Reflections Enroute » Korea

My Feet, A Feast for Fish

corinne — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 08:53:57 +0000

”Oh come on, Jim, you’ll like it….really!” That’s me imploring Jim that he cannot pass up the opportunity to have his fishy foot massage. Asia is famous for its massages, and let me tell you, those human hands don’t hold a candle to the attention that these little fishes pay to some dry and deserving feet.

What you do: As you walk into Dr. Fish- Spa, Books, and Cafe, you must pay to hang out. The cafe boasts an impressive “self-bar”, which consists of three types of bread and a watered down tea. The houses are rather small in this country, so to socialize folks go to a cafe, order tea, have snacks, and hang out. It’s rather peaceful, and someone else has to do the cleanup.

In order to sit, though, you must consume something, so we order the “self-bar”, then head over to load up our 4,000 won (about $4) of bread. We also have paid for the “spa treatment”, which set us back another whopping 2,000 won. We were handed a number and found a cute little table, near the bookshelf (there’s only one), and eat, chat, and wait.

Finally, we’ve eaten more bread than we should have all week, and our number is called. We go over to the platform, take off our shoes, and are instructed to wash our feet, then climb in feet first into the fish pool. Immediately we are swarmed by little fishes devouring every stray piece of skin that our body isn’t tightly holding onto. It tickles; it doesn’t hurt at all, but the idea that there are piranha-like beings eating my flesh is just a little unnerving.

After you get used to it, it begins to feel pretty good, but alas, you are only allotted 15 minutes. Afterwards, we wash our feet once again, have it sprayed with some type of disenfectant (the most distressing part of the ordeal – for obvious reasons), and on go our shoes. We are allowed to go get more bread, but Dr. Atkins is screaming at us, so we decide to call it a day. I have to tell you, my feet have never felt so soft!

How to Eat Shabu Shabu

corinne — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 08:35:34 +0000

A couple of years ago, the “English” teachers, took Devon and I to this fantastic restaurant and introduced us to Shabu Shabu; it quickly became our favorite Korean dish. This meal supposedly originally came to Korea with the invading Mongols. Jim and I are anxious to see if we have anything like it in Mongolia where ol’ Genghis himself hailed from. All of us had had Shabu Shabu in Japan, and in theory it could be the same dish, but this is definitely one item that trumps the one from Japan. In Japan, the waitress brings you a plate of mushrooms, vegetables, and meat, you dump the whole mess into a pot of boiling clear, unseseasoned broth, and when you are ready, you eat it. It’s not bad, in fact it’s pretty good, especially on a cold winter’s day. However the Korean dish is so much more.

One thing that is fantastic in Korea is that if you look like a foreigner, the waiters and waitresses will help you eat. Even though burner is situated in the middle of the table, so that you can have full control over your meal, they will show you (read do it for you) what to do.

First you are brought a two-tiered wooden plate, and on the bottom tier there are lettuce leaves, a ball of rice, topped with a few roasted sesame seeds, carefully arranged into bite-sized portions. On the top level you have finely sliced beef, frozen and rolled into a tube. Meanwhile the broth, well-seasoned with kimchee and red pepper is boiling rapidly in the pot.

You take your chopsticks, pick up one tube of beef, and carefully swish it back and forth through the broth until it is completely cooked. This takes only a matter of seconds, but the difficult part here is not loosening your grip on your chopsticks, lest you will lose your meat!

When the meat is cooked, you can dip it in the soy sauce and drop it on one of the rice/lettuce portions, then pile it with bean paste, onions, and whatever else you want to put on it, then shove the entire thing into your mouth. Repeat this until all your lettuce, rice, and meat has been consumed. Delicious!

Oh, we’re not done yet. You still have your soup to eat. While you’ve been swishing and eating your beef, the vegetables have been cooking, and they are just about ready. Now you put the noodles in the pot and chat for about 5-7 minutes. At that point, have someone ladle out the soup. Be careful, those noodles are long and you will need to use the scissors to cut them into manageable lengths or you will splatter yourself with a red broth that is impossible to get out of your blouse (yes, that is experience talking).

