Preface: Last weekend Chris and I went on an Authentic Countryside Experience with the other members of my studio. That was about all I knew about, and trying to find out more only got me a schedule completely in Korean. Chris got it translated at work, and it listed activities like "harvest experience," "water play with float device and swim," and (best of all) "make special memories on a summer night and snacks."
It took us five hours in a 10 person mini van to get there (traffic-- should have taken two), but that's the boring part. We finally arrived, to find we were sharing our authentic experience with about 300 other Koreans. Which we should have guessed, that's how everything here seems to be. After some lunch of various spicy fermented things (quite tasty, despite that appealing description I just gave), we began the activities. It was organized quite like summer camp, our group when around to different stations, to try out an authentic countryside activity. We even had apathetic teenagers leading us around.
The first activity was fishing with our hands. We followed the group out to the stream, where little sections maybe 40'x40' were separated of with low fence. Then the teen can with a bucket and dropped 3 humongous trout (or something) into the water. Then we all groped around trying to catch it, which was the easy part, then hold onto it long enough to get it back in the bucket. Now, the water was only about 8 inches deep, and the fishy are squirmy so most of the time they would flop out onto the rocks. As you can imagine, this isn't very good for their stamina, and pretty soon they were not so much of a challenge to catch. I looked in the bucket after we'd got them all, and one was floating upside down. I think a few organizations in the States would have a problem if we tried to pull this off their (ahem, PeTA).
After the fishing we pushed ourselves around on rafts with sticks. The rafts were quite authentic, two layers of bamboo strapped together around Styrofoam. This was fun until the other students (masters and PhD students, just to clarify) starting playing king of the raft, all of the rafts, and I got pushed off into about 2 feet of water on top off rocks. But this was soon followed up by eating strips of raw fish (presumably not the same ones we just exploited in the stream) with kimchi and makgeolli (fermented rice wine). Next we picked some potatoes, or dug them I guess, out of some green houses. We took them to the river—yes, the same river—and peeled the potatoes with river rocks. Teen-guide rinsed them off with some hopefully more sanitary water, we pulverized them with cheese grater contraptions, then mixed in some green onions and fried them up on big cast iron woks. These potato pancakes, pajeon, are one of my favorite Korean dishes. Ours were okay but a little soggy. While we were eating the professor passed around cups of whiskey and everybody drank more makgeolli until it was time for the rest of dinner, strips of meat on the grill (daeji bulgogi, I think). We wrapped these in lettuce with some spicy red soybean sauce (which is sooooo good), in the typical Korean fashion. And of course plenty more kimchi, makgeolli, and Hite (cheap Korean beer). After dinner there was even more drinking, and talking, and (for me) avoiding a drunken Korean too obviously hitting on me. Chris and I fell asleep early… he’d been on duty all night the day before… and I just sleep a lot.
The next morning consisted of breakfast and rice cake making. Breakfast included a potent fish dish that too closely resembled the trout from yesterday. Rice cakes in Korean cuisine can either be a starchy addition to stews or dokbokki (basically just rice cakes in spicy red sauce), or a dessert. The word “cake” might be a little deceiving here—they are not so much cakes as mashed rice in a cylinder or ball shape. The dessert ones are a little softer and dusted with a semisweet powder that reminds me of the crumbs on top of shoefly pie. I was told the powder is ground soybeans. Making of rice cakes is pretty much what you would imagine: pounding cooked rice until it’s a sticky dough, then cutting it up into small pieces and rolling it in soy powder. So we got to practice our mallet swinging and eat some sticky, ricey, soy-milky snacks.
That’s a brief overview of the weekend. There was also some mud bathing, which Chris and I tried mostly to avoid. Lots of moths, fire building under the house, etc. etc. Today some of the students told me they too thought the trip was a little weird. The professor asked me if we had something similar in the US. Maybe summer camp meets Williamsburg plus some Amish watching and Saturday night in State College?
