A needed update

The main reason that I waited so long to update was because after I finished doing something really fun, I was only like two days away from something new. For instance, when I went to the rice cake museum on Saturday, I had a visit to the Cherry Blossom festival scheduled for Wednesday. So I thought, "why update now when I can include both stories in one?" And then, on Monday, I learned about the tennis tournament, which led to similar logic.

But things have piled up a little too much so I am compelled to finally update.

1) Rice Cake Museum: One of the planned events from the PEACE buddies involved going to visit a rice cake museum, glorified by the opportunity to make our own rice cakes! Rice cakes are traditional Korean snacks (maybe deserts?) that only have the faintest sweet taste -- as in, nobody would ever say they were too sweet. I've had some really bad ones before...the dull taste can sometimes feel like I am eating rice paste. So I was a little concerned over how mine would turn out. But, the extra addition of love, made sure that mine were the best ones there!

The rice cake museum was in the outskirts of Insadong (the traditional Korean area. Also it is the only place where Starbucks is spelled with Korean characters). I was pretty tired because I only had about 6 hours of sleep, but the excitement was able to overpower the fatigue. When we arrived, we sat down in a classroom, facing a chef as she taught us the steps to follow to make the rice cakes. There was also a camera focused on the table with a TV in the corner so we could see what she was doing. I laughed when she grabbed the remote to zoom in and most the room gasped "wow..."

Anyways, she spoke in Korean and far too quick for me to really understand what she was saying. She did a really good job at hand motions, so I felt confident I would not burn anything down. We then divided into teams of six and started cooking.

The first step was to peel the skins off of sweet potatoes. Koreans really like these damn potatoes because I find them everywhere. Every coffee shop I've been to has sweet potato lattes complimented with sweet potato pastries. Let me just say, for the record, sweet potato lattes are really gross. It is like a sweeter milk with potato floating around inside. I only drank it because I already paid for it. Anyways, after we peeled the potatoes, we needed to crush them into a paste. After we did that, we needed the paste to be extremely fine by pushing it through a filter. It made me feel like I was digging for gold because I had to really crush those potatoes to get them through the small mesh bottom. When that was done, we put them inside this huge pot on the stove to cook them with steam (boiling water at the bottom). And then we had our food!

I may be missing a couple steps in the process. It took us about an hour (with six people), but we were also making something else. Additionally, those steps are only what I worked on because I was concentrating too much on my work to pay much attention to what the others were doing.

Finally, with the rice cake museum, I have to express my confusion about the names. I thought that rice cakes were the little colored pastries seen below, but all we did with those was try to get red bean inside. And everyone kept calling the cake-looking thing a rice cake. Anyways, I am not 100% sure which is which. Google suggested that rice cakes were the colored pastries.

Wait, I need a finally-post-script. We "made" the colored pastries as well. What I mean by that is that the dough was already made and our job was to flatten it out, add in the red bean, and then roll it into a good enough ball to keep the red bean from coming out. These were considered successful if you couldn't see the red bean on the edges, but instead only in the middle.



This is the cake thing that we made with sweet potatoes and some other things (God help me, I can't remember). With four groups, our cake tied for second place...but there was also a tie for first...


These were what I always thought were rice cakes. The tiny pink one was made by me when there was only a little dough left. The Japanese girls in my group thought it was weird that I was naming the ones I made. Actually, everybody thought it was weird. As you can see in the four surrounding Wilbur (the baby rice cake), the red bean is clearly visible on the sides, which means that we didn't do that great of a job on those. But mine was pretty amazing!



I did such a good job that the chef gave me a certificate of appreciation...



...Then I found out she gave one to everybody. That smile was hard to fake because it was covering my crushed spirit...


We had Wednesday off from classes for General Election Day. From what I can tell, whenever there is an election, schools shut down as well as some companies. With my Wednesday, I was going to watch the tennis team play in a tournament followed by an afternoon trip to see the Cherry Blossom Festival.

Tennis is essentially the same as back in the States with a few minor changes, most noted before. It was my first trip to the Yonsei University tennis courts -- let me just say, I do NOT understand why Koreans build tennis courts at the highest elevation on the whole campus. It took me 20 minutes of walking to the highest point to find the tennis courts, followed by getting lost because Yonsei posts no signs for the courts.

Tennis matches at the University level is fairly different than I am used to. There really aren't any 1 vs. 1 matches, but rather, an actual tournament with teams from each university. It is also fairly easy to be playing someone from your own school. Koreans are also very competitive, but maintain the image of respect. There was one instance where the ball landed close to the line and the team that called it out asked for the other players to come over and examine the spot where the ball landed. They sat for a solid four minutes talking about whether the mark on the clay court (I was so stoked to find that Koreans play on clay) was the right one, followed by if that mark was in or out. After one team won the call, the team that lost the point bowed and thanked their opponents.

