Well, we just got back from our first field trip. It feels just like elementary school all over again! Except this trip is probably way cooler and I'm spending less time making paper air planes and throwing rocks... Anyways, we saw as much of Korea in two days as is humanly possible. Thursday we saw an old confusion academy and a temple. Both were rich in history and were very impressive, but the weather didn't exactly help us out. It poured rain on Thursday and was somewhere in the low to mid 50's, then today it rained on and off but was only in the mid 40's. We slept at a cool Korean hotel where the rooms consisted of a large empty room with wood flooring and a bathroom. Apparently beds are out of style while roll out cushions and comforters are in here. My pile of 3 cushions provided a good night sleep but did continue the unfortunate trend of beds that are just soft enough not to be considered the floor. Thank
goodness I like firm beds! (Bummer for everyone else though)
On the top is the temple we visited on thursday, on the bottom is some lame boy band we saw at the temple... aka me and my roommates. (I still don't know what they meant by "Pop" pose) Clearly I just dropped the ball all together with the posing thing.
We had a couple of tradition meals on the field trip, one of which was a soup whose noodles looked more like disembodied parts of Gumby than actual noodles, but hey, when in rome...
And in case you haven't had this spledid dish yet, the little red "noodle" sticking out is spicy squid and the dark green flakes are seaweed. But, despite my bland, sheltered palette, I ate most of it, and didn't hate it. The noodles were "Buckwheat jelly" and actually tasted a lot like nothing and spicy squid is one of the few side dishes offered with most meals that I like. Weird right?
Some restaurants have you sit on the floor. This hasn't been a one time occurrence. All in all we ate some interesting food, saw some really fascinating temples and historical sights, got some good usage out of our umbrellas, and saw vast quantities of buddha statues, buddha worshiping monks, buddha paintings and buddha souvenirs (No, I didn't buy a buddha t-shirt or the glow-in-the-dark buddha keychain).
Here is a random picture of our group, and yes, those are real monks in the picture. We just happened to catch them off duty grabbing a smoke behind the mens room. Ok so they weren't smoking but they did just get off duty in the temple. We took somewhere in the ballpark of 8 to 45 group photos during the trip. Every other Korean owns a super fancy camera and they take pictures like there's a paycheck coming for it (I'm talking quantity, not always quality). Fortunately I'm not Doc, a tall African American guy in our group who every Korean thinks is a basketball star even though he's only played basketball a few times in his life. On occasion Korean children want to meet him or even get a picture with him, but he handles it like an All Star.
I hope you enjoyed this small depiction of our field trip in Korea. We squeezed a lot of stuff into two days and had a good time doing it. Oh I almost forgot, we watched live in a restaurant as a Korean figure skater won the gold medal today. That was pretty cool. The whole restaurant fell silent when she was skating and went nuts when she took first place. Then they all cheered when the Japanese girl who followed tripped over herself. Too bad the American girl couldn't steal the win right at the end... I would have run for cover.
Love you all, keep on keeping on in Akron, enjoy the 80 inches of snow or whatever you're getting right now, its gonna be 55 with some clouds here tomorrow, peace!
