Ginseng Festival and Hiking Trip: Part I

This weekend I went to a Ginseng Festival followed by a day of hiking with Adventure Korea. Basically they're a travel/tour group that has events running every weekend all over Korea. They're very well organized and they have some cool events. I've done a handful of trips with them now including the DMZ and Mud Fest, both of which were right at the top of my list for things to do while in Korea, and both were pretty great. It's nice because usually when I'm off doing something on the weekend I head into Seoul or somewhere that is easily accessible by just jumping on a bus at the local terminal. With Adventure Korea though I've been able to see some areas of the country that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to really navigate myself to and have had a few unique experiences along the way. The owner is a cool guy and the guides are a mix of Koreans and foreigners who volunteer. I can't recommend their trips enough.

So Saturday morning I was up at 5am to get ready and then take the train into the city to catch the tour bus. Except I actually couldn't fall asleep at all (my work schedule is not conducive to such an early wake up call) so I was dragging my feet real bad as we headed out the door. 

We left the city around 8am and had about a 3 and a half hour drive with a rest stop and lunch break thrown in there. Have I mentioned how much I love Korean rest stop food? Because I do. The rest stops here are pretty similar to the ones back home- convenience store, bathrooms, junky souvenir area, couple of fast food joints, etc. However, you're also sure to find a bunch of vendors selling what pretty much amounts to street food. Delicious, amazing street food that is. Bags of football-shaped, custard filled deli manjoo, paper bowls of potato balls, french fries, mini churros, and tasty tasty skewers of chicken. You just have to be careful that you don't lose an eyeball in the crowd with everyone walking around and not paying attention to where they're waving the pointy-end of their stick food but if you make it out alive it's so worth it.

After lunch we arrived at the Punggi Insam (Ginseng) Festival. 

I knew they had a few activities for us lined up but the first one took me by surprise. They whisked us over to this stage area and told us we were going to have a ginseng peeling competition. Uh, it is exactly as exciting as it sounds. They split us into two groups and had us sit on stage and well, peel a ginseng root. Which isn't too easy to do actually. Those roots pretty much look the same when they're all cleaned up, it's not like peeling a potato where the difference is obvious. So I just sat they're awkwardly peeling away and I think I over peeled mine and therefore did not win the giant box of ginseng tea for my efforts. Sadness.

Look at how jazzed this sea of elderly people who were just looking for somewhere to sit down crowd is to be observing such a thrilling event.

Basically it was just an excuse to put a bunch of foreigners on stage and have them make a spectacle of themselves. In that we succeeded admirably. The whole festival was actually like a publicity event or something, photographers and videographers would not leave us alone. I know that foreigners get stared at a lot here and this is especially true when you head out of the main cities and into less foreigner-traveled areas. But it was overkill at the festival and really awkward. They kept swarming us and I kept covering my face (hello, 24 hours with no sleep at that point, the last thing I want is your HD lens picking up how many shades of gray are happening in the dark circles under my eyes) and waving them off but it did nothing. So I started taking pictures back while they were taking pictures of me. Because what else can you do?

Yeah like I couldn't see you creeping from behind that pillar. Nice try. He did pose with the Korean V sign when he saw what I was doing but I was too slow to catch it.

After making fools of ourselves we had some free time to wander the festival. There was a nice turnout and it was pretty big but it was less festival-y than I was expecting. Lots of food tents and such but only a handful of craft booths (what I always troll at festivals) and an overload of identical tents all just selling ginseng roots. There was literally rows and rows of them and people were snapping those things up like crazy. So that was the big draw really. We just walked and took it all in.

There was a small area with apple tents and this little house made of apples. I caught these two old buddies posing for a picture in the apple house, aww. I also got a picture sitting there but I had to wait for the three kids in line in front of me to finish first...

At 2pm we met back at the bus and drove to a ginseng field where the town mayor met us and told us we would be helping to pick some ginseng. I managed to dig up a row of about four roots and then they had all us foreigners pose with our rooty booty for the paparazzi again. I'm pretty sure our fate is to end up on the festival banners for next year.

Then it was back to the festival again to make ginseng wine. It is basically the most simple process ever.

Ginseng Wine Recipe
Step 1: Clean a ginseng root. It is clean when you can no longer see any dirt on it or when the people supervising realize you're the last one doing it and quickly announce it is clean so they can finish and go home.
Step 2: Get a tall plastic bottle with a screw top.
Step 3: Place root inside tall plastic bottle with screw top.
Step 4: Fill tall plastic bottle with soju.
Step 5: Screw on top
Step 6: Let sit for 100 days.

