Peachy Festival

Please try reading this too a soundtrack.  First listen this to song.  Once you finished that feel free to listen to this while you are reading.  Both of them are pretty awesome.  I promise if you make it through both songs and read this entire blog there is a nice little musical surprise at the end.  They are from a video game that I played right before coming to Korea, that is just absolutely fantastic, called Bastion.  It cost me about 8 bucks and has one of the best soundtracks I have ever heard.  It's a game about the end of time, loss of love and how what we perceive to be permanent is constantly falling apart all around us.  You can obviously here the same dark tone in the two songs.  I'm kinda fiending for some gaming time over here.  My power supply didn't work so I had to leave the old one at home and hope that I could contact Xbox support over here and buy a new one, but as of yet I can't get in touch with them.  :(

So apparently the picture I am tagged in on facebook of the Korean dude with a beard is me and the National Assembly Representative of Janghowon.  Awesome.  That picture was taken at the Peach festival that happened in Janghowon this weekend.  Janghowon is the town that is attached to Gamgok, where I live.  It is literally a ten minute walk to get from one town to the other.  It is right across the river that acts as the boundary for Chungcheongbuk-do and Gyeongi-do provinces.  I am probably the only person in South Korea who has been into another province almost daily.  Lucky me.  Janghowon is known for its peaches, as everyplace in Korea seems to be famous for something.  So we went to the peach festival that is apparently held yearly and got to eat a TON of them.  They are not crunchy.  They are not dry.  They are big, and soft, and juicy and sweet.  I never really liked peaches back in the states, but over here I am eating SO many, as was referenced in previous blogs.  So Saturday morning me and Nate (the other guy from Texas who is a half-Korean TaLK scholar) took the walk.  We went all the way through Gamgok, then all the way through Janghowon, and on the opposite side of the downtown area we crossed a highway.  We continued up the road a ways past a school and some high rise apartments out into what looked to be the country.  Finally after passing a couple fields there was a little sign that told us we were there.

The first thing we were greeted with upon arriving at the festival was a ride that looked like a magnet for frivolous lawsuits.  The ride was one of those ones where you spin around, except this one was equipped with hydraulics.  When the ride would stop spinning, they would bounce the thing up and down at an angle.  The purpose of this was to try and dislodge the riders from the seats.  So kids were falling everywhere.  They would then be allowed to return to their seats, before the operator rotated it a bit more and bounced it again trying to shake the kids off.  I was kind of horrified, but at the same time it looked like ten year old me would have been all about that.  Me and Nate walked around for a bit while I watched him play some carnival games.  They were the typical ridiculously hard games with cool prizes to entice you into playing.  I think he ended up winning a yo-yo and a dolphin.  We ate some free peaches and had some peach makkoli.  Makgeolli (both spellings are correct) is like a thick semi carbonated rice wine.  Apparently they drink it a lot on hikes up mountains and such.  It was quite delicious.  We also ate bindaettok which was also freakin' delicious.  Having had a little bit of Makkoli, we decided it would be best if we continued our day drinking, so we took it over to a tent that sold beer and food.  We had maekju (beer) and soju (weak rice vodka) and sat there having a good time.  There is this concept in Korea called "service" where they give you free stuff.  Usually this comes in the form of a plate of snacks at the local hoff or a free pack of tissues with a full tank of gas, but this time came in the form of free food.  The lady set down the food in front of us and I knew immediately I was not going to eat it.  Pictures forthcoming.  It was a plate of what looked like heart valves and liver.  I actually tried a bit of liver, but it was just simply too gamey for me to eat.  The taste stuck with me.  I don't like that.  Later they gave us some fishcake soup, which if you have never had it is delicious.  It's basically mashed up fish with some breading served in a soup.  I had figured I would be coming back the next day with some friends who said they wanted to try these famous peaches, so I didn't really want to stay out that long.  After eating enough and drinking enough we had pretty much had seen all of the festival so we continued our night out.

