Korean School Lunch

Back in the states if you were to ask a student at most elementary schools what their favorite part of the day is many would probably say lunch and recess. Here at Samyook Elementary, most students would probably label lunch as their LEAST favorite part of the day. Why? The food. If you ask my first graders why they love field trip day the most common response is "I get to bring my own lunch." Why do they hate the food so much? As some of you may or may not know, we work at a Seventh Day Adventist school and therefore there is a "strict" vegetarian policy (more on that later...). Although vegetarian food can be delicious, a lot of what the school makes just isn't. In addition, for the most part students are required to eat everything on their plates. For the older kids this is always true, for the younger kids it is dependent on their Korean teacher. Luckily for us, the teachers don't have to clear their plates!

Most days we are served rice, soup, fruit, kimchi, and three other sides. One of these sides is a always kimchi and it is a lifesaver as it helps us finish the rice. Sometimes the other sides are great, other times we can't stand to finish them. For example, we have been served plain uncooked slabs of tofu, what can only be described as grass and twigs, and more or less flavorless jelly cubes made from acorns. And with the exception of a day here and there, the daily soup is basically intolerable. On Wednesdays we have something "special" like bibimbap, egg over the rice, curry, etc, and on Fridays we normally have some sort of noodle dish. Earlier, I said "strict" vegetarian policy loosely as there are days certain dishes taste quite fishy (kimchi is traditionally made with anchovy paste), non-synthetic meat flavorings have been used for the curries, and one of our fellow teachers that speaks Korean said he has seen spam listed on the menu before.

Without further ado, a week of school lunches:

MONDAY

Rice, tofu seaweed soup, yogurt, clementine (in season right now and delicious!). Sides (left to right): tofu potato thing; green plant with sesame oil maybe?;  raw cabbage and carrots covered with a sauce that can only be described as tasting like pureed sprinkles; kimchi. 

TUESDAY

Rice, tofu seaweed soup (a different one), apple, the plastic wrapped thing was some sort of pastry with an "apple" filling (at least that's what the kids said - it tasted nothing like apples). Sides (left to right): egg pancake; absolutely no idea what the second one was; sweet seaweed and apple slices that tasted more or less like you walked over to the nearest tide-pool, grabbed a handful of whatever was inside, and shoved it in your mouth; kimchi. 

WEDNESDAY

This was a great day! Curry over rice, chocolate cookie, chocolate soy milk, kimchi,  and korean pears which taste sort of like a mix between an apple and a pear. 

 THURSDAY

Rice, seaweed soup, persimmons. Sides (left to right): sweet potato/onion saucy thing; some sort of seaweed pancake; the dreaded acorn tofu in sauce; kimchi.

FRIDAY

Friday is pretty hit and miss, and this is the definition of a miss. Pumpkin porridge: the worst Friday meal. I can see how this could be good if it was pureed better and was lacking the rice cake balls and black beans. Also on the tray, banana soy milk, a banana, and the sides (from left to right): rice cakes with a sweet liquid filling, apple/persimmon/ clementine chunks covered in the sprinkle sauce, and kimchi.

So there you have it, a week of school lunch at Samyook Elementary School. We promise to post with some of our favorite non-school foods soon!

Boseong Tea Fields

One of the many things there is to do right near Gwangju is go to the Boseong Tea Fields. Boseong is a small town about an hour bus ride from Gwangju. We have heard there are only like 10 foreigners in the town, really different than the 20,000 in Gwangju. We didn't really get to check out town that much, as we got a late start to the day.

Once you get to Boseong, it is really easy to just jump on a city bus and get dropped off at the front entrance of a plantation. We just told the bus driver we wanted to go to the tea field, and he stopped the bus where everyone made it clear the stop was for us.

The tea fields in Boseong are massive and beautiful. And due to the mild temperatures and low humidity of the region, they produce some of the most high quality tea in Korea. If you ever see photos of tea fields from Korea, it is most likely the ones on Boseong.

There are many tea-related things you can enjoy like green tea ice cream (which was delicious) or green tea baths. While we wanted to check those out, our late start meant we didn't have the time. We ended up just hiking around and taking in the scenery. There has been discussions about returning in the Spring because one of our coworkers informed us that that was the most beautiful season to go.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Chuseok in Japan

Korea's Thanksgiving, Chuseok, is in the end of September so we had some vacation time. There also happened to be a National holiday 2 days later, so we were lucky and had 5 days off from school. We decided to take this vacation time and go to Kyoto, Japan.

We left our apartments bright and early Saturday morning at 4:30am to head to the airport. Not living near an airport like both of us are used to is really terrible; it takes 4 hours to get from Gwangju to the Inchon International Airport, sooo needless to say we had a long day of travelling ahead of us. We took an express train into Seoul, then flew to Osaka. The flight was amazing, an hour and a half and we got a full meal. This is so unusual, as Olivia flew from east to west coast USA and didn't even get peanuts.