So basically ginseng wine is soju with a root in it? If there were any other way to make soju worse than it already is I think this would be it.

Also, ginseng floating in liquid is scary looking, like some sort of malformed alien fetus. It gives me the creeps. Also also, I am bringing mine home with me so clear a spot in the dining room next to the other wines Mom and Dad. You can put it out on Halloween to scare trick-or-treaters. Or when repair people come to the house. Whichever works.

I'm not entirely sure what criteria of fabulous a ginseng root must meet in order to win a prize because they all looked the same to me but apparently this one was pretty special. 

This weekend was good but wore me out big time so I'll cover day two of the trip in a separate post which I'm hoping to write tomorrow night when I'm off from work early. After I've gone grocery shopping that is. And after I've finished my toilet paper roll bat decorations. And after I've done some more studying for the GRE. And after I finally attempt skillet ginger snap cookies. And after I've bleached my bathroom to hell. All in order of importance of course. Yeah. Another blog tomorrow night.

maybe.

Trivia of the Day: Myeonje Baegab (면제배갑), claimed to be the world's first, was a bullet-proof vest invented in the late 1860s in the Joseon Dynasty, modern day Republic of Korea. During the French Campaign against Korea, 1866, the military of the Joseon Kingdom, at the time using matchlock rifles, experienced the superiority of western rifles. As a result, Heungseon Daewongun, then acting leader of the Joseon Kingdom, ordered the development of bullet-proof armor. Through multiple live fire tests using matchlock rifles Kim Gi-Du and Gang Yun, who were national weapon developers, found that 30 layers of cotton fabric were effective in preventing penetration by rounds fired from a matchlock rifle at around 100 meters. The vests were distributed to soldiers after its creation, and were used in battles fought on Ganghwa Island against United States Navy and Marine forces during the United States expedition to Korea in 1871. Although the vests were effective against bullets, they were susceptible to fire because they were made of cotton. The vests were easily burnt by fragments from cannon fire; US records indicate that some Korean soldiers caught fire after a cannon attack. Also, the vests were too hot to wear in summer.*

*Adding my own note here to say that any article of clothing is too hot to wear during a Korean summer.

Rewinding

Now that I've had a chance to catch my breath (and my boyfriend's had a chance to share some stories from his trip before I could spoil them all), it seemed about time to rewind and post some of the things I've been up to for the past month or so.

My boyfriend's first weekend here we spent checking out various places around the city. Our first stop was Insadong. I really love going there and poking down all the little back streets. It's a much bigger area than just that main drag with all the tourist shops and art galleries and worth spending some time wandering around.

One little gem that the main street does have to offer though is the Toto Museum, which is as random as its name suggests and looks like this:

Essentially, you pay a dollar to look around someone's old basement. Except it's not actually a basement and there aren't any abandoned exercise machines or tool boxes stuffed in the corner. Just lots of toys and board games and action figures and politically incorrect dolls, all sporting a coating of dust. Apparently it's supposed to showcase items that were popular in Korea back in the 60s and 70s (an idea that might have worked) but there is plenty of stuff from every other decade too so really it just looks like a storage space for random junk. I think it's amusing though so we went inside for a look.

 hahaha my favorite!

And obviously they have post cards you can buy so that you can tell all of your friends about the awesome twelve-minutes you spent at the Toto Museum! They also sell valentines with Peter Falk or Farrah Faccett on the front. You know, just in case the years old ramen packets and Spider-Man action figure rocking gym socks and a leotard didn't sway you already.

After Toto we headed to Changdeokgung Palace, a spot I'd yet to visit.

Aw I love this picture haha. Those poor kids and that poor chaperon. Just that look of boredom on every single one of their faces. It was hot and it was a Saturday and they had zero interest in being on this field trip but she's trucking away anyway.

Since basically all the palaces and old structures have these similar designs I've become used to seeing them and the bright colors. Changdeokgung was the first place though that I saw the original paint job that has yet to be updated (or is being preserved). Makes quite the difference.

 :)

Trivia of the Day: The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty (also known as The True Record of the Joseon Dynasty) are the annual records of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea, which were kept from 1413 to 1865. The annals, or sillok, comprise 1,893 volumes and are thought to cover the longest continual period of a single dynasty in the world. During the reign of a king, professional historiographers maintained extensive records on national affairs and the activities of the state. They collected documents and wrote daily accounts that included state affairs as well as diplomatic affairs, the economy, religion, meteorological phenomena, the arts, and daily life, among other things. These daily accounts became the Sacho ("Draft History"). Great care was taken to ensure the neutrality of the historiographers, who were also officials with legal guarantees of independence.

