Creating in the Kitchen: Connecting to the World Through Food

I ran across the weblog today of a self-taught amateur "world chef" and backyard gardener (such as I aspire to be) who has dedicated his cyberspace to sharing cooking adventures of a predominantly Asian kind. Though he currently resides in the deserts of California, he spent several years of his life living abroad, including a stint in Tokyo where his first exposures to Korean cuisine bloomed into a full-fledged love affair with Asian-inspired cooking.

His background struck a chord with me, as my first experience living abroad -- teaching in central Taiwan --introduced me to foods and preparations I had never heard of before, and which tempted my curiosities unendingly. I sampled the smoke-scented of street vendors, sipped exotic teas, slurped authentic chao mian noodles and spicy chicken innards, and began peeling off the layers of Eastern gastronomy one morsel at a time. For me, my year in Asia was the beginning of what has now grown into a deep passion and appreciation for all things Eastern... not the least of which is food.

I scrolled through the pages of sumptuous photos and straight-forward narratives so carefully archived by Mr. "Evil Jungle Prince", eagerly recognizing names of Korean dishes I've sampled and beginning a mental list of others I want to try. Kimchi, for instance, has been high on my agenda of foods to prepare with my own two hands, and seeing the at least half-dozen renditions of kimchis presented on this site was encouraging, and somewhat demystifying. His version of Cubed Radish Kimchi (kkaktugi), for example, looks particularly appealing.

Mostly, however, I think I was attracted to this site not for the pretty pictures or the down-to-earth descriptions. It was a paragraph I read in his "About Me" section that seemed to echo -- almost eerily -- most own sentimentalities about food and cooking and sharing my thoughts with the world:

"...Cooking for me is... an escape of sorts. After having spent many years of my life living outside the United States, 'growing up' has meant settling down a bit. And while settling in a particular place in the world comes with it so many joys, it also means giving up one's freedom to roam around the world at will. Cooking allows me to have it both ways.

"...The act of cooking is also a form of therapy. In a world which is largely out of our control, cooking allows one to cultivate beauty and perfection... [To] prepare food with one's own hands is to exert control over an otherwise chaotic world."

Amen to self-therapy and complete creative control in the kitchen. Amen to the simplicity of wielding common ingredients to an uncommon end. And although I'm fortunate to be living abroad at the moment -- an experience which I truly am savoring, I know I won't always be so fortunate as to be immersed in the sights, sounds, and flavors of another culture. Preparing a dish from other parts of the world roots me to journeys from my past that are infused with an exotic blend of unforgettable impressions and fond memories. And perhaps that explains my fascination with not just seeing the world, but tasting it.

On Wounded Pride and Cryptic English

I don't know what's more discouraging-- watching one of my students rip her exam into shreds right before my eyes, or reading the almost cryptic writing that they hand in for their homework...

Today I handed the freshly graded exams back to my students and tried to temper their collectively wounded pride with a reminder that it's not the grade that counts, it's the effort you make. And if you truly tried your hardest, then that's what matters most. Erin, a slightly tempestuous teenager who usually keeps her lips too tightly pursed to allow a word of actual English to slip past them during class, surprised me today when she pulled what appeared to be an exacto-knife out of her innocent pencil case and began slicing her test score from the top page of her exam. She then proceeded to tear it into miniscule pieces, prompted no doubt by a duty to guard her sensitive ego from the bruising of classmates who ousted her with higher marks.

I slaved, I tell you -- slaved -- over preparing those exams. Couldn't she have had a modicum of respect and at least waited until after class to rip it up, instead of making a grand display of it on her desktop during class today? Forget her ego; what about mine?? (calm down, everybody, that's sarcasm.) That pretty much cements the deal that I struck with myself late Friday night after tearing through more paperwork than I've seen since my days working in the Human Resources department of a high-turnover company. Melanie, overzealousness is not thy friend. Time to take it down a notch and do thy job with a little less heart.