When we arrived in Osaka, we tried to do some tourism in the city and go to the Osaka Castle, but we got in too late and it was closed. So we just walked around a park for a bit then headed to Kyoto to settle into our hostel. Our hostel was pretty nice, there was a really good common room to meet people and it also had extremely comfortable beds. After we settled in we found a little hole in the wall and got some dinner. No idea what it was, we just pointed at some pictures and a guy cooked for us. It was good though!

As close as we got to Osaka Castle. We got there too late, and it was
already closed for the evening.

Waiting for our first taste of Japanese food. See that door back there?
That wall behind us? Yeah, that was the size of the restaurant. 

Our food being cooked.

Our plan for Sunday was to walk around and look at some temples in the area. This was made rather difficult as the weather forecast called for a typhoon that afternoon. Since arriving in Asia, we have been through 4 typhoons, not very welcoming. Since the typhoon wasn't hitting until the afternoon, we woke up early and were able to walk around for a few hours and visit a few temples and shrines. Our hostel ended up being in a really great location, in the Gion District, and we were able to take a walking route to one of the more popular temples in Kyoto, Kiyomizu, which took us past several others. So we spent our day going in and out of various temples and even attending a Japanese Tea Ceremony, a very specific way to prepare and drink tea. But, but 3pm the rain and wind began picking up, so we grabbed an awesome ramen lunch then headed back to the hostel.

Our hostel's weather report.

At a temple we visited. We saw tons of these.

Olivia being Buddhist.

 Praying at the temple.

In a graveyard, downtown Kyoto behind us.

A giant stone Buddah we saw from afar.

More temples.

The room we went into for the tea ceremony.. . it was
a little bit of a struggle getting inside.

Around Kyoto there were many of these little statues to
rub for luck, wealth, health, etc.

At the Kiyumizo temple, our last stop before the typhoon hit.
The wind and rain started picking up quite a bit. 

Kiyumizo Temple

On Monday we checked out of our hostel and began the long trek to our next hostel. We decided to spend 2 nights in a hostel with beds and 2 nights in one that was more traditional Japanese where you slept on mats. However, finding this 2nd hostel proved to be a problem because our map left out some key streets. This caused us to walk around the area quite lost for quite some time. We finally found our hostel and were able to drop off our things before we headed to Nara. Nara is another little town about a half hour by train from Kyoto. We spent our day in Nara Park, a place with numerous temples and shrines, and a very large stone Buddha. Also in this park, and more importantly, were deer. These were not normal deer, they would bow to you, eat from your hand and let you pet or hug them. It was unbelievably entertaining, and definitely the highlight of the Nara excursion. Both of us now have an absurd number of pictures of deer.

Temple in Nara

Olivia getting ready to feed the baby deer.

A deer let Michelle hug it.

See, lots of deer. Many more where these came from.

Us in front of the temple with the big Buddha in Nara, Japan.

50ft stone Buddha in Nara

When we returned to our hostel, we asked a woman who worked there a good place to get sushi, and we were finally able to eat sushi in the homeland. We ate at a conveyor sushi restaurant, where there were plates of sushi on a conveyor belt going past all the tables, and if you saw one you wanted you would just take it. The plates were also only 100 yen, so about $1.20. It was nice to find a good restaurant to eat at without spending a ton of money, which is where you can end up spending a lot of your money in Japan.

The conveyor sushi restaurant we ate at a few times.

Our last day in Japan was spent slowly perusing our way around Kyoto. We went to the Imperial Park, which was where the emperor lived when the capital was in Kyoto. We were able to walk around the Imperial Palace with a tour group of what seemed like 1000 people and take pictures. All in all, not the best tour. After, we then went to the Nijo Castle. This was where the Samurais lived, it also looked way better protected than where the emperor lived. We then hopped on a bus over to Kinkaku, the Golden Pavilion, this is another Buddhist temple and is really made of gold. We weren't able to go inside, but it was a really beautiful place to walk around and take pictures. After this we still had a few hours of daylight so we went to a market where you can buy really interesting foods and pastries to try. Here we had octopus on a stick and some delicious doughnut holes. At this point, we were pretty exhausted and just biding our time until 8pm where we had heard that in the Gion District, where our first hostel was located, there was a street where you could see geishas walking around to their appointments. So while waiting, we went to another shrine (if you haven't noticed, temples and shrines were EVERYWHERE, it was great). Finally we went to see what all the geisha hype was about, and found it was over nothing. We did see 2 geisha's going into a building. There were about 100 tourists taking pictures of them, and they looked so uncomfortable.

Kinkaku - the Golden Pavilion

The main intersection of the Gion District.

A shrine we visited in Gion

A shrine we visited in Gion.

Wednesday we reached the end of our trip and headed home. We left our hostel (which was not that great and the other people staying with us kind of sucked) quite early again, and headed back to Gwangju. And again, got a full meal on our flight with delicious coffee and tea.

So, all in all this was a really fun trip. We did have some strange occurrences  like when an older Japanese man gave us presents on the bus (Olivia - air freshener, Michelle - an odd little chest of drawers) or the nice woman shop owner who was helping us find our hostel and gave us snacks while we waited for her to call around to try to find it. We also met some really nice foreigners like us, a lot were also teachers in Korea with the 5 days off for Chuseok.