Weekend!

We started Friday with a visit to Choshun National University. This was the sight of the Gwangu Uprising in the 1970s, a student fronted opposition to the military run government of the time. The school was the site of protests, demonstrations, and clashes between students and police into the 1990s. There is now a museum in what was the main administration to commemorate these events. and the students who died for the cause of democracy. We got a tour of the campus and the museum after meeting with the president. The university has an exchange agreement with Stonybrook, and the exchange has not been flourishing as much as it was in the beginning. This visit was a way to foster this exchange again, since our team leader is in charge of International Student admissions at Stonybrook. Our guide for the morning works in the University's international center, as well as heads the Gwangu International Center, an organization funded mainly by donations to help foreigners navigate Korean life. He was an indispensable guide to the university. He treated us to lunch in the school's cafeteria. For about $3, you can get a full meal--rice, soup and vegetables. For about $0.50 more, you can add a heartier soup or a meat dish. We had too much food on the table again, but not as much as in a restaurant.
We spent the afternoon at the Butterfly Festival-this was voted one of the best Festivals of 2010. There were a number of green houses set up, the last one full of flowers and butterflies. We tried our first Korean Ice Cream--coffee is a popular flavor, and I tried a mix of coffee flavored ice and vanilla ice cream, it was like a very cold latte. It came with it's own little fold up spoon, which is pretty brilliant if you ask me. I also bought a large ceramic bowl from an artist who had a stand set up at the festival-I didn't manage to get a picture of it, and it's now too well wrapped that I'd be scared to open it up. I saw it and fell in love with it, enough to decide to carry it home when I learned that they don't really take care of shipping to the states from here. I'll have to ship something home however, as I've already filled up my extra duffel bag, and the gifts for our host families don't take up all that much room in my luggage.
We ended our festival experience with a snack of rice rolled around veggies and some crab meat-similar to sushi rolls but with cooked ingredients. This is traditional Korean picnic food. Our hosts added some rice wine and a spicy skate fish dish to this snack, and we sat under a tarp roof and chatted for a bit. Though this probably would have been enough for us for the evening, we of course had to go to dinner after, for beef ribs. These came to the table cooked, but went on a hot plate for heating and a nice caramelization. There was a bit of raspberry wine at dinner as well, which went surprisingly well with the beef considering it's sweetness. We went to a 'singing room' for Karaoke after dinner, for about half an hour we sang and danced a bit, before heading back home. A quick stop to check email, then we were off to bed for our next big day.

Saturday was a Rotary Club picnic. We took a bus to an island off the coast of Gwanju, a bridge had recently been built connecting the island to the mainland. Driving on a bridge over the ocean is pretty cool when there's not much else to see except bridge, ocean and mountains. There were many speeches today, and as usual they were translated between English and Korean, but this time we where treated to a three way translation--Chinese to Korean to English. Our leader's mother language is Mandarin, and one of the club members in this club is a professor of Chinese language and literature. It was very interesting to be at the tail end of a three way interpretation.

We started the day at a dwarf tree park, where beautiful bonsai type trees were scattered through out the park, along with beautiful stone sculptures. There was a series of waterfalls flowing around the park as well. We walked down to a restaurant for lunch of very fresh raw fish, along with clams and crab claws. Even using a restaurant's bathroom can be a cultural experience. In this one, you go outside the restaurant, up some stone steps around the back, down a corridor past the guard dogs and drying laundry, to a "women's" restroom with a urinal outside the toilet stall. But there was a toilet, which was better than the facilities later in the day. After lunch we walked down to the end of the parking lot, which butted up to the rocky shore, and took some pictures. After lunch we got back on the bus and drove up to an elementary school, where we used their field for a picnic. Apparently Koreans eat lunch before picnics. We did manage to work up an appetite with some games however--recycle hockey, which was a relay race where you use a broom to push a bottle down the field, around a person, and back before handing off the broom. We also played some football/baseball, or Korean Kickball. We ended in a tie, which was a pretty good showing since it was the Americans (with a few ringers) vs some very experienced and athletic Koreans. After more food (including some delicious pumpkin rice cakes) we headed back to the city. The hour long bus ride was made more interesting since the party bus we were on also had Karaoke. I shouldn't have expected any less with the sparkly floor and disco lights in the roof. We were roped into singing--I sang Crazy Little Thing Called Love with some backup from the other girls. The Koreans tended to sing slower songs, but we weren't really up for that. We went to dinner at a place famous for octopus, which is served whole, and cut at the table. It was good, but spicy, so I didn't eat much--not that I needed to after all we had eaten the whole day. I still have not figured out how Korean people stay so skinny, with all of this food. After dinner we went to another singing room (this group likes to sing) with a mix of more up beat songs in with the slower Korean ballads. After all of this, we happily collapsed into our beds, and got to sleep in this morning. We're now on our own for a few hours, before the 4pm transfer of luggage to our next host family. Free time is a beautiful thing, especially when your life is scheduled so tightly that you have to think long and hard about using the restroom before moving onto the next activity.