But then, I run across the seriously disjointed and almost altogether incomprehensible garble submitted by another student, Annie, later today. The handwriting was perfect, as was her spelling. But the rest of it sent me somewhere between guffaws and giggles. I will say one thing about my Korean students: for the most part, they are excellent spellers. Along with the study skills they've perfected in their Korean school system, they are more or less masters of repetition and memorization. But as I read (or tried to read) through her almost-too-short-to-qualify-as-a-paragraph paragraph, I had the funny feeling that I was reading something churned out from the "Korean to English" button on a web-based translation mill, such as BabelFish, or WordLingo:

Today with the moms and the bosom friends does a silt experience went together. Watch to shrimp, caught the clam and a beat from the silt and took the picture. And ate the lunch rice, made and did. Truth was fun. ~ ~ happy

Bosom friends. Lunch rice. This is good stuff, Annie. Just one thing -- what the hell is a silt experience?? ;) So I suppose I can't bring myself to do my job with less heart after all. These kids, snotty, sensitive, silly and everything in between, need good English like I need air to breathe. It's their ticket to a future filled with promise. Besides, at the end of the day, what matters most is that I'm making a difference, that my students are happy, and that they know they matter in this big world. I think my student Max sums it up quite memorably:

A school is funny so happy school but, school is sad too but, I Love school

On the bright side, I think it's safe to say I've got pretty good job security here in Korea... my students are going to be needing me for quite some time...

Seosanites Unite -- Foreigners on Facebook

Last Thursday night, I rode my bicycle to the Family Mart (Korea's version of the ubiquitous 7-Eleven) near Seosan's movie theater, to meet my good friend Chetty for a mid-week drink and chat. I had sent out an invite to several of the other foreigners that I've befriended in my few months here, and was expecting to see at least a couple of familiar faces sitting under the big, blue, plastic umbrellas on the corner when I pulled up. But I was bemused and surprised to instead find nearly a dozen strangers, including a couple of fresher-than-fresh recruits -- a cute young couple from the U.K., who had literally just arrived in Korea the day prior.

Over the next hour or so of laidback chatter, I realized how much things have changed since I arrived here nearly 3 1/2 months ago... And how my perceptions of Seosan as a small-town, off-the-beaten-path kind of place -- where I'd scarce cross paths with another foreigner for perhaps weeks on end -- has changed as well. I chose to come to Seosan for more reasons, obviously, than a high-rolling social life -- its charms (for me, at least) lay in its supreme accessibility to mountains and the coast, and its decent proximity to the action in Seoul (1h40 by bus isn't bad). Here, I thought, I'll have time to contemplate, meditate, and make progress on a number of personal projects that really don't require involvement by anyone other than myself. And I figured I could live with that, at least for a contract-length year. If I found myself going stir-crazy by that time, I'd just pick up and move on.

As time has passed, though, and as fate has led me smack-dab into the path of one foreigner after another, I've realized that living in Seosan really isn't quite as solitary as I had once imagined. Which isn't a bad thing, at all. It's been an education in human psychology to see how social boundaries that would exist under normal circumstances seem to all but completely fold when members of an absolute minority (such as the foreigners working as English teachers here) meet. It's almost as if we create our own little network not so much for friendship and comraderie, as for support and sanity. Getting together for a late-night conversation in the middle of the work-week, sitting on a street corner amid the trailing taillights of taxi-cabs and neon signs of nearby storefronts, we bond almost without consciousness, as if reaching out to others who also don't "fit" somehow restores our sense of belonging.

After getting home that night, I decided it was time to create an "official network" for all of us Seosan folks, especially so that the new people coming here could have a resource to tap to ease their adjustment. I've lived overseas before, and I know it can be a roller-coaster of a ride, trying to adjust to a new culture, strange foods, an incomprehensible language, and the hundreds of instances, large and small, that separate you from your former world and your place in it. It can all be quite overwhelming. Thanks to Facebook, anyone living in or around Seosan, South Korea, can find, with one click of a button, 25 other instant friends (and surely more to be found, as we get pulled into one another's paths).

