March Showers & Adventures

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As the rhyme goes, it should be April showers which bring us May flowers, but in Korea, it seems to be March showers (and it has rained a lotttttttt here this month) that bring the wonderous cherry blossoms in April. While Toronto has experienced the first ever March with no snow recorded, Yangsan has seen almost double the amount of rain that they are used to! What a year to choose to be out of the country.

Last weekend was the 40th International Kite Flying Festival in Busan at Dadaepo Beach. We thought it might be cool to check so we gathered a group of eager foreigners and went to the beach to see the spectacle. Well, to say the Festival was exciting would be wrong. There were some cool kites, some so humongous, colourful and mostly in the form of various sea creatures, but they all just floated there in the air and didn't really do anything!

I think they called the festival "International" because they let us foreigners fly kites ("Hey, we have kite flyers from all over the world - Canada, USA, South Africa, NZ, etc!"). Yup, that's right, we each got a kite with a colourful bird on it and had a foreigners-only contest - who can get their kite the highest, the fastest. Well, this was funny because they didn't actually tie the string to the reels so when most people just let their reel loose, the string flew right off the reel and the kite was a gonner! Luckily, I am smarter than that and managed to fly my kite high in the sky for quite some time before reeling it in to take home as a souvenir. Unfortunately, I did not win the contest, but a fun time was had by all!

It was quite cold on the beach that day so we went for the perfect warm-me-up kind of lunch: gamjetang. This is a spicy soup with cabbage, onions and pork but the pork is still on the bone. You pick the meat off the bone (or it practically falls off the bone) and it's so delicious and perfect on a cold spring day.

Heading back to Yangsan, we went straight to Paul's house for the important first birthday party of baby Sonya. In Korea, birthdays are celebrated differently. There are 2 major important birthdays: 1 and 60. All the others are minor ones and aren't even celebrated most of the time. As well, everyone gains their 'year' at New Year's, so right now, every student in each grade is the same age, regardless of their birthday. So that means that even though Mike's birthday isn't until August, he would already be 28 in Korea.

So anyways, the first birthday is super important and most often families will rent a hall and have a huge celebration. In this case, however, Paul's family all lives in the US and his wife's family all lives in Seoul, so it was mostly friends at this party. Even so, it was a traditional, typical Korean birthday, which was great! We were greeted with baby Sonya dressed in hanbok, the Korean traditional dress, which was gorgeous! She loved being dressed up, except that the long dress made it impossible for her to crawl!!

Paul's wife made an amazing meal, as usual, including chopchae, a dish with glass noodles, roasted potatoes, and bulgogi. Sonya opened her presents from us all which included an English alphabet book, a play cooking set, a mini keyboard and a cute dress. Then came time for the traditional activity. A plate was filled with a few different items, each signifying something and she would choose one, which will determine her future. On the plate was a harmonica (musically inclined), a ladle (proficiency in the kitchen), 10 000W bill (will be rich), a Bible (religious importance), a camera (technology), a pen (scholar) and a dictionary (worldly). When showed the plate, Sonya was initially drawn towards the harmonica and the camera, but in the end, she chose what I'm sure most people would have: the money! haha!! This was a fun little activity and it was great to see how another culture celebrates birthdays!

Sunday, Mike and I went to Tongdosa temple with Drew and James (a newbie from England). It was rumoured that cherry blossoms might be out this weekend, so we went to the temple hoping to catch a first glimpse at some of them. Unfortunately, it was still too early (darn you cold weather and rain!). This did not stop us from walking for hours to the far reaches of the temple (it's one of the 3 largest temples in Korea, in Yangsan - we have visited it before, in September). At one of the small hermitages (small group of buildings where monks live and worship), a monk came over to talk to us and told us how to get to "paradise"! That's right, we went to paradise that day! The translation of the name of one of the hermitages is Paradise and it's said to be the most beautiful of all the hermitages (and there's at least 20) on the temple grounds!

We walked quite a long way up and down small hills to get to paradise and it was quite a nice area...not sure I would call it paradise, but it was pretty! There was a small pond there which had a skinny bridge arching over it...only the bridge had no railings or anything and looked quite dangerous (and scary!). You would be surprised at how many parents were taking their barely-able to walk 2 yr olds to climb over that bridge! There were lots of beautiful trees with flowers of every colour, which made for a nice scenery, but sitting down to enjoy the view was obstructed by the loud sounds of the construction project going on in the next building!

After a long afternoon of walking around the temple, we took the bus back into shindoshi (downtown) for dinner and prepared for the week ahead, fingers crossed that the cherry blossoms would be out next weekend.

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Photos

Pink underwear kite!
Not surprisingly, these kits are from France!

Waiting to get our kites!
Brittany, Mara, Drew and James