Bosung

Monday:
Monday, we packed up our stuff, and left Jinju at nine to start heading the next city. First stop of the day was Daehan Dawon, a famous gorgeous tea field (better to be known as tea hill, because it’s up a mountain) around Bosung. The Bosung area is known for it’s 녹차 (green tea). We climbed up the hills, took a bunch of pictures, ate some green tea icecream, and moved on to the next town.

The next town, 삼수마을 (Samsu town), we had lunch, and then were sent into the corn fields behind the town hall. Everyone picked two heads each for the ladies in the town hall to boil for us. I also got destroyed by mosquitoes in the process. After we finished picking corn, we went back into the town hall for a Korean tea serving demonstration. It was really interesting to watch. I thought it would be just like tea ceremony in Japan, but it was actually quite different to many ways. The only thing similar about it is that they were both art forms. When the tea demonstration ended, the corn we picked came out and everyone stuffed themselves with corn on the cob. It’s so good they way they make corn here!

Around 4:30pm, we finally arrived at our next hotel, Oksum Beach Mansion. The place has a whole little kitchenette, which makes me a bit jealous since we don’t even have one at home. We got a corner room with a good view, but once again was a small room with mats and pillows on the floor.

Even though our hotel was right on the water, we had to take a 15 minute bus to get to the beach where we could swim. We headed out to the beach at 5:30, but there wasn’t too much or see to do there. It was pretty much a village, and didn’t have a PC café or anything. It was easy to get bored quite fast.

At 10pm we got back to the room finally, and everyone was kinda tired. We started setting up our beds, and then a large grey and orange centipede the size of an unused crayon crawled out of Jacqueline’s bedding. Her and Mary started freaking out, so I grabbed some tissues and went after it. As I was trying to kill it, it STUNG me, so we captured it underneath a bowl instead. Tyler came down and grabbed a bunch more tissues and killed it.

The night ended with me going to the local hospital to get two shots because apparently there are poisonous centipedes here. A girl got bit by a centipede on the ankle last year on the trip, and thought nothing of it, but the next day went swimming and her ankle swelled up huge.

Tuesday:
No radioactive bug signs were visible, so I guess I survived. We started the day with going into the beach town to have a FULL AMERICAN CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST. Really unexpected, but a welcome change. We’ll be having breakfast there the next two days as well. We’re all looking forward to that.

After breakfast, we went to Nakan Upsung, a village the sits on the site of an old fortress that defended itself against Japanese pirates long ago. We had lunch there, and were gonna head to the beach again, but it started raining, so everyone just went back to their rooms to practice for the play. I have new lines because some stuff got switched around in our script. I slept through my group’s practice because I was really tired, and missed out learning the steps for our big dance performance at the end. Only one more day to go, so I gotta learn it! Pretty slow day cause of the rain.

Wednesday:
We got up same time as Tuesday to go have some more continental breakfast.

After that, we hiked up 다산초당 (Dasan Chodang), the estate of some scholar who lived there while in exile from the royal palace in Seoul. The hike was really beautiful, and at the top was this temple called 백련사 (Baek-ryun-sa).

We returned to the beach after that to practice for the plays that evening. 동선 (Dongsun), another friend from Temple who lives not too far away, came to visit and watched us rehearse. At 6pm, the show began, and EVERYONE's performance was so great and funny. I can't wait to see the video back of our performances. A lot of people did really great jobs. During one scene in ours, I was a waitress, and I had to go off to the side for a moment and come back with alcohol for the customer. I had two small bottles of soju in my back pockets, and people said I looked like I was pulling bottles out of my butt.

Someone mentioned that morning that there was internet at DaBichi Condo where we'd been having our breakfast, so after the performance, when Dongsun went home, I went to DaBichi and sat on the internet for a while getting stuff done.


P.S. I’ve started trying to practice reading and writing in Russian. My goal is to be able to read and write at least 40 words a minute by the end of September. At the moment, I feel like I can read about ten words a minute and write about three words a minute. But as soon as I learn the keyboard better, I should get that second number up really fast. Good luck to me, eh!
Fulbright application due September 28th.