And tonight, after connecting via our new Facebook group, "I Live in Seosan (and Surrounds)", about a dozen of us met together for a few rounds of bowling in Seosan's nightlife district. It was again a treat to just unwind and be social without the need to navigate language or cultural boundaries. Even if I do suck at bowling.

And I'm eager to see where this little social experiment of a foreigner community will go over time.... Will we organize activities and meet-ups more regularly? Will our numbers continue to grow? Will we find among ourselves the solution to one of the largest hurdles foreigners face while living abroad: finding a niche and filling social needs? Or will involvement in our own "exclusive foreigner circle" extricate ourselves even more from fitting in to our surroundings? Time will tell... in the meantime, I guess I better start learning a thing or two about bowling!

Highlights from Andong's MaskDance Festival

I'm back from an incredible weekend in Andong and Hahoe, where the annual Maskdance Festival is still underway. And though it was short (and I missed the traditional wooden-masked dancers, too sad!), it was worth every bit of effort (which was quite a lot) to get there. There was so much to see and do, and I'll definitely plan to return next year to catch more of the action... provided I'm still here in Korea ;) (something tells me I will be).

So, in a departure from my usual type of blog post, I'm going to make this more of a photo montage, with some brief explanations for the sake of "cultural education." Here we go ~


One of many venues within the festival complex, the Mask Theater is a covered dome stadium with a stage, where international dance troupes performed throughout the weekend. Here, Russian dancers wow the audience with a Troika or two:


And more dancers, these from the Philippines (aren't those costumes fantastic?):


At another venue, near the bank of the river, a shaman (fortune teller and spiritual vessel) entrances the crowds with her hypnotic singing (note the W10,000 bills stuffed under her hat), while a skinned pig (this is real, folks) sits just outside the tent, a token symbol of good luck and prosperity. (I actually read up a bit on this, and pigs are considered such a good omen because of their portly build, which connotes abundance and wealth, and because females produce such large litters, which symbolizes fertility. A pig's head will always be found at Shamanist ceremonies and sacrifices, as well as events such as the opening of a new business, moving to a new home, or even buying a new car. Want to read more? Look here)


Kites were flying high throughout the festival. This young guy was quite a skilled kite-flyer. Over the course of several hours, he succeeded in raising one kite after the other into the air, connected on one verrrrry long string. It was quite a spectacle:

















Food vendors lined the streets in white tents, their delicious-smelling dishes spilling out into the crowds and across the streets. You could try any one of literally hundreds of snacks and dishes, including freshly grilled corn, marinated meats on skewers, miniature waffles filled with bean paste, roasted chestnuts, corn dogs with fried potato ... I even saw a doner kebab stand!!


One of my favorite activities was dipping a calligraphy brush in a pot of thin black ink and scratching my wish onto a thin strip of paper. Following the lead of the buzzing crowd, I then wedged my paper strip between the fibers of twisted hemp strung up among tall wooden statues. What did I wish for? You'll have to see for yourself:


And last but not least, the masks themselves... wooden masks, Venetian masks, masks from all over the world... masks that begged a touristy photo-stop, masks that towered over you from their lofty perches, masks printed onto balloons, embedded into stone walls... masks lining shop fronts, spilling out of vendor's displays... mask necklaces, mask wallhangings, mask puppets, mask dolls...


So, if you're in Korea at the moment, and trying to find some last-minute ideas for how to spend the upcoming three-day weekend, run -- don't walk -- to your nearest bus station and hit the road for Andong!

Want to know more about Mask Festival? Check out these links:
Andong Mask Dance Festival
The Official Website for Maskdance Festival 2008
Korean Traditional Masks

Or, to see more of my pictures, follow this link.

