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Tea Tour Part 2: Real Live Horses Invade Nampodong!

This weekend cultural groups from Japan, China and Korea are coming to Busan part of the Joseon Tongsinsa Busan Festival. It starts this Thursday May 5th and goes until Sunday May 8th. It is a festival commemorating the time during the Joeseon Dynasty when Japan, China and Korea were at peace with eachother and were trading heavily. During that time trade delegations from Seoul would travel down to Busan where they would embark by ship to Japan.
What they don't tell you is that there will be a parade reenacting that time when an embassador would embark with his delegation to Japan to trade. The parade will also include real live horses and will take place Saturday at 2:00. At 2 there will be a few speeches and everyone in the parade will assemble in the park beneath Nampo tower. At 3:00 the parade will start, going down the hill and around a corner to proceed down the street past the Zen Buddhist temple heading towards the statuary, police station and roundabout.
It will be very crowded, most especially when the parade ends which will a good time to drop by one of the many teahouses along the parade route. (at the bottom of this post I've provided a tea map).

Here's the statue where the parade will pass. Up the street there's a great place for Korean teasets (usually 30,000-40,000 won). Just go up this street passing between the Police station on your right and good Calvin Klein on your right.

Another way to go is one street in from that main street. The one with all the food stands. You'll pass behind the 2F Chinese restaurant and behind the Zen Buddhist temple. Just after the temple on your left will be a women's underwear shop. Turn left at that shop.

From the main street you'll come to Cafe Pascucci and Shakers bar. Across from those two is a narrow alley with a few adjumas and sewing machines (4 sewing machines...there used to be more years before). Go down sewing machine alley to the underwear shop. Pass the underwear still going straight.

Heres the underwear shop on the left. Just walk under the umbrella keeping the undies on your left, empty grey building pictured here on your right. You'll suddenly pass several 2nd hand clothing shops. Right next to the 2nd hand clothes you'll find...

TAMINA!! The place where everything is always on sale. Tis the place for Korean teasets. One set comes with teapot, tea cooling bowl and several cups. Hands down the cheapest place in Busan for a proper Korean style teaset.

If hardware is not your thing there's a place that sells great floral teas in small packets: 5000 won per pack. It's also where I got a great Pu'er tea/Boey cha. To get there start at the statue. With ABC mart to your back and the police station to your right go along with the traffic down the curvy street. Eventually you'll get to a

gate with two drug stores on either side. The gate says 만물의 거리or everything's street. Go through the gate up the street to near the end.

Going up that street you'll pass electric/lighting shops then it'll change to alot of great touristy stuff; t-shirts scrolls etc. near the end of the street on your right you'll finally find...

The trickly named 이은수도예공방 or Lee Eun Soo pottery making place. They don't make pottery there but sell tea hardware and steepables. I bought a western style teaset there : teapot with mesh insert and teacups for 10,000 won! There are still a few deals like that there!! She also sells flower and herbal teas as well as the classic Chinese Pu'er tea. Just ask to see her Boey Cha if you like. Her flower teas sell for 5,000 won each.

Also in the area are two teahouses. One serves an excellent Pu'er tea and another has the best green leaf tea to be had in Busan.

The best place for Pu'er tea in Busan is right across from the Nampo hill escalator. At the foot of the escalator you'll see what is pictured here: Cafe Bene and a Nike shop. To the left of the Nike shop you'll see on the 2nd floor a sign for a teashop/teahouse.

The sign is tea in Chinese with DaHengJung in Korean. It is a large teashop with 2 enterances on either street. They sell mostly Pu'er tea/Boey Cha. It is THE place for a fine cup of Pu'er and the store owner is quite knowledgeable. For ordering and what to do once you sit down there, just order 보이차 and see my earlier post on Boey cha here.

If green tea is your thing, well, then just head up the street. Go upstream (towards the car traffic) from the statue until you get to the Krispy Kreme donut shop.

Here you can see the donut shop above, on the extreme right hand corner of this photo is Seoul Katdoogi. Across the street from that you can see a rectangular green sign. It says "Green Tea House" in English letters on it. Just go on up the stairs to the left of the clothing shop.

The teahouse is called 소화방 or white flower room according to the Chinese characters on the sign. It's on the 3rd floor.