When your belly and taste buds just can’t take anymore, you have the option of adding rice and seaweed flakes to the remaining mixture; this is cooked scraping the sides to get every last morsel of spice and food to kind of fry your rice. This is a yummy end to the meal, if you can make it that long. Jim and I were only able to do this twice in three years!

Shabu Shabu is not just a meal, but an experience. Don’t pass up the chance to go. Our favorite restaurant, which is pictured here, is a chain and they have restaurants located all over Korea, so there’s no excuse for you not to find one!

The Killer Trek to the Buddha of Health

corinne — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 08:11:11 +0000

Famous in Daegu is a stone Buddha with a hat. We’ve never seen a Buddha stature with a hat before, except for the many images of it plastered all over the city. It would be criminal to have lived in Daegu three years and never climbed Mt. Palgong to see it. So we did. We did it! It was tough, but we persevered! Boy, did our thigh muscles scream for the next four days….but we did it!

We climbed up there last Sunday, exactly one week ago. As we drove up and up, we figured that great, the more we drove up the mountain, the less we would have to climb it…ok. At 8:30 in the morning, we were surprised at how many cars were already parked. Korean coffee shops don’t even open until 10:00! Apparently, this pilgrimage is worth getting up early for, or perhaps they just wanted to beat the heat. We had to park in the third parking lot, which didn’t seem too bad, until we were crawling back down; that extra 300 yards was a killer!

The walk immediately started getting steep. Someone had decided that laying rough concrete would be easier than steps or a dirt path, but it didn’t seem to help me much. The sign at the beginning said it was a mere 2.2 kilometers….no problem! After about 15 minutes of continuous climbing, we sat down to take a quick break on a rare piece of flat land. A Korean-American couple came up to talk to us, and she let us in on a secret; we really hadn’t even started yet. What?!

So after our chat, we bravely headed uphill….and we climbed, and we climbed, and we climbed. At one point there was a nun (well, we thought on the way up that she was a monk with her shaved head, but on the way down we gave her an offering and she blessed us in very melodic female voice), and right behind her was a well-made and intentional rest area. We figured that it had to be about half way. So we took a short rest and kept going.

We climbed another 20 minutes or so, with frequent stops, and came to a distance sign, only 300 meters to the top. We finally had made it two-thirds of the way. At this point we were visibly tired, and the people who passed us gave us many words of encouragement. Well, I’m assuming that’s what they were saying; it sounded sweet. I didn’t detect one bit of “Lady, if you think you can make it up this mountain with your big American body, you have another thought coming.”

We stopped at another rest area and reloaded on water, afterwards we knew we were on the final stretch, and what a stretch it was. There were a few “steps” that I had to lift my weary legs about three feet in the air to pull myself up. I really don’t know how those ancient Korean ladies do it, but there were plenty that couldn’t be a day younger than 80, and they were all kicking my booty all the way to the top!

Finally, we were there. The first stop was a window selling offerings, candles, rice, etc., and then after just a few more stairs, we saw a concrete platform packed full of prostrating pilgrims. We could hardly navigate through the throng without tromping on hands. As we came around an enclave or rocks, there he was, Gatbawi, the medecine Buddha. I suppose if you can climb that mountain, you are going to have pretty good health.

We lingered for a few minutes trying to take in the august and lively spirtual scene, but after a few photographs, we headed back down. I marveled at how they could first climb the mountain, then prostrate themselves 108 times, then climb back down. It was going to take all of my strength just get back to the car.

Going down was not any easier than going up. We gladly took advantage of the few rest stops as our legs were quickly turning to jelly. Luckily going down was much faster than going up, but the best part was, that now I got to be the encouraging one. So many Koreans gave us their blessing; it was wonderful.

If you find yourself in Daegu, take the bus to Gatbawi. Now that my thighs have recovered, I can truly say, it was worth it!

