Today is a quiet, rainy day, and I think all the teachers are appreciating it by laying around reading and resting. We have this week's opening ceremony, to meet the teachers and students and introduce ourselves at 4pm, but until then, not much seems to be happening.
Yesterday we visited the Korean Folk Village, which was described as a Korean Williamsburg. They're not completely wrong, but I would drop that down to a Korean Jamestown, which was much less impressive when I visited. Williamsburg goes to great lenghts to be authentic. They have actors who really pretend to live and work in that time period, and they're building an entire plantation the way it would have been built in the old days. Jamestown and the Folk Village both seem to settle for mock buildings you can't enter, and models instead of people in most of the buildings. There are live performers, but we only saw them at the folk dance and acrobatic performances. And I can't understand Korean, but honestly I'm not sure if the tightrope walker really represented a traditional Korean performance, or just something he could do in old fashioned clothing to entertain visitors.
On the other hand, it was interesting just to wander around, because the signs were in Korean and English, so we could actually understand what the different sites represented. One of the few live craftspeople was a woman spinning silk from silkworms. It's way easier than I would have guessed. They literally just pluck the silkworms from the trees, soak them in warm water, and then untangle them by yanking on one end and running the silk through a small hoop to make thread. It gets wound around a support frame, and it's crazy how strong it feels.
After the Folk Village (it's almost two hours north of us), we drove back to Daejeon, and went to the spas. We were trying to find an outdoor hot spring, but the closest one was hours away in the opposite direction from where we were. But there is an indoor hot spring/spa in Daejeon, not very far from where we're staying. It's attached to one of the hotels.
It was only $5 a person, and the men and the women go into totally separate facilities, because everyone bathes completely naked. One of the women in our group wasn't very excited about that, but as long as it's single sex, I didn't care, and neither did my younger roommate. But even the older roommate admitted she felt better once we were in the spa because, as she said, not all Korean women are young and gorgeous. There were women of all ages and shapes, so it was hard to feel self-conscious.
What was weird was that unlike the hot springs I visited in Colorado, for instance (which were outdoors and smelled very strongly of minerals, neither of which were true here), people used this spa as a literal bath. Most spas make you shower before you enter the pool or sauna or whatever, but here people brought entire shower kits, and scooped water out of the springs to rinse off. There were lots of shower areas around the side of the spa room, and people would mostly wash there, and use either water from the showers or scoop water from the baths. There was no soap in the water, so it didn't feel dirty, just unexpected.
We had noted before, as well, that Korean people are much more hands-on with people of the same gender than Westerners. And that was extremely clear in the spa. Women were scrubbing their daughters who were probably 14 years old. Women were washing other women's backs. One of my roommates wanted a massage, but mostly they do a scrub instead, where they just use a scrubby hand towel and some kind of soap/lotion, and scrubbed, in her words, "ALL over." She liked it, but she said she felt like she had a new layer of skin.
There were also two types of saunas, and four different baths, ranging from 100 to 113 degrees, and one cold bath. One of the medium baths had "waterfalls" which were just falling water that felt really good on your back when you sat under them.
After that we went to dinner, which was some amazing Korean barbeque. They bring you raw meat, pork and beef, and you put it on the grill at the table. You're supposed to wrap the meat in lettuce with whatever condiments you like - garlic, a green onion salad, a spicy sauce, kimchi - and then eat it with your hands.
Today, as I said, was our lazy day, but we went out for lunch. We thought we had walked into another Korean barbeque, but instead they brought out bowls of broth and put them on the burners in the table. The server scooped vegetables from a big platter into the bowl, and left the raw seafood and meat for us. Apparently, it's actually a Japanese way of cooking. So you wait for the broth to boil, and then you cook your meat and fish it back out again with a big spoon or tongs. We had clams, mussels, tiny whole octopi, and some kind of tiny squid. The other table had beef. I think we won. So you cook your meat and eat that and the vegetables. Then they bring noodles, which you cook in your broth, and you eat those. Then the server takes what little broth is left in your bowl, and makes a mushy rice dish, about the consistency of risotto. It's a really cool way to make broth and then use all of it. We also got a bunch of dumplings to share around, which were all good.
And now, it's about time to get ready for this week's opening ceremony. I'm still not sure whether I'm teaching high schoolers or middle schoolers this week, or whether I'm supposed to be teaching Astrobiology or Climate Change, but I guess I'll find out.
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