As you can see from the pics there are plenty of seats. With a menu in available in Japanese, this place is quite popular with the Japanese tourists.

There are 3-4 booths with 4 seats in each. One booth has 8 seats so there is plenty of room to bring your pals.

They have a variety of teas here but are known for their green teas. This is one of the two places in Busan where you can get Japanese style powdered green tea in a bowl 말차 or Mal cha. Here they don't give you very much but it comes with Mochi the ultimate tea savory. More on that later...

I do recommend either of their two leaf green teas: Ujeon or Saejak tea. Earlier I blogged about ujeon green tea. Saejak green tea is picked one month later than Ujeon green tea and is also called "Sparrows tongue tea" because the leaves are so tiny. When you order either Ujeon Cha or Saejak cha they will bring you a teaboard as pictured below:

Simply pour the hot water into the teabowl. This is to measure out the right amount as the teapot holds more than the teabowl. The water should not be steaming. If its steaming its too hot and you'll get less flavor out of your leaves. Let the water cool a bit in the bowl then pour it into the pot. The little stand is for the teapot lid. After about 30 seconds pour the tea into the bowl. For Saejak tea anything over 30seconds of steeping will give you a bitter taste to your tea. On really hot summer days I recommend Saejak tea as it is quite refreshing almost like a fine peppermint tea would be.

I trust this is enough tea info for you to start your journey. I most highly recommend 소화방 or white flower room, it is quite relaxing and a great way to decompress from the crowds. Those subways are going to be absolutely packed after the parade and what better way to relax and wait for it all do die down than with a fine cup of tea? Another must see in Nampodong is the Zen Buddhist temple. Feel free to walk around to the back side of the temple. Theres a great ledge from where you can look down upon all the shoppers there. Either way, Nampodong this May 7th weekend is the place to be! For more help with directions, do see the map @ the bottom of this post. Best wishes, and stay steeped! -- MWT.

큰 지도에서 Tea Treasure Map Of Busan 보기

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About the Author

Matthew William Thivierge has abandoned his PhD studies in Shakespeare and is now currently almost half-way through becoming a tea-master (Japanese,Korean & Chinese tea ceremony). He is a part time Ninjologist with some Jagaek studies (Korean 'ninja') and on occasion views the carrying on of pirates from his balcony mounted telescope.

Blogs
About Tea Busan * Mr.T's Chanoyu てさん茶の湯 * East Sea Scrolls * East Orient Steampunk Society

Amazing Korean Art: Kim Joon (김준)

Born in 1966 in Seoul, Kim Joon is a contemporary Korean artist whose work focuses on the human body and nudity. Playing on the taboos surrounding tatoos in Korean culture, the human relation to nudity and the aesthetics of the fragmented body Kim Joon has been experimenting with various colors and designs. Using his technique of "mouse painting", he paints bodies with everything from traditional Asian patterns to logos of famous luxury brands. You can check his website for more awesome art. My personal favorite's the Dragon - Fragile print featured below :)

Birdland - Chrysler

Cradle Song - Ferragamo

Dragon - Fragile

Duet - Horse

We - BMW

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www.daily-korean-stuff.com

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Guest post:

This guest post is from a member of Nanoomi.net, a community of writers, translators and Korea-enthusiasts who represent part of the diverse ecology of the Korean blogosphere. You can see more from Charles Montgomery at ktlit.com.

It’s a puzzle how someone interested in something as specific as translated Korean modern literature might have anything to say on Chris’s blog.

It’s about exploration. Chris travels relentlessly, to find interesting destinations and report on them. He also writes about Korean culture so as to introduce it to the wider world.

Brilliant! That kind of exploration is what Korean modern literature has been to me.

If you are outside of Korea and can’t precisely follow Chris’ tracks through the urban/suburban/jungle of Korea, I’m here to give you two quick pointers as to how you can follow it in literature.

Chris loves the road-trip, and so do I. So here are two Korean road-trip stories – one a traditional road-trip, the other a road “trip.”

The Choe In-ho’s Deep Blue Night is a combination of a travelogue and that most quintessential American literary form, the buddy road-trip. The story begins with an unnamed narrator waking up after a paralyzing night of drinking. He is revealed to be Hyeong, a man on a road-trip with his friend Jun-ho, who has been exiled from Korea because of a drug arrest.

