This Weekend: Chungju, Danyang, and Gosu Cave

[In this episode, we wander aimlessly until an ajumma hand-feeds us, get on a boat, and spelunk.]

This weekend, Kristen, Tom, and Lee, and I headed out to Chungju, a town (or tiny city), northeast of Daejeon. Chungju is the proud owner of the Chungju Dam, a hydro electric extravaganza that has created one of the most beautiful lakes in the country. There are regular ferries on this lake, too, so it's an excellent opportunity to see the Korean countryside at its (mostly) unspoiled best. The lake stretches through to Danyang, a tiny little town that is best known for the surrounding caves.

Now caving is not my usual bag, so I was pretty excited when this opportunity popped up. (We went through Adventure Korea--I wanted to introduce the 'new kids' to the wonders of weekend-tour programs, and also it seemed like the easier thing to do.) I vaguely remember tromping around in Tennessee's Cumberland Caves when I was a wee one, and I remember enjoying it immensely, but I also remember it not being nearly as cool as this.

In order to be ready for the bus in Chungju at 9:10, we decided to head into the city on Saturday night and stay in a cheap room. We didn't get out of Daejeon until about 4:00, so we didn't really have anything to do in Chungju except wander and eat. We made our way through the market, which is always intriguing. As always, I took market pictures... (I think my fascination with market pictures comes from a deep guilt of never taking market pictures in Ghana.)

Here are some various kimchi dishes for sale--I don't think it's regular kimchi because I believe that there are fish inside it.

And here are some pajamas and various Ajumma clothes for sale. I was pretty happy with the way that these pictures turned out. They are quite delightful. Anyway, after leaving the market, we wandered through a more hip district, where it seemed like all the young people were, and then we stopped in a random SamGyeopSal restaurant--which turned out to be the best decision of the trip.

SamGyeopSal is meat that you cook on your own little barbecue plate, and they bring it to you raw. Or--in this case, you retrieve the meat that you want from a buffet in the center of the restaurant, and you pay a flat price. (This one was less than eight dollars.) Here is Kristen stirring up our first batch of meat.

 However, it soon became clear that the owner of our restaurant, a wonderful enthusiastic middle aged woman [or, ajumma] , didn't see many foreigners. She decided to come talk to us, to which I sort of responded--but she had NO English, and I had only very limited Korean. (As in, I answer yes or no to what I THINK the question is.) But she was so happy to see us that she just wanted to help us understand how to eat SamGyeopSal. The whole time she insisted that the men at our table needed more garlic--to become strong men. "Maneul, MANEUUUL!" As with  all Korean dishes, there is a proper way to consume SamGyeopSal. The meat should be eaten with a tasty red sauce, with a piece of garlic and wrapped in a lettuce leaf. The wrap should be eaten in one bite, so as to avoid lettuce-wrap explosion. Anyway, Lee didn't really get it, so she did it for him--and then PUT IT IN HIS MOUTH. We were laughing hysterically as we watched him just sit there with lettuce poking out of his mouth, a look of utter horror on his face.

From there the night descended into uncontrollable laughter (it actually bordered a little on hysteria), too much food, and one seriously amazing good time. She even took a picture with us.

(from Left to Right, we have the woman, Lee, Kristen, me, and Tom.) She insisted that she was fifty five but I didn't believe her. By the end of the night, we were calling her Ommah, or mom in Korean, and she gave us delicious glass-bottle pepsi, apples, and literally fed us until we were insane. Kristen and I were laughing so hard we were crying, and it was really over absolutely nothing. We decided we'd have to get out of there before someone offered us alcohol, because we were already so far gone that that was the LAST thing we needed.

After leaving the restaurant, we walked all the way across town, back through the market, along the river, and towards the bus station so we could find a place to stay near our departure point. We ended up staying in the Love Motel district, at a neon-lit, blinking cluster of buildings that cater to Korean couples. These buildings attract patrons through sheer gaudiness, and decorate the buildings with neon lights that make them look more like a cake than a hotel. Ours was named Titanic. Quite excited about the potential sinking that we were going to do, we booked two rooms at the unbelievable price of 35,000 a night. For this 35,000, we got a working computer, a huge tv, an amazingly clean room, a bathtub with JETS, and all of this fancy madness....

Anyway these types of hotels, if you don't already know, are designed so that couples who either a. both live at home, or b. have spouses, can spend some time away from it all for cheap. These are extremely discrete places. The hallways are dark. Cars license plates are covered with blue wooden planks, in case anyone is looking for them. Keys are left in a corner in the elevator, not with the desk woman when the deed has been finished. But for travelers, these things are the best thing in the world--because they really are paradise for half the price.

