Finally Settled Down in America!

Its been a year since we came back from South Korea!  We still eat a lot of rice, but its hard to find good kimchi!  We spent this year getting over reverse culture shock and figuring out how the US works Riley worked part-time as a consultant and part-time as a job seeker.  It paid off!  Riley finally started work this month in East Tennessee! 
After spending half of this year working at a State Park, its weird not getting to walk around in the woods everyday.  Now its my time to apply for jobs.  I am volunteering at various interesting organizations in the area, and I want to start a new blog on nature-y things.  This will hopefully keep me sharp and give my future employer something to look at.
Thank you for all our faithful readers!  I hope you enjoyed our Korean Adventure as much as we did!

Seorak-san National Park

If you think about it, National Parks in South Korea are about the equivalent of State Parks in North Carolina.  South Korea is similar in area to NC, and thus the many national parks cannot all be like the ones in the entire USA.  This was definitely true with Gyereongsan  National Park near our city in South Korea.  However, in our last week in South Korea, we visited a national park that would be worthy of that title in any size country, Seoraksan National Park.  We barely scraped the surface of the miles and miles (or kilometers and kilometers) of hiking that could be done in this park.  It is a huge mountain range in the NE corner.  From this mountain range there is a continuous slope to the Pacific Ocean.  Its amazing to climb up the mountains and then view the ocean.

We stayed at the town of Sokcho (famous for squid), and bused to the national park.  Sokcho is amazing in itself having once been a park of North Korea before the war moved the border North.  Many North Korean refugees settled in the area, so the food is supposed to be a mix of North and South.

Some of Sokcho's famous squid

Back to the mountain climbing, we decided to climb the rocks on the edge of the park to get a good view of the rest of the park that we didn't have enough time to explore.  On the way we climbed past two places where you could stop and eat.  It was very strange, suddenly there were a lot of outdoor tables, a bathroom, and a restaurant with ladies trying to sell you water and rice wine.

Right before the extremely steep part was a small Buddhist cave and a famous rock that you were supposed to try to wobble.  Apparently large groups are able to shake it, but it never will fall.  We were not strong enough to move it, but we tried.

Trying to wobble the rock!

 Oh, and I forgot to mention that around the temple, carved into the surrounding rocks were poems!  Lots and lots of poems, in old Korean i.e. Chinese.  We couldn't read any of them, but they were still pretty.

Next came the steep steps that went up and up and up.  We finally made it to the top, and the view was amazing!  Every direction there were forests and mountains, until the land evened off towards the ocean.  Even more amazing, there was a little shop at the very top that sold coffee and ramen.  The person who runs that little shop must be in really good shape.  The rest of the park was really pretty, someday we have to go back and explore the rest.

The view from the top

Later we hiked up a river to a waterfall.  It was also beautiful.  Also not to be missed is the local history museum!  They have architecture from different areas of North Korea, and we got to see an amazing performance of the spinney hat drum guys!  It was the best one I have seen in Korea, and the only other people watching were kindergartners, so we had a great view!  This is probably one of the most remote and most beautiful areas in all of South Korea!

Membership Training

Membership Training, or "MT" as it is called in konglish, is a time where labs or departments go off and bond.  Traditionally, there is no actual "training" involved.  Usually, it is a time for students to get together and bond without professors, and there is lots of alcohol involved.  Our lab is very very odd in that the professor actually wants to get to know his students outside the lab, and that he does not drink alcohol.
When he decided that our lab should have an MT, the Koreans in our lab had no idea what to do.  We found it amusing because there are hundreds of little team building games that we could use, but the people planning had trouble thinking outside the traditional "MT" box, especially when they learned both our professor and the new research professor wanted to come along and participate in the games.  Having fun with your professor is a scary thing for some people.
We also needed to have a different MT because two members of our lab are Muslim and don't drink, and one of the guys brought his wife and 1 year old son with him.  It was a lot of fun having them around, and the traditional MT wasn't going to work.
We ended up going to a "pension" (a large, rent-able vacation home) in a very beautiful part of Korea.

The view behind our pension.

Behind the pension was a giant mudflat full of oysters.  When you walked on the path between them, the oysters would squirt at you.  It was a drizzly day, so the clouds looked amazing!
There I learned many new things about my labmates.  First of all, the Korean guys like to dance to k-pop (even dances done by girls).  Secondly, Koreans are afraid of moths because their mothers told them that the dust from their wings are toxic (NOT TRUE!).  And last, singing is a common talent.  We ran out of games and switched to a talent show.  Everyone either sang or danced except me (I played spoons).
The next day we went to the shore and saw a famous rock feature while playing in tidal pools.

Dr. Yim, Irfan, and Riley in front of the famous rocks.

Then we ate tons of clams and went home.  It was really nice.  Even though this was a different sort of MT, I think the Koreans still had a good time.  Our professor is trying to change the culture of the labs one person at a time!

But wait, there's more!

Some of you may know that Riley and I are actually moved back to the US and are no longer in South Korea eating kimchi.  Though this is true, this does not mean we are done with this blog.  The last few weeks in Korea were hectic, so there is a small back log of blog posts that I did not get a chance to put up.  Coming soon will be a description of our lab's "MT," a visit to the most beautiful place in South Korea, a list of what we will miss (and not miss) in Korea, and our reverse culture shock experiences! 
Before the back log of posts, I thought I would update you on how we are doing.  Riley now has a master's degree in Nuclear and Quantum Engineering (the quantum part sounds cool, but we are not sure what it actually means).  He is currently applying to lots and lots of jobs, and today he scheduled his first phone interview!  Where we will end up is still unknown, but we will be within at least one day's driving of all the parents.
While Riley applies to jobs, I get to run around and do all the little stuff that needs to get done when you switch countries.  We bought a car!  We have independence!  Job-wise, since I can get jobs in many places, but Riley can only get jobs in a few places, I have to wait.  After we figure out where we will live, I will be applying to lots of places!
Meanwhile, we are staying with my parents, so if you want to visit look for us there.  There is lots of room and its beautiful here!
One tidbit of reverse culture shock, when we bought our car and had to sign our names, there was plenty of room and we didn't have to squeeze our signature into the little box they use for the official red stamps.  Its little things like that that will stick with us for a while.