They have traveled an average Korean tourist arc, Disneyland, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, San Francisco, and now they are on their return trip to Los Angeles. Hyeong travels to escape, saying, “The sole purpose of his journey was not to see … His journey to America was a journey to a self-chosen land of exile.” (45)

Deep Blue Night is often an amusing read. Jun-ho is presented as a pretty clearly identifiable character, the amiable pot-smoking dolt. Choe’s writing is expressive (and often surprising) as in his description of sunset on the coast;

“The army of the sea launches a concentrated fusillade against the disintegrating realm of heaven. Shells explode in a burst of sparks, illuminating the darkness on high with shards of light.” (57)

Choe uses automotive speed in a way quite similar to Kim Young-ha’s use in I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, as a metaphor for the modern separation each one of us endures.

At the end Hyeong and Jun-ho are stranded, car dead, on a highway they hadn’t intended to follow. Only then do they come face to face with their isolation and exile. Lost, weeping, dazed and repentant they both promise/beg to return home. Deep Blue Night concludes with Hyeong broken on the beach, his desires clear, but his future opaque.

You can read a longer review here at KTLIT.

Having mentioned Kim Young-ha’s excellent in I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, I think I should briefly discuss it.

I Have The Right To Destroy Myself is a short novel that attempts quite a lot and achieves almost everything it attempts, and one that describes the modern dissociative state of Korea in its repetitive scenes of a character speeding relentlessly down Korean freeways and characters endless trips from here to there.

To be fair it also describes that dissociative state in terms of assisted suicide, narcissistic absorption in art, and sex. Which is kind of the quadrifecta, in modern literature. It reveals a modern Korea in which everyone is traveling, frantically trying to find meaning, but in the end just traveling. So, you know, just like Chris.^^

This work “travels” in another way with it’s internationality, which is unusual for Korean fiction. Kim casually drops references to Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat and Gustav Klimt’s Judith. Consumerist, modern, and fatalist, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself is the perfect introduction to postmodern Korea.

As you close the back cover of this book you’ll wish that, maybe, there had been a bit more. The clever balances, the counterpoised aesthetics, the omniscient narrator whose omniscience is possibly unmoored from reality, and the alternately propulsive and comfortably numb plot? All of these combine in a uniquely satisfying way.

A longer and quite different review can be found here at KTLIT.

And now.. back to Chris!

Thanks to Charles over at ktlit.com! For other interesting bloggers across the Korean blogosphere, check out nanoomi.net for a wide variety of people blogging around Korea. If you’re more interested in seeing what’s new in Korean literature, check out Charles’s noble blog.

© Chris Backe – 2011
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This post was originally published on my blog, Chris in South Korea. If you are reading this on another website and there is no linkback or credit given, you are reading an UNAUTHORIZED FEED.

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Korea Spring Phrase Two

No garden here, so this is my attempt at spinach on my window ledge.

7 Things About Korea: Festivals

More-so than anything else, Korea is a country obsessed with festivals. You'll find them for most anything - ranging from religious inspired festivals such as Seoul's Lantern Festival (for Buddha's Birthday) to debaucherous borderline orgies such as Boryeong's (in)famous Mud Festival.

While it's true that a lot of the Korean social experience seems to revolve around consuming vast quantities of alcohol and making out with your peers, there's also a lot of opportunities to get out and interact with people without the influence of alcohol. A year round calendar of festivals means that, if you're game, you'll rarely have a weekend where you won't have the option to get out of town and soak up a little bit of the local culture.

The best time of your for the festival 'circuit' is most definitely the spring and summer months. Starting with the Cherry Blossom Festival in Jinhae and working all the way through to July's Mud Festival and October's Kimchi Festival in Gwangju, there's all manner of weird and wonderful experiences to be had. I won't go through a blow by blow, and I've written on a few of these festivals in the past, but here are just a few of the highlights of the Korean festival calendar.

Jinhae's Cherry Blossom Festival marks the start of warmer weather in South Korea

In late April and early May, the sleepy town of Hampyeong is transformed by the Butterfly Festival - a mix of floral displays, carnival attractions, and giant insect statues like the above.