Our night was uneventful. We watched a plethora of English tv, like Scrubs, and then we crashed out early. We woke early and headed back to the bus terminal, met our Adventure Korea bus, and then headed to the Chungju Dam, where I aggressively played a broken "Wack a Mole" until our ferry was ready to depart.

On the lake it was frigid, because we were traveling so fast, but it was beautiful. The water was very low, and so layers of rock were exposed, with the most intriguing coloration from years of water rising and falling.

The mountains in this part of the country are jagged, with exposed rock. They look fuzzy in the winter, because there are no leaves on the trees. The cloudy day made things seem awfully sinister, and the freezing wind on the deck added to the feeling. It was invigorating.

As we got closer to our destination, the water became greener and greener, and there was more and more rock standing there, strong, still, and perfectly straight. Like I said in my last post, there is something inherently 'Asian' in my head when I see those kinds of rock formations. It just doesn't seem to happen elsewhere, not like this.

Our final destination was a ferry terminus some ways away from Danyang, situated inside this gorgeous valley. It is a part of Korea's "Eight Famous Sceneries", or things in this area that Koreans have uniformly decided are beautiful. That includes stone pillars, climbing mountains, and an all around glorious display of rock, mountain, and water.

From the ferry terminus we left these mountains and moved onto new ones--this time mountains that we could go inside. We visited Gosu Cave, or Gosudonggul. I was really unprepared for how beautiful it was inside--I had no idea how much the earth could do in its spare time.

The cave had been developed with rather precarious looking metal stairs, but they didn't move or teeter, so I was happy. There was a course which we should take--as there always is in a Korean tourist destination--but it was not a disappointing one. Stalactites and stalagmites were everywhere, forming in groups, forming in patterns, forming in enormous organ-pipe shapes that took my breath away.

The cave walls were one thing, but the ceilings were the most impressive. Looking up, row after row after row of dripping stone could be seen, stretching up into black forever. It amazes me how long this took, and how long it went on doing this without any eyes to watch it. There are so many things under the surface of the earth that we don't know about... so many beautiful things that we won't see until we look under the barriers.

I was also extremely pleased with how my camera behaved. I switched it over into Manual and actually felt like I had some grip on the controls for the first time since I've had it... and I didn't use flash for ANY of these pictures. Props to my awesome Canon. Switching cameras before coming here was a 100% good decision. Now if only I could get up the courage to do more people shots....

Anyway, more about the cave... inside the cave there were certain points where men with digital cameras and huge flash umbrellas waited to take pictures of couples and travelers tromping the cave course. They stood in front of some of the more famous stalactite formations, and it was kind of intreguing--these older men (adjoushis--the male version of ajummas), just sitting in these boxes with cameras, attached to the metal framework of our course. It must be an odd underground job. Despite the fact that they were doing tourist things, their little booths looked industrial to me, and I got a rather cyberpunky feeling from the whole thing.

The course was wild--curving through the cave, spiral staircases, wet with water that dripped from the top of the cave--at one point my friends were twenty feet above me. Tom said he thought that the cave was overly 'sensitized' and 'touristy', but I rather liked the course and the lights that lit up the different formations. It helped me get pictures, and it helped me appreciate everything.

Anyway Gosu Cave is a must see. It's not really a day trip from Daejeon, as it took us 2 buses and about 3-4 hours to get home, but if you made a weekend out of it, you could hit up some of the other caves in the area as well. (Gosu is extremely popular for tourists, and so in the summer months may be more crowded. There are others.) Also in that area, which I plan on seeing soon, is the famous Guinsa Temple.

It's getting a little warmer, and I just keep hoping that it'll stay that way.

The ice on the streets is melting, so I might take my bike to work tomorrow. I've been down with a pretty miserable cold the past five days or so. I actually was teaching some classes on Thursday and Friday with no voice. That was real bad. Now I'm just coughing up my life every time somebody makes me laugh.

Thus, because of the sick, this weekend was really uneventful. But I've been practicing some Korean vocabulary, conjugation as best I can, and watching my favorite shows--Private Practice, Greys Anatomy, Castle. They're back from the long grave that is the "Holidays", which drives me nuts. The last thing everybody wants on the Holidays is to have their favorite shows disappear. Boo!

Anyway, now I'm eating Campbells Chicken Noodle and whistfully thinking about green, dancing trees on Minnehaha Avenue. I've been trying not to think about the relaxing summer days in my apartment, right after graduation, when the most I had to do was wander over to the park and read a book--and then occasionally go into work. I really miss the flowy green trees. Sigh. Then again I miss them every winter. Little home things just get to me every once and a while. Little things that you don't think about. Like trees, and the sound of the wind in them.