The Three Jewel Temples of Korea

corinne — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 06:39:22 +0000

We rented a car and wanted to go explore the western coast of the Korean Peninsula. We were on a quest to find the Unesco World Heritage Site ancient dolmens. A dolmen is a very large rock, somewhat shaped by tools, but basically a rock. The purpose of the rock is to cover the grave of ancestors. In the old days, Koreans would visit the dolmen and pray to their ancestors to gain favor, have a good crop, and many other types of things to make their harsh lives a little easier. As it was much more important to have a boy, the families would chisel a small hole in the dolmen and burn an offering in the hole to wish for a boy. Once you had a boy, that hole was all used up and if you, or your descendants, wanted to wish for another, you had to chisel a different offering hole. At any rate, these dolmen are scattered throughout the Korean countryside, and some are much more obvious than others. It is near impossible for a foreigner, like myself, to determine what is just a rock and what is a revered ancient burial site. What’s the answer? Go to the Dolmen Park, where the government collected over 140 of them before flooding a town with a new dam.

So, that was our destination. We did eventually make it there…the second day. It wasn’t that easy to find. Once we found it, it took approximately 20 minutes to see what there was to see, just mildly dissappointing to say the least. In comes “chance” and “opportunity” to interfere. Along the way, as we were looking for these reverent reminders of the Korean past, we drove by sign after sign that said this way to Songhwasa temple. Each time we read it; each time we pretty much ignored it. Afterall, it was not our destination.

Having exhausted the Dolmen Park, though, we had to decide where to go next. We decided to look up the Songwhasa temple in our book and see what was so darn special about it that warranted hundreds of signs pointing out its direction. As it turns out, there are three very important, or “jewel” temples, in Korea, and Songwhasa was one of them; Tongdosa ouside of Pusan, and Haeinsa outside of Daegu, are the others. Each of the three “jewel” temples holds one third of the critical aspects of Korean Buddhism. Songwhasa is a famous school for monks and has many monks still who live and learn there. Tongdosa is famous because it houses some relics of Buddha himself, and Haeinsa is the keeper of the Koreana Tripitaka, ancient Buddhist scriptures carved on wooden tablets.

Ok, at this point, we’re more than a little irritated with ourselves; after three years in Korea, we were not aware of these three “jewel” temples at all, let alone realizing that two of the three were within one and a half hours’ drive from our house. Did we feel like travel imbeciles, or what? Here we are exactly one month prior to our departure from this country and now we have another full goal to fulfill before we can leave.

All three temples were absolutely gorgeous and worth going to regardless of the added importance to the spiritural well-being of the country. Most Korean temples have been built in idyllic locations, and they are kept impeccably clean. First the pilgrim, or visitor, is required to walk to the entrance. This is not for the weak-kneed as it usually involves climbing up a hill, in which the temple seems to fit quite nicely in a valley or along the river. Once you enter the grounds, though, there is a feeling of peace and tranquility, leaving the frenetic chaos of vegetable vendors and restaurant hawkers outside the gate.

Songhwasa- As we approached this gorgeous temple, flowers were in full bloom, and the river held millions of tadpoles underneath the colorful lanterns celebrating Buddha’s birthday (May 5th). The entrance to the temple was a bridge and once inside, people go about their business. Everyone is laughing, playing, and of course praying and buying offerings. The rooves are gabled and brightly painted and the monks happily stop and talk to you, answer questions, and even lead tourist groups.

Tongdosa- When we visited this temple, we were impressed at how old it seemed. Most of the temples were built originally in the late 600s, and have weathered invasions, fires, bombings, and who know what else, but these building really seemed to be old. The paint was faded and the colors were very muted. It definitely leant a spiritual feeling to the place. Whenever I go to a temple that holds an imporatant relic, I always want to see it, but as it true of most, the relics were safe under a stone stupa. We did see the people circling the stupa praying and making offerings.

Haeinsa- we realized we had happened upon a special occasion. We never found out what it was, but there were banners hanging from the main temple, and there were hundreds of people praying with the monks, and making their 108 prostrations.