip sometime...
these cameramen made one chick who caught a fish put it back in the water twice while they filmed her bringing it out, making it look like she was just catching it...i don't think the fish survived the ordeal, even though she threw it back in the end...
dinner was back in our homestay, homecooked...the usual assortment of korean foods...different kinds of kimchi, dwenjungjigae (sp?) as well as rice and fish...pretty tasty...i eat korean food nearly every day, so i knew what most of the foods were...we ended up eating the same food for breakfast the next morning...
i'm as game as anyone to do what the local culture does, but i have to admit that i prefer western breakfast traditions...oh well...after dinner we went up to a school play yard to have a bonfire with all the people who had come on the trip as well as some of the locals...they had set up a relay of sorts, in which i decided to participate...somehow (despite my not always stunning athletic abilities) i ended up on the winning team, which was also the most enthusiastic team...lots of cheering and generally making fools of ourselves...when you throw yourself into any activity the way we did, you'll have fun, regardless of the outcome...
the relay involved doing sommersaults on a mat, leapfrogging a wooden horse, finding candy with our mouths only in a plate full of flour (and getting our faces shoved in the flour...trust me, flour on your teeth is not a pleasant sensation) and walking on a balance beam...with a face full of flour, most of us fell off the balance beam at least once...
the next game was a tug of war...tons of fun, and the bonfire afterward was nice...i got a chance to talk with a few more of the others who had come on the trip...
after breakfast the next morning, our first activity was watching how the terraces were tilled...
people who wanted to do so had the opportunity to walk behind the cow and try to control how it did the tilling...while i didnt participate in this one, it looked to be a lot more difficult than one would imagine...the cow looked quite bored, and we speculated as to what was going through it's head with all of us standing around watching it go back and forth...
the last activity before getting back on the bus back to seoul had been advertised as deep sea fishing...howeva, as it ended up, it was more like "deep sea standing around"...
we got on the boat, which drove out to where the nets had been in the water...on the way out, one of our guides opened up one of the tanks, and brought out a live sea cucumber...after gesticulating that eating a sea cucumber is good for male virility (use your imagination as to what gestures he made) he proceeded to bite off the top of it, and eat the entire thing, guts and all...i'm not big on slimy things, but it was almost fascinating to watch...as we got to the area where the nets were, he helped to pull in the nets...(as all of us stood around and watched)...included in the catch was a squid, still alive...so, in keeping with the 'look what gross thing i can do' theme, he made the squid squirt ink at us...
one girl got a face full of ink and it ended up all over the clothes of several in the group...i made sure i was standing behind people so my clothes stayed clean...anywho, then he ate one of the tentacles off the still living squid, and offered to cut off a tentacle for anyone who wanted to do so as well...again, not so much something i wanted to do...and again, while it completely grossed me out, i was fascinated and watched as others did so...after riding back to the dock, the guides cleaned and gutted the fish right there on the dock, so we all had fresh sushi...pretty awesome, though i didn't have much...
and then it was back to the bus for the long trip back...though we spent too much time on the bus for such a short trip, it was great to get out of seoul, see something new, and spend a night in a really really quiet place...(seoul is NEVER quiet)...
new adventures coming soon i think....