On a different note, today my Taekwondo teachers gave me food with a completely new twist. It was a creamy white soup, and I asked what it was. She replied "It is... ah, Cow Spawn soup!" .... I took this statement in stride, because I KNEW that it couldn't be true. There's no way. So I just tried to memorize the word she gave me in Korean, which was something like kong-guk, but I don't remember too well. They put some salt and pepper and onions in it.... and then we ate it with rice and it was pretty bland. (So I stuffed tons of kimchi in it.)

At work I asked a teacher friend if she understood what it was, and I asked her "this is what I thought she said..." and she replied "Yeah I have no idea, because we don't eat that..." Anyway it was one of the weirder things that has happened to me here so far. But now I'm going to be trying to figure out how anyone mistranslated something into COW SPAWN. (Especially when the soup itself tasted nothing like any kind of meat.) I was thinking it was some kind of milk soup.

Anyway. Who knows. Weird story for the day/week.

Annyeong haseyo!

WOW! .. Yeah I'm not really sure where to start.

You will notice that I am awake at 7:30am. At home it's 5.30 pm. This is strange because usually when you are jetlagged, you can't sleep when you wouldn't sleep normally. However, I am the queen of napping through the evening, so I can't figure out why I was wide awake this early. Who knows! It is a mystery of the universe.

Anyhow, yesterday I was up even earlier, 6:00am, which means that I had a pretty jam packed day. I started training yesterday, which basically consisted of my boss showing me where the teacher's guides are, and then letting me sit in on five classes. It wasn't until the two last classes, that had American teachers, that I really started to understand what my job would be like. It sounds stressful and confusing, and it kind of is, but this is the way I learn--I refer to it as the "if you throw her in the pool, she will learn to swim" method. Now I would never teach a child how to swim like that, mostly because that endangers their lives, but this is how I best learn new jobs. It just takes a big toll on you the first week or so.

I am surprised at how calm I am about things. I remember the first time I went abroad on my own--to London--I was nervous about this, and that, and all these different things. This time I am just at ease. I think it's because I'm older and better traveled, but also my bosses have put me at ease. They are great people, very kind.

I am staying at a hotel right now, because the teacher I am replacing is still in my apartment. He is leaving tonight, but my bosses said that they wanted to clean the apartment before I moved in. (Good plan!) I am really excited to have my own place--decorate everything, make myself at home. Of course, I do like the (free) broadband internet that the hotel offers... and the self-making bed and self-folding towels, haha. Anyway, though, I started to say that because wen I arrived, I pretty quickly realized that the power outlets in Korea are recessed, meaning that my converter plug wouldn't fit! It is big and square, and the outlets have round holes. (Pondering the situation, I decided that recessed outlets are silly and don't make any sense, but maybe it helps with tripping on a chord and breaking it.) I went to have lunch with my bosses, and I mentioned this problem to them, and Mr. Kim ran off and bought me an extender! I was so happy!

Okay so a note about food. FOOD IS AMAZING. Mr. Kim and Mrs. Park took me to a Japanese fusion restaurant for lunch yesterday. I had some kind of fried meat (pork or chicken) with sweet potatoes stuffed inside. Mr. Kim had the same thing only the stuffing was cheese! CHEESE! NO WAY MAN. I don't know if that is an anomaly in Korea--to have so much cheese in one meal--but I know where I will be eating if I am having a craving for a cheesy deliciousness. For dinner, we went to a restaurant where you cook your own vegetables and meat. I went with Mr. Kim and Mrs. Park and Rebecca, the other American teacher at my school. She is interesting and does well with the kids. I sat in on a class with her that was VERY rambunctious, but at least they were rambunctious and speaking English, haha.

The curriculum is simple, and I think it will be easy to learn. It's even all online, so I can check it out on my laptop! That is what I intend to be doing for the AHH million hours that I have before I need to go to work. Mr. Kim is coming to pick me up, because.. well, I don't actually know how to get from my hotel to my school. Hehe. Like I said, I'm being pretty laid back about things.

Anyway... overall I am doing well!! I am tired, but I am so excited about living here! The eye has plenty of things to feast on, from the distant mountains (!!!) to grandmothers sitting on the street selling their produce. Just from briefly walking on the street yesterday, I feel like this is going to be a fascinating fusion of old and new... where you can have a farmer sitting on the ground with beans for sale on top of a subway tunnel and next to the kind of clothing shop that would be at home on 5th Avenue.

This is going to be great, I can tell.