At Home in Hahoe Village, Maskdance Festival 2008

What do troupes of masked performers, hoards of happy onlookers, one quaint traditional village, and a shower of shimmering fireworks have in common? If you guessed the Andong Maskdance Festival, you were right :)

This weekend marked the beginning of a ten-day celebration in Andong, Korea's south-eastern Gyeongsangbuk province -- a festival to honor the tradition of the mask and its place in cultures around the world, and in Korea's history in particular. Hahoe, home of the legendary Korean wooden masks, is steeped in the folklore surrounding their creation.

According to legend:

"A series of disasters and bad luck were happening in the peaceful and beautiful Hahoe Folk Village, and all villagers were very concerned. One day, Mr. Heo, a good person from Hahoe Folk Village, dreamed about a Folk God who told him what he must do:

'You should clean your body every day and carve a set of masks with your heart -- then all disasters will disappear. But there is one strict rule: You must finish the work within 100 days and no one is allowed to see you during the time that you are making the masks.'

"So Mr. Heo started to work on the masks. He did not tell anyone else in the village about his dream. One day, a lady who lived in the same village and who loved Mr. Heo very much, his as she waited for him. She could not bear it any more at stole a glance at him. As soon as she did this, Mr. Heo fell down and died, leaving one Mask unfinished, Imae (Foolish Servant). This is why Imae Mask does not have a chin, as it was left unfinished." [note from me: can you find it in the photo to the right?]

"Villagers of Hahoe danced with the Hahoe masks (aristocrat, scholar, young bride, meddler, Buddhist monk, butcher, old widow, young woman and foolish servant) and finally danced the village back to peace. "

Even today, Hahoe is a peaceful and beautiful folk village where life seems to carry on much the same as it did centuries ago. And despite the busloads of tourists that come from around the country (and world) to sample a taste of traditional Korean life and enjoy its peaceful ambience, it maintains some semblance of authenticity, which is part of its subtle charm.

This past weekend, I had a chance to spend a chilly night and leisurely morning soaking up the special flavor of Korean culture that Hahoe serves up on a heaping platter. I arrived by bus with a group of CouchSurfers (who converged in Andong from various points around the country) Saturday night, after poking around the festival grounds. As we stepped off the bus and into the dark night, I tugged at the cuffs of my jacket, pulling them over my hands to ward off the sting of the evening chill. We walked along a quiet dirt road which followed a riverbank until we arrived at the traditional house, Hagungje #13, which was our home for the night.

Though it was dim, as we stepped into the house, muted light emanating from an open door gave us a view of the house's unusual arrangement. It was built as a series of rooms, which comprised four outer walls, all facing an inner courtyard which was exposed to the open air. Short sets of cement steps led from the ground to any of a number of rooms, most of which served as sleeping areas. I peered inside one of the rooms and was intrigued by its small size and spartan furnishings. There was enough room for four or five bodies to lay sardine-style on a hard floor, and a "yo" (traditional Korean mattress) and stack of blankets to warm us. A window at the opposite end of the room, a simple wooden frame lined with rice paper which slid along a wooden track and latched with a fabric tie, was the only other decoration.

The kitchen, set in the back corner of the house, was bustling as the old couple living in the house began to prepare our dinner. After dropping our bags and removing our shoes, we stepped into the "dining room," a large, low-lying wooden slab near the courtyard. Although the table was quite long, our group was bursting in size, and we spilled over onto two adjacent round tables, filling up the entire area with our bodies and energetic conversation. The man of the house began what turned out to be an insanely busy job of waiting on the lot of us as we feasted on platters of steaming hot and spicy "jjim dalk," Andong's signature dish -- a mixture of chicken bits, glass noodles, leeks, and near-lethal doses of hot pepper (though somehow, I didn't think our dishes were deathly spicy).