Since I am on tennis, I will go over how the tournament went with me. It was in the same format as the one at Yonsei. I planned to play mixed doubles with a friend that studied abroad at Colombia University for the 2007 academic year. I got to play on clay for the second time in my life, but the first match of my life. All the Koreans are able to slide everywhere they go, but I really struggled with that and only slid when I changed directions quickly and lost my balance. I was expecting to slide much more and was ready to be injured by tripping, but it didn't happen.

We also were playing only one set with no-add scoring. We won our first match 6-3. The next team we were playing was really unique because the female played in men's doubles as well. I felt, as we went into the match after watching them destroy a really good team, that we were pretty much screwed. I was pretty happy when we won our first game at 0-3, then happier when we won the next two, and then even happier when we were up 4-3. I felt that we could actually win, especially after winning a match point at 4-5 and tying the set at 5-5 for a tiebreaker. We got down 1-5 and game back to sadly lose 5-7 on a really easy ball that I should have put away. It was very exciting and both my partner and I had huge smiles after the match. Our opponents really seemed beat and ended up forfeiting their next match from shoulder pain.

One thing that really bothers me about Korean tennis is the way that women play with men. What I mean by that is that the men never serve hard to the girls and, when it gets competitive, seem to sideline their female partners. In my match, the man served huge to me but barely lobbed it in to my partner. I asked my partner before the match what she thought of that and she said how women like it that way because it makes the man appear like a gentleman. I was having trouble doing that because it came off as so demeaning -- like saying that she isn't good enough to play with me at my best, so I will try to make it as easy for you as possible.

Additionally, when I watched the following rounds, the male would literally jump in front of his female partner to take a volley that she was perfectly capable of hitting. The matches were boring to watch as it was the two girls standing at the net as the guys played from the baseline, occasionally lobbing the girl at the net and then the women shifted sides. In the whole set, I couldn't imagine each girl hitting more than 20 shots (serves excluded).

Being the only foreigner at the tournament also served a huge advantage. Whenever anybody was hitting to me, they tried really hard to blast the ball or hit a winner on me. If I was at the net, the returner would just hammer the ball down the line (see also, right at me) but would blow the shot and miss by a strong 7 or 8 feet. I think they must have been very nervous around me. I did notice the trend that they seemed to want me to make the mistake...

At the end of the day (I was there from 1PM to 9PM), we celebrated Korean style (drinking). We went to this bar that was close by and ordered some food and alcohol. Part of Korean culture is for the boss, elder or host to pay for everything. After we ordered about $80 worth of food and drinks at our table, the captain of the host university came over, introduced himself, and said that everything was on him. He told us to enjoy our night. I looked around the bar and saw six tables of tennis players and I would guess that each table was probably close to what we were at...meaning that guy might be leaving the night paying around $500 or so.

As we were leaving, I started looking for him to thank him for being so kind. It was really interesting, but at each table I walked up to, everybody stood up and yelled "ERIK!" I kid you not, but every tennis player at that bar knew my name and who I was. It still feels weird knowing that I will see these people in the future, being unable to recall their faces or names, and they will completely remember me.

Last story: The Cherry Blossom Festival. Although spring is here, the weather does not really indicate that. It is slowly getting warmer, but sunshine is still a precious commodity as clouds taint the sky. Notwithstanding, I only know it is turning into spring because of the beautiful plants that are starting to bloom. Yeoido (I think that is the spelling) has a Cheery Blossom Festival each year--well, not really a festival. I really don't know what to call it because there are all these advertisements for the festival but it is only a park on the Han River that has really pretty trees and shrubs. I thought I may have missed the festival part. When I told people that I went, they were surprised I went alone. Because it is popular for couples to go, they thought that there was something wrong with me for not taking my girlfriend (not having a girlfriend seems to also be a problem).


I can't remember if I discussed how ordering delivery works in Korea. They, quite literally, deliver anywhere. We were talking about what to order and within twenty minutes, two guys on mopeds delivered this food to us at the tennis courts. They leave the plates and such and then pick them up at a later time. This is Chinese food. Localization of food is still entertaining to me; enjoying Chinese food in Korea and having everything taste different than American-Chinese food -- or even Indian food (I had some like two weeks ago) and noticing all the differences. As part of Korean culture, the captain would not let me contribute any money for the meal, but instead treated us all.



This picture was taken at Yeoido. This boat was on the Han River as these kids came off. I thought it was really cute. Additionally, the giant steps that they had to climb to get back on the main path were larger than their legs. I slowed down to watch them try to climb these stairs that were half their size. If all the kids had the orange suits the ones in the back have, this caption would involve juvenile detention while in Korea.


A Cherry Blossom tree in Korea. Look at the sky -- where are you sunshine?!


I was walking around with some time to burn and I really liked this picture. The place with the umbrella is a small newsstand, if I remember right. It is also common to see stores like that selling fish, produce, brooms, rice cakes and so forth.

I have midterms this week followed by a hopeful trip to Japan on Friday. I am not sure if anything eventful enough will come up before Friday, but if not, I get to write a long post about my trip to Osaka!