Camping Korean Style!

This blog post could also be called Sapshido 2, since we went to this island last year for a service trip, but this year we went early to go camping.  This was the first time we went to an actual campground in Korea, before we just found a nice place on the river.  This time we had a site, a shower, a bathroom, a small store that sold ice cream and bottled water, and neighbors.  This is all very normal things when you go camping.  So, you are wondering, what is different about Korean camping vs US camping?

Well, it seems Koreans view camping differently than I am used to.  (Disclaimer: Please remember that all this is compared to how I (Margaret) have camped growing up.  This will affect some of the opinions about why you should camp, but I do at least have extensive experience with various styles of campgrounds.)
Anyways, Koreans like to sit outside and cook lots of food on their nice gas grills that they brought, then they sit at the table they brought, sit on the benches that they brought, and eat.  Then they lay back in their open tents and nap while the kids run around.  The campground was next to a nice beach, so between the large meals and the snacks, the kids went to the beach and the men went fishing or clam digging.  The wives, between cooking and cleaning up, would just nap.

What I have failed to mention is the most obvious strange thing about Korean camping.  The reason I have such detailed information on how Koreans camp, is because there is no space between sites.  Tents are set right next to each other.  You also have to bring everything because your site is a 12ft x 12ft square of ground.  That's it.  The one we were at didn't even have sites mapped out, you just had to squeeze it in where you could.

Each tent is on a separate site.  You can't see our tent, but its a lot smaller than the tents you see.

Camping was a lot of fun.  We spent the morning peering into tidal pools and finding anemones, and spent the afternoon hiking all the way around the island (it took about 4 hours).  After our busy day, we went swimming at the beach.

Now, the other difference between US and Korean camping is the idea that there is only one way to camp.  (The idea that there is a "best" way to do everything pervades society here and explains a lot about Korea generally.)  We stood out in many many ways, and this caused concern for some, and we got lots of strange looks.  It didn't help we had the site closest to the edge that everyone had to walk by to go to the store, cars, shower, bathroom, and beach.  Every time people would walk by, especially when we were cooking, we would get long looks out of the corner of people's eyes. 

One evening it started raining, and all the men grabbed their shovels and dug trenches.  We are assuming that they get all their camping skills from the military.  It didn't matter to them that we were camping on sand and the rain didn't even leave a puddle, much less be affected by trenches.  We had trenches dug for us, since we obviously had no camping experience or adequate camping equipment and were basically considered to be helpless foreigners.  After the rain stopped, we had a concerned guy come up to our tent who was extremely concerned that our trenches were too shallow and our tent too small.  He was also worried that we didn't have a lantern hanging up somewhere.  We tried to convey that we were fine, everything in our tent was dry, and we didn't have a lot of stuff because we carried everything there on our backs.  Seeing that we put our backpack on the bare sand, he gave us a lot of giant plastic bags to put our stuff in and our bags on.  He even put our bag of plastic bags in a bag.  It was all very nice, but it conveys how concerned they were that we did not bring a huge tent with tables, benches, and the kitchen sink.

So in summary, Korean camping is car camping with a lot of food and relaxing, but not in seclusion.  This may be similar to what other people do (though how you can go camping and not explore stuff is beyond me), but the two major differences is that the sites are closely packed and anyone who does things differently is considered very strange.

Our tiny tent with our tiny stove and our tiny "table."

Grading and Parking Garages

Even though we have lived in Korea for almost 2 years now, there are still little things that surprise me.  For example, the concept of tissue paper is foreign here.  Whenever I asked for it they started heading to the Kleenex. 

Two other little things have caught my attention.  Riley got his papers back from one of his classes, and they were covered with 0s.  It looked like he had gotten no points at all for most of his answers.  This was extra strange since he got 100 or greater on all of them.  We found out the a 0 is the same as a check mark here.  Xs still mean the same things, but triangles mean you get partial credit.

The other thing I saw recently is the amazing parking garages!  I don't know if this is a city thing everywhere, but the signs in the parking garage I went into were better than any I had ever been to before.  As you are driving around, each aisle has a little light up sign that tells you if there are any free spaces down that way.  If there is a free space and you turn to go down the aisle, you just look for the green light on the ceiling that indicates there isn't a car below it.  Once you park, the light turns red, and the aisle number goes down one.  This solves the drive around in circle problem common to most parking garages!  Alas, they have not come up with an easy way to remember where you parked your car.

Sam Gye Tang!

There is a soup that you are supposed to drink here in the summer.  I know, I was skeptical about soup in the summer, but this soup is so delicious that it is worth eating any time of the year.  The original Korean calender had 24 months, and on the first day of the three hottest months, you are supposed to eat this soup.
Ok, the English name is Chicken Ginseng Stew.  You get a whole little chicken in a bowl with rice and ginseng.  The chicken is stuffed with garlic, a chestnut, and a jujube.  The soup is supposed to give you energy to face the heat of the summer.  The protein and ginseng are energy foods.  However, the soup just made us really full and happy.  This is a recipe I will definitely try to make in America.

Delicious Samgyetang!  Your own personal chicken in a bowl.