Week 1: Adventures in Language, Cooking and Bathing

It's been an exciting Week 1 here in South Korea. Again, most of my days are spent learning Korean in the morning and taking various workshops in the afternoon, but I've been able to participate in some Korean cultural things, as well as some things that were just plain interesting. I have to keep this short (relatively speaking), as we have our first quiz tomorrow over everything we learned during the last week, but I'll try to hit the main highlights.

Cooking The most thrilling event was probably the fact that I took my first Korean cooking class. There were two dishes available to make. The first was called jabchae (잡채). This was the one I helped make. It's a hot noodle dish that is absolutely fabulous. It is made with various vegetables and meat items, and the noodle used is those translucent chinese noodles you can sometimes find at restaurants (called dangmyeon 당면 here). As the cooking instructor explained, this dish is essentially what you make out of anything you find in your refrigerator that you can chop up "prettily". (And EVERYTHING had to be chopped prettily.) The second option was a dish called pajeon (파전). This was essentially a pancake, but made with scallions as the foundation of the dish (the flour and water basically held it all together). As toppings, one adds various meats again, though I think these are usually seafood. It compares fairly well with that favorite Thanksgiving caserole, French Fried onion rings on greenbeans with cream of mushroom soup. Mmmhmm, good. The only real issue this night was that most of us ate before we came, so it was hard to finish all the food we made. The instructor scolded us soundly for this, and we will surely starve ourselves the next time to appease her wish that we might be made full off our labours.

Bathing The second most thrilling event (though some of you may disagree given what I'm about to talk about) was going to the jjimjilbang (찜질방) this Saturday. This was very relaxing and very welcome after a full week of trying to speak Korean with a Western language oriented mind. A jjimjilbang is essentially a bathhouse, and for about 6000 won you can enjoy hot baths, cold baths, herbal baths, various temperatures of saunas, showering areas where exfoliation is encouraged (and sometimes the natives will help you with this portion of your bathing experience). Everyone is nude. Everyone is bathing (or sweating). Everyone is having a grand old time in the aquatic arena, though it's important to note that you should shower before you jump into any of the pools. (If you were wondering, it is gender segregated, so no free shows.) If you're willing to pay a little extra, you can even have a full body massage with deep exfoliation so that you're essentially walking around in a new set of skin. (I opted out of this as the person doing the massaging was a fully nude 50 year old.) You can even sleep overnight in these places (for the same price), and it is the recommended option if you're just bumming around Korea a la European hitchhiking. I haven't been taking pictures of anything really, but don't expect to see any of this experience anytime soon anyway. I'd feel a little awkward about it, and I'm sure the old men would too. One piece of advice to note: When in the sauna, especially the hottest one, which I could barely stand for 5 minutes, it is a good idea to breathe out your mouth, rather than your nose. This is because rather sensitive areas can get, shall we say, uncomfortable from the intense heat coming out of your body. Beyond this is a non-segregated area (p.j.'s required) where one can watch movies, play video or computer games, get refreshments, read, or even just fall asleep.

Church I finally made it out to a local church on Sunday for worship, a large Methodist congregation. It was encouraging that there were several other ETAs who wanted to go and who are also interested in doing Bible study during the week. They seem quite sincere about their faith, and I feel that they will be a blessing to me (as I hope I am to them) in the coming weeks and year. We first went to the Korean service in the morning. This was incomprehensible, but very nice. Those of us who have just had a week sounding out hanguel stumbled through the words projected on the wall behind the altar, though we did not know what we were singing. Some of the hymns were familiar, as they used Western tunes, but for all I know they were using entirely different texts from the English equivilants associated with those hymns. I did understand one word in the sermon (besides Jesus and Christ), and that was πιστις, which is actually Greek, not Korean, meaning faith, but it was still exciting for me. πιστις, πιστις the pastor kept saying. 네, 네, 아멘 (Yes, yes, Amen!) was my happy, silent response. The pastor welcomed us after the service into his office and extended his offers of help and hospitality. He gave us a delightfully tasty Vitamin C drink, and told us that if we ever needed help during our stays in Korea (or a meal, and given the cafeteria food, I may take him up on this), we should call the church immediately. This afternoon we attended the English service, which was actually more geared towards those learning English (everything was translated and the congregants were asked to parrot what the pastor, a different one, said as in our Korean classes). I found it both fulfilling and frustratingly poor homiletically speaking. I'm not sure that the pastor had necessarily prepared well, but it could be that I felt he focused too much on glory and not enough on the cross. But that could be just the Lutheran in me talking.

안녕히 가세요!