Nobody was allowed to read the Sacho, not even the king, and any historiographer who disclosed its contents or changed the content could be punished with beheading. These strict regulations lend great credibility to these records. Yet at least one king, tyranical Yeonsangun looked into the Annals, and this led to the First Literati Purge of 1498, in which one recorder and five others were cruelly executed because of what was written in "Sacho." This incident led to greater scrutiny to prevent the king from seeing the Annals. In Later Joseon period when there was intense conflict between different political factions, revision or rewriting of "Sillok" by rival factions took place, but they were identified as such, and the original version was preserved.

The original recorders recorded every words and acts of the king in "Sacho" although not all details were included in the final version. For instance, King Taejong fell from a horse one day and immediately told those around him not to let a recorder know about his fall. A recorder wrote both Taejong's fall and his words not to record it. In another instance, Taejong was recorded to complain about a recorder who eavesdroped on him behind a screen and followed him to a hunt behind a disguise.

We got the van at a used car lot. We think it says Alleluia Church of Scranton in Korean

Wednesday morning I went with Brianna into Songdo which is the new central business district being built in Incheon. I've only been there once and just for dinner so it was interesting to check it out during the daytime and see how the construction is coming along.

Currently the area is pretty quiet- a handful of buildings sticking up here and there, traffic light enough that you can run across the street during the "Don't Walk" signal (something I wouldn't advise doing anywhere else in Korea), a good number of people out and about but not crowded by any means, etc. Here is what the vision for Songdo is, according to its website:

Songdo IBD (International Business District) boasts the wide boulevards of Paris, a 100-acre Central Park reminiscent of New York City, a system of pocket parks similar to those in Savannah, a modern canal system inspired by Venice and convention center architecture redolent of the famed Sydney Opera House. The cultural fabric of Songdo IBD will also be a rich one with a stunning opera house, concert hall, museum and aquarium. A Jack Nicklaus championship golf course - one of only 25 in the world - is under construction with plans already in the works for high-profile events, including a PGA Championship Tour event.

The plan is to have the area complete by 2015 though I expect that they'll want to have as much as possible done by 2014 when Incheon is hosting the next Asian Games. So Songdo is filling in slowly but surely. People are moving in, buildings are going up, and restaurants and stores are starting to open bit by bit.

(Songdo Convensia Convention Center)

The Central Park is nice. They did a good job planning lots of open spaces in Songdo and the park is located right across from the convention center. A canal runs through it and you can take little boat tours so we bought tickets and then wandered through the park while we waited. And along the way we came across this:

Yeah, so, back story time. Apparently at some point last year they set up this big thing in Central Park called The Bible Expo. But then along came a crazy typhoon at the end of the summer and did a number on it. They stood up some of the pieces that had fallen over and everything but now, a few seasons later, it's still standing and... well I'd say looking pretty worse for the wear but I'm not sure it was ever really in such great shape to begin with.

 (There's luckdragons in the bible?)

 Dedicated to those who did not make it through the typhoon parting of the Red Sea.

Random Santa Village

After a turn around the park we still had about an hour to kill before our boat ride so we grabbed some lunch at Res2Go, a teriyaki house with great food and great service. I definitely recommend it if you're in the area. Then we came back for our boat ride down the canal which lasted approximately 25 minutes. It's a wee canal.

Look at how huge that ark is that they built! I thought it was a building at first.

친차?! Really?!

I feel like this picture pretty much sums up Songdo as it stands right now...

 The Northeast Asia Trade Tower.

So yep, that's Songdo, or at least what's there so far. A few streets over from the convention center and central park there were more stores and coffee shops and the traffic was slightly heavier. It'll be interesting to watch as it gets busier though and hopefully while I'm here some more good shopping places will open up. Maybe I can use the Asian Games as an excuse to come back in 2014 and see how things have progressed!

Trivia of the Day: Dancheong (단청) refers to Korean traditional decorative coloring on wooden buildings and artifacts for the purpose of style. It literally means "cinnabar and blue-green" in Korean. It is based on five basic colors; blue (east), white (west), red (south), black (north), and yellow (center). Dancheong has various symbolic meanings. Dancheong also represented social status and rank by using various patterns and colors. It functions not only as decoration, but also for practical purposes such as to protect building surfaces against temperature and to make the crudeness of materials less conspicuous. Applying Dancheong on the surfaces of buildings require trained skills, and artisans called dancheongjang (단청장) designed the painted patterns.