It has been a little while since my last update and I have had some new and exciting experiences. I am hoping to have some pictures of the mud festival up that I went to about a month ago. Not a ton of stories but there should be some pictures of people covered in mud.
Onto the next few stories. A couple of weekends ago I went to Kong-won-do (spelling?) beach. It is on the East side of Korea and I live in the East side. I went with 4 friends, 3 Koreans and my neighbor Jeff. We left at 4 AM on Friday night/Saturday morning and headed out. We left at this hour because traffic is so bad here. I believe that it is roughly 250 Kilometers, but don't qoute me on that. The weekend before we left our driver's brother made the same trip and it took 10 hours. Our trip over took roughly 3 hours and we arrived at the beach around 8ish. We had breakfast and decided to head to the beach. We were one of the first people on the beach, and the beach was quite different. First, there were many awning-type things that were covering the beach and in order to even sit on the beach you had to pay about $15. If you decided to not pay for the awning there was a roped off area quite a ways away from the water where people would put up tents or towels. It was quite an odd thing and the second thing that was quite weird is taht people, for the most part, would wear their clothes and people just stand on the edge of the water. Most of the swimming was when people would throw their friends in, and that was also generally in full clothing. We stayed at the beach until about 3 or 4 and then one of our friends, Amy, entered a women's korean wrestling contest. There were 56 women in the contest and Amy won her first match and then during the time between rounds they challenged one of the 2 foreigners to wrestle a middle school wrestler. I told Jeff to go first and we found out that the middle schooler was the national wrestler for Korea. The women's fights generally took about a minute or so and this match between Jeff and the boy took about 1 second. jeff was ready to quit and they got him to try one more time and it lasted the same second as the first one. Jun, another friend with us, said that the sport isn't so much about strength as it is about strategy. After seeing that I decided that I wouldn't take my chances and Amy had the first match after this debacle and she lost so we made our way out after that. We got so incredibly burned at the beach. By the time we got home to shower we were all friend and then it was time for dinner. We went to a famous fresh fish market that was right down the road. We got dropped off and it was a narrow street with little covered restaurants on both sides. In front of the restaurants were fish tanks filled with all kinds of different fish. We would walk by and ladies would pick out fish and put them in a strainer and then negotiate a price with people walking by. I am thankful that we had koreans with us because I would have no idea what to do if I was there by myself. After a bit of walking we found a place to eat and we had a strainer of fresh fish still flopping and slinging water all over. These are the fish we had: rock fish, squid, flat fish, a heart-looking thing, a brain of some fish, an orange thing, and who knows what else. Behind the fish tanks were 2 ladies who would cut up the fish. They were incredibly fast, I was the 5th person to walk into the restaurant and by the time I walked past they already had the whole strainerfull of fish filleted and all that was left was the guts. We sat down at a really cramped table. There was a little trough that ran from the front of the place out to the docks. It ran right through the restaurant and in between the tables. We sat down and within 5ish minutes we had a plate full of freshly killed raw fish. It looked a lot like raw chicken and it actually tasted really good. All of the fish was raw, I didn't know that you could do that without getting sick but no one had a problem and we nearly finished it all. After the meat tray, we slowed down our eating we were brought a type of soup and they poured the rest of the meat into the soup (which included an entire fish head) It was quite an experience and I really enjoyed myself. We went to the beach again on Sunday for a little bit and then headed home. The trip home was almost stop n' go the entire way home. We stopped at a rest area and I have never seen so many people in my entire life. The entire rest stop was shoulder to shoulder and it was literally just a swarm of people. They don't have many places to get off the highway and there aren't really fast food restaurants/gas stations/etc off the exits. The gas stations are at the rest stops so everyone has to stop at these places to use the bathroom or refuel. Our return trip took about 5 hours or so but we had a great time.
Last weekend I had another eating experience. It seems like many of the experiences that I have been posting have to do with eating, ha, I didn't really realize that until now. I will have to make a point of writing about other experiences... But last weekend I had eel for the first time. We went with a group of about 8 people and we had 2 different kinds. We had BBQ eel and regular eel. It was actually really good. It was quite chewy and the BBQ was spicy but it was really tasty. I had a really great time that night also, I met some new people and made some new friends.
Nothing much has changed at my school. Everything is about the same, some new students and some students have left. Boss is still really sketchy. We have a new head teacher who is quite nice, but that is the only thing new on the school front. There is a big global festival in Incheon (my town) and I'm planning on going there next weekend, but other than that it's a bunch of same ol' same ol.' Thanks to people for keeping in touch and seeing what is up with me. I really appreciate it.
Kevin
I actually had written the above post earlier this week and I figured that I would just add a few stories from this past weekend. On Saturday I went to a baseball game in Korea. We watched the hometown team play another team from somewhere in Korea. It was fun but the game was sold-out. They sell more tickets than seats so people sit on the walkways and stand wherever it's possible to see at least some part of the field. The other team's pitcher was supposedly the 4th best pitcher in Korea and the game was a blow-out but it was still a great time (we found a seat about halfway through the game) You go to a game and on the way into the stadium there are vendors that sell food/beer/water/etc and you just buy it and carry in whatever you want. There isn't really much food inside the stadium so everyone carries coolers and bags with them. One of my friends said that you can even order pizza to your seat, quite different than at home. After the game we went out with a big group of friends and I had my camera because of the baseball game so the pictures with me and friends are from that night. Anyways, that's it for now...
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