Boryeong's Mud Festival is the highlight of the Korean festival calendar for most. A week long orgy of drinking, mud wrestling, and good times on a sunny Korean beach

January's festival highlight is the Ice Festival in Hwacheon. Fancy a game of ice soccer, some trout fishing in the frozen rivers, and the epic challenge of plunging into icy water to try and catch a fish with your bare hands? It's all on tap in this very Korean way of celebrating the bitterly cold winter months.

March sees the Cheongdo Bull Fighting Festival grabbing the attention of locals and foreigners alike. And before you rush off to cry animal cruelty, there's none of the dart throwing and taunting of its Latin inspiration. It's bull on bull action, and it's mostly of the head-butting variety. Cruel? A little. But it's not quite as bad as I first imagined.

April and May mark the real starting point of festival season. There's the aforementioned Cherry Blossom Festival, there is the Green Tea Festival in the gorgeous Boseong Tea Fields, Jindo's Sea Parting Festival (in which a land bridge temporarily revealed by annual tidal movement allows thousands to walk between two islands usually separated by the ocean), and the Firefly Festival in Muju.

Of the above I've managed to do the Jindo Sea Parting Festival once and I would definitely recommend it. It's wet and it smells and damned if it isn't crowded, but it's one of the less commercial festivals and there's a fascinating story behind the whole affair. Plus there's something surreal about standing on a slightly raised patch of land and being surrounded on both sides by the Yellow Sea.

Seoul and Jinju both have their own Lantern Festivals which offer some spectacular night-time displays, and Gwangju's Kimchi Festival gives tourists and locals the chance to make their own kimchi to take home to the family.

Not so interested in Korean culture? There's two very epic music festivals in Korea that offer up something a little different that street food and crowds of jostling ajoshi and ajummas. In May, Seoul's World DJ Festival brings some of the biggest names in the world of dance, house, and trance music to the banks of the Han River for two nights of thumping beats, scantily clad foreigners and locals grinding up on one another, and sleepless nights. I've not had the pleasure of making it myself, but every one of my friends who has gone have had a fantastic time and highly recommended it.

Dance not your thing? Incheon and Busan both have international rock festivals offering up both local and foreign acts. In a country where Wonder Girls and Big Bang dominate the air waves, it's a welcome chance to hear some authentic Korean punk rock or screamcore. You've not really seen Korea until you've seen that, I assure you. Busan's event even takes place on the beach, so you can hit the waves in between sets to wash off the sweat.

That said, Korea's most famous rock festival takes place in the Jisan Valley in July. 2011's edition is headlined by Incubus and the Arctic Monkeys, so you can expect to see heavy hitters each and every year.

As you can see, Koreans love their festivals. While I've listed the choicest of choice up above, there's plenty of others: the Slow Walking Festival being the strangest I've encountered. So get out, check Facebook and tourist websites regularly, and soak up some of the local flavor!

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Got a burning question that you can't fit into one comment? Need to contact me for a travel tip? Feeling generous and want to donate $1,000,000 to my travel fund? Want me to visit your town and tell the world about it?

For all of the above reasons and many more, here are my contact details.

Skype: CWBush83
Twitter: CWBush
MSN: CWBush83 (at) hotmail.com
Email: CWBush83 (at) gmail.com

Wierd Teaching Hours? Try Freelancing Online

I Should’ve Posted This Earlier
Working as an instructor in Korea means some strange hours. For teachers at schools, you may end early. For teachers at hagwons, you generally start late. For business English instructors, there are the normal blocks of times (early morning, lunch, after work) when you teach. Maybe you need some extra money (who doesn’t).

Freelancer.com Isn’t a Scam: I’ve Used It Myself
You should check out www.freelancer.com. Its like a global Craigslist for part-time jobs that can be done from a remote location. You bid as a freelancer for a particular job. You agree to terms, and are paid via PayPal. Simple as that. I had to have some data-entry work done, I posted the job on Freelancer.com, someone from another country (Philippines) bid on it, that person finished the work, and I paid that person via PayPal after I confirmed that the work had been completed. I didn’t have the time, and someone else had the exact skills necessary to take documents, etc and do the work that I required. Voila.