Some of the group took off for the riverbank to watch fireworks, while others (myself included) stayed behind to finish dinner and warm up under layers of blankets. I later found out that this wasn't your typical fireworks show -- it was a special affair (...and I'm still chiding myself for missing it. I suppose there's always next year...) Seonyu Julbulnori, or traditional Korean fireworks, aren't shot from the ground, as are the festive explosions we're accustomed to. These fireworks are like gigantic sparklers strung above the ground. When they're lit, they create the ethereal feeling of falling stars or, as Roboseyo describes (and I quite like his visual), "bright flower petals floating to the ground."

[Check out this video footage from Roboseyo]

The rest of the night was a blur as round after round of soju and maggeolli found their way to our table, and the energy wound up before the evening wound down. Eventually, I retired to my shared room, tucked my too-thin blanket around my shivering body, and managed to settle into some sort of sleep (though between the winter chill and neighboring snorers, it wasn't particularly productive).

The next morning, after waking the the sounds of chirping birds outside our rice-paper window, new-found friend Adam (also an English teacher in Korea) and I did a little exploring around the village. We circled its perimeter, walking along narrow, dusty roads that tangled their way through the village, out to the edges of its rice fields and along the river, enjoying the peaceful pace of this rural respite from the busy world just outside its gates. We watched local farmers working in their fields, listened to the sound of wind blowing over vast carpets of rice crops, and even managed to find a litter of playful puppies. After putting our cameras to good use at some sort of wooden statue mini-park, we said farewell to our fair village and returned to the festival grounds to finish out the Maskdance weekend.

See more pictures of my visit to Hahoe Village here

On Missed Buses and Meditation

So I missed my night bus to Seoul Friday night. As it turns out, this wasn't the only bus leaving my behind on my journey to Andong for the Mask Festival... After an excruciatingly long week of giving and grading written exams for EGA's entire student population, I woke the next morning to find my backpack and everything in it saturated from a water bottle that had leaked slowly throughout the night... The only silver lining (thank God for silver linings) is that my camera, cell phone, and batteries were somehow spared from the flood.

I had planned to take the first express bus Saturday morning to Daejeon, one of the big hub cities in the central-western part of the country, and the place from where I'd catch an onward bus to Andong. I pedaled to the bus terminal, bought my ticket, and settled into a hard plastic seat outside the terminal, underneath the sign posted for Platform 12. While I obviously don't read Korean, the tickets are usually pretty straightforward -- with a little hangul I can manage to double-check the destination I've purchased for, and besides that, the rest is mostly numbers: departing time, ticket price, platform number, you get the idea.

I knew I had a little time to kill, so I got out a book and started reading, watching through my peripheral vision for the bus that was bound to soon pull into slot 12. Minutes went by, then ten, then twenty, and with still no bus in sight, I pulled out my cell phone to check the time. It was 8:11 AM which, for my 8:10 bus, meant it was time to start panicking. Korean buses run like Swiss clocks -- they are extremely precise on departure times, which is more than a little impressive. In my three and a half months living in Korea, I've never been on a bus that has left more than one minute late. So you can imagine my reaction at seeing the time...

The realization somehow I'd made a grave mistake, and my express bus (the only one for the next three hours) had left without me hit with incredible speed. Sure enough, after thrusting my ticket at an elderly woman sitting next to me and sputtering out what could have only sounded like confusing jibberish to her, she shook her head despondently and pointed to the opposite end of the bus terminal. And there it was confirmed, by three chainsmokers employees hovering around the apparently correct Daejeon bus platform. It was still somewhat early Saturday morning, I felt slightly drugged from the events of the past week, and was just handed the bad news that I had missed my bus...

After inspecting my ticket, one of the employees brought me back to his office, where he looked up the bus timetables and pointed out the next departure for Daejeon, which was a 0h45 wait, but an indirect bus at that (meaning that one little minute between 8:10 and 8:11 AM had cost me a minimum of 2 hours). My mind clicked and whirred, as if trying to calculate whether to it was even worth making the trip to Andong, or whether I'd be better off scrapping all of my plans and turning back for the consolation prize of a quiet weekend at home. In the end, though, I willed myself onto that next bus, determined to see the trip through. Mask Festival is one of the events that I had had my heart set on experiencing while in Korea, and I just couldn't give up that easily.