Catching a taxi into town for a couple thousand won that was hailed for us by a Korean Marine we wound up at the "western" bar.  Foreigner bars here are the only places I have seen that have an actual bar.  Everyplace else I have been to is called a "Hof" (핲) and they are big tables where you are waited on and order pitchers of beer and bottles of soju.  This western bar was a place where I could order some whiskey for the first time since I've been here.  They had my favorite scotch, Macallan, and my favorite whiskey, Makers Mark.  After a few drinks and a small dispute over the bill (apparently each shot is 9 bucks.  I expected it to be expensive, but that is highway robbery) we headed out again.  I was with Nate, and he is 22.  Being 22 he drinks like a 22 year old: fast and furious.  We walked home and stopped to get a cheap beer at a convenience store on the way and were invited over to the table of some Korean gentleman who were talking.  We had a nice little conversation about schools and families, because everyone likes the picture of Mark and Rachel at the Marine Corps Ball I have in my wallet.  We talked about Baseball, and I bragged that the Texas Rangers were number 1.  After awhile I believe we wore out our welcome because the gentleman sitting next to me said "time to go."  He didn't have to tell me twice, but Nate was so shmammered that I had to coax him back to our apartment.  I definitely remember one point where he drunkenly sat on someones scooter while I tried to convince him what a bad idea that was.  He said "I'm not leaving till you take a picture of me on this scooter" then put on the helmet and I snapped the photo.  I vaguely remember getting a slice of pizza to eat at the convenience store, but can't remember if I heated it up before eating it.  Good times, good times.  I helped Nate upstairs into his apartment, then went back to my own and turned in for the night.  What seemed like a night filled with adventures took place in little to no time apparently, as we were in bed before 11:30.

Last night was fun also.  We had our first meeting of the Eumseong area teachers.  I got to meet all the people who had been here longer than me, and I pretty much knew the other two people that arrived at the same time as me.  There was another South African, a few Englishman, and a few Americans.  We met up for dinner at a Korean bbq place and ate massive amounts of grilled meats, then talked about education in a large classroom for a bit.  After dinner we headed out to a local hof and had some beers.  The conversation was good and I got to talk to the South African for awhile.  She has been here a year and a half along with her brother and sister.  The brother and sister moved to Seoul, but she decided to stay here in the middle of nowhere.  She probably lives in the smallest town out of any of us.  She only has two other foreigners living there, a Russian who is married to a Korean man and speaks fluent Korean, and a Phillipino woman who is in the same situation.  She has therefore been pretty much forced to learn Korean.  I heard her speak it, and it is WAAAAYYY better than mine.  I have promised myself that I will hang out with this girl to give her A) an English speaking friend, and B) someone to teach Korean to.  I hear it everyday but don't understand it yet.  I really want to learn this language though.  It stinks that I am so far out that I can't take a Korean class anywhere.  I am tentatively planning to move to a bigger city next year.  I would have to reapply through EPIK and forgo any sort of raise in pay, but I would be near my friends, and in civilization, which is looking more appealing every time I want to hang out with someone on a school night.  I will see how I feel in a couple months, but after that I will need to start turning the wheels for my application process if I am really serious about it.  Also, now is the time for me to get reacquainted with my graduate degree, as it would provide a pay raise no matter what job I am in.

So as I was saying at the beginning of the post, this game Bastion is themed around loss of innocence and the impermanence of all things.  It is narrated by a scratchy voiced man who tells you exactly how things are, and it is probably the best eight dollars I have ever spent on a video game.  Hopefully you listened to both those sad tracks in the beginning.  When playing the game I almost tried not to finish the part where they played because they were so hauntingly beautiful, but when I did, I was rewarded with this song.  It combines both previous tracks into a melody that is even more beautiful.  I suppose the reason I had so much fun with the game was that the theme of change is what really hit home for me.  In a time of my life where friends seemed to be falling off like snakeskin, and job prospects were receding like a low-tide, I was able to take comfort in the fact that I am who I always have been.  The only thing constant in my life is me, and I will stand against these feelings of hopelessness like the monolith that I am.  Consistently have I been met with challenges, and although they seem to grow in magnitude, I grow faster.  Planning and forethought have brought me this far, and my journey will continue as long as I can ride that wave of change instead of trying to stand in opposition.  Luckily I have spent a long time stretching and growing socially, morally, intellectually and now culturally.  I bid you all good day, and hope you are safe, warm and surrounded by people who love you.