A group of us went about 3 hours East of Seoul to Vivaldi Park - Jin, Misang, Jaesang, Yongsu, Yongsu's friend (I cannot remember his name, and if he ever sees this blog, I apologize), and me. We car-pooled in two cars, and I got to see some beautiful countryside. Especially scenic was where 2 rivers converged to become the Han River, with mountains all around. I also noticed that there are greenhouses all over the place. I asked Jin about them, and she said that they dont stop farming just because its winter -- just use a greenhouse. I can see how Korea would need to use lots of greenhouses, given the high population and relative lack of arable land.
Close to Vivaldi Park, we rented a house for Saturday night for 160,000 won, which, divided among 6 people, was a good deal. Saturday morning, we had bought all the food supplies we needed for a little party, Korean-style. That night, we grilled the meat in the back-yard and had a feast. In the picture, we had the house on the right.
Unfortunately, since I didn't buy a memory card for the camera, I could not take many pictures. I ran out of memory before we even got to the snowboarding...
I also got to eat something that I think most Americans would gag at (this was actually 2 nights before, but I may as well put it in this post). I ate live octopus. Jin and Misang wanted to see if I could eat it, so we went looking for a restaurant specializing in weird food from the sea. Live octopus, called "Nakji" (낙지, I think), is a favorite in Korea. It is chopped up into smaller parts, all still wiggling, and simply put on a dish in front of you. There is a sauce that you dip it in - I think the sauce is sesame oil and salt. Nakji is chewy to the extreme, and the suckers kept sucking onto my tongue and teeth. It actually tasted pretty good, and was really fun. That restaurant had all sorts of other sea-creatures alive in big tanks on the street-side, including several squid and sea-cucumbers. I will try those others some other time. This kind of food is actually pretty normal in Korea, and is cheap too. As you watch the video below, you will hear my sonorous "wow" - I hate hearing my own voice recorded...
We also ate fried shrimp. The Korean way of eating these shrimp is to first break the head off, then either suck the brains out of the head or eat the body. When you eat the body, you dont pull off the legs - you eat those too - and you don't discard the tail - the tail is just the crunchier part. This dish was one of the best-tasting foods I have ever had - even the shrimp brains were good!
Back to the snowboarding; it was a lot of fun - hard, but fun. After what seemed like a horizontal (EDIT: vertical? lol..) learning curve, I finally got the hang of it, in a rather basic way. Jin is very good at it, gliding around like a bird in the air, even snowboarding backward as she tried to teach me. It is a very tiring sport, and I felt the front of my legs burning from exhaustion before I even began. Also, those open-air ski-lifts can be a bit scary when you are up high and the wind blows. It was a fun weekend, and I hope to snowboard again in the future.
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