I can't quite put my finger on the moment when my attitude shifted from disappointment to enjoyment, because for sure I spent the first bit on the bus convincing myself that I'd made the right choice to hop on board. But I spent the next seven hours on highways and city roads, winding my way slowly towards the opposite side of the country, peering out tinted windows and the ever-changing landscape and losing myself in thought. Out on the open road again, flying as much by the seat of my pants and with any real itinerary to note, and riding along in the solitude of self-contemplation amid the shuffles and chatters around me, my body began to loosen. My mind began to roam free. And I felt again the raw, visceral sensation which fills me whenever I find myself in touch again with my nomadic spirit. I began to remember my place in the ebb and flow of the world around me, and the freedom that I feel when I let go of time and schedules and just let life be.

As much as I was looking forward to the festivities in Andong and meeting up with some fellow CouchSurfers for the weekend, I was finding an unusual sort of fulfillment in this lengthy bus ride eastward. It was like a meditation of sorts, and a gratitude session, and my own little noraebang (karaoke room) rolled into one, and I no doubt amused my seatmate with the Rascal Flatts melodies I spiritedly emitted (when I'm feeling the music, I just can't hold back!). I felt the energy of being in motion, the childlike wonder of new experiences surrounding me, the recognition of the gifts that my previous experiences in life have bestowed upon me, even the overwhelming emotion of gratitude for all that I have been blessed with and have had the opportunity to learn and experience. It was like a beautiful upward spiral of thought and emotion, lifting me beyond my slightly cramped seat on the bus and out into the universe of possibility.

And seven hours later, as I pulled into Andong, my spirits were high, and I felt a smiling beaming out from somewhere deep within me. I would never have imagined that a missed bus could have resulted in such a thing... maybe I should miss my bus more often...

Surviving Exam Week

Another week has bullet-trained by, dragging me along behind it as I tried to keep up with the exam prep, testing, and grading that has marked the end of the bi-monthly grading period at my hagwon (private academy). Early last week, I held review sessions with all of my students to cover the grammar points, reading passages, and vocabulary that we've focused on since the beginning of August. Meanwhile I raced to finish writing up written exams for each of 16 classes, and began entering grades and comments on 119 report cards.

It's not such an easy thing to grade students on oral comprehension or intonation, I've realized. I try to be objective and consistent from one student to the next, to consider my justification for each category on the report so that I'm not just arbitrarily entering letter grades. But it all begins to blur together after a while, and after typing the equivalent of a mini-novel, I wonder how much of my personalized comments my students and their parents are going to actually comprehend anyway. Not to be rude, that's just the reality.

Thursday and today, I administered the exams, and madly graded thousands of test questions, trying to finalize all of the scores and grades and report cards before leaving for what promised to be an exciting weekend trip to one of Korea's famous fall festivals. It was all a bit much, and by tonight at 10:00 PM when I finally got home, I nearly fell into bed with exhaustion.

I had hoped to take the last bus out of town to Seoul, and stay overnight with a soon-to-be-friend Leah, who was also going to the festival. But as it turned out, the buses finished running before I did, and there went my chance to jump-start the long journey to Andong for the weekend festivities. Perhaps it was all for the best -- this girl was in desperate need of some rest.

So as my eyes fell heavily shut against the flicker of the TV screen, I made myself a promise -- I've never been a believer in doing things halfway, which generally means I OVER-do them instead. Exam Week was no exception. But I promised myself to be more of a slacker next time around, to spend less time and less worry on these grades and written tests and rein in my strong impulse to "do the job and do it right." I'm not sure exactly what that solution is going to entail, but if it can take the edge off of the flurry of academic activity that pummeled both me and my students this week, it will be a step in the right direction.