Flexible Hours, Different Skills, Extra Pocket Money: Perfect
Of course, there are those that really need serious outsourcing for serious work. However, given the huge variety of instructors in Korea who have very different backgrounds, Freelancer.com is a viable alternative because the part-time work on projects can work within your schedule. You will be stunned at the different types of jobs that are available on the site. Article-writing (no, not on the Seoul Gyopo Guide) to computer programming, small jobs to huge jobs, it makes total sense why Freelancer.com exists. It is one of those niche services that a person should wonder “why the %*&^ didn’t I think of creating that?”

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www.seoulgyopoguide.com www.twitter.com/thelostseoul

Maybe Samsung Hasn’t Won Quite Yet

No Surprise Here: Apple v Samsung Is a Long Way from Over
The mK Business Daily may have changed its (i)tune in today’s article. Unlike the previous article on this topic, the subject of this post, the new article points out that Apple may replace Samsung components with other manufacturers’ components. These components just happen to be used in the very popular (and profitable) iPhone and the iPad. While the Galaxy Tab may be a fine tablet and the Galaxy S is a very good smartphone, Apple must be one of Samsung’s most important customers. The same cannot be said in reverse.
In any case, these are only the opening chapters in an ongoing feud between global giants. The Seoul Gyopo Guide has no opinion on the eventual outcome, other than the fact that we wouldn’t be quick to presume that either party has a clear advantage, as has been written in the mK Business Daily.

North Korean Zombie Attacks (NK Links Dump)

Amid reports of ROK-US military drills near the “five western islands” near the disputed Northern Limit Line and zombie computers spearheading DDoS attacks against South Korea, Doug Bandow asks, Why Are U.S. Troops Still In Korea?

During the Cold War the two Koreas were part of a “great game” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The peninsula mattered not because it was intrinsically important to America — just consult any atlas — but because the battle between the two Koreas was tied to the larger global struggle. Today conquest of the South by Pyongyang would be a humanitarian tragedy and create an economic loss, but would have little geopolitical impact on America. And now, in contrast to 1950, the ROK is well able to defend itself.

Some advocates of permanent defense subsidies for Seoul point to the DPRK’s nuclear program. There is no easy answer to the threat of North Korean nuclear proliferation: It might be better for the South to have its own nuclear deterrent than for the U.S. to stay involved. In any case, America’s conventional forces do nothing to deter a North Korean nuclear attack. To the contrary, the U.S. has provided 28,500 nuclear hostages for Pyongyang to threaten. The North’s nuclear program actually is yet another reason for America to bring home its troops.

Just what Seoul finds important became murkier after a “senior South Korean government official” implied, that six-party talks and inter-Korean denuclearization talks were separate tracks, and that a North Korean apology for the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island and the sinking of ROKS Cheonan was only aprecondition for the former. (Yonhap and Hankyoreh)

In another report, Amnesty International provides new information about North Korea’s gulags.

A rights group has published satellite images of what it says are North Korea’s political prison camps, saying they appear to be growing in size. In a linked report, Amnesty International also provides new witness testimony to shed light on the conditions in the camps. The document details accounts of torture, starvation and mass executions of political inmates.

Filed under: Human Rights, Korea, Link Dumps, Military, USA, WMD Tagged: amnesty international, ddos attacks, doug bandow, gulags, north korea, roks cheonan, six party talks, South Korea, yeonpyeong

Destination: Jongmyo Daeje

Held on the first Sunday of May, the annual Jongmyo Daeje (종묘대제) is an intriguing glimpse into the solemn ceremonies for the spirit world. It seems a mite out of place in this ultra-modern country, but if the US can have Civil War reenactments, Korea can have their annual ceremonies.

While I had done some reading on the ceremony ahead of time, a brochure picked up on-site offered the basics to the 12 steps of the ceremony. A larger 50-page booklet offered everything from congratulatory messages to the names and pictures of the musical instruments to come. A trilingual 30,000 won book was also available, which went into even more detail.

While the crowd waited outside the South Gate (cropped out of picture), security guards of both the modern and traditional type kept watch over the crowd. This wasn’t exactly a ceremony for the crowd, however – despite the modern touches and accouterments, there was almost no interaction with the masses.

The Daechuk – an officiant in charge of reading ritual prayers – Over a dozen other officiants had specific roles – the Choheongwan, who offers the first glass of wine, the Sajun, who pours wine into the cup, and the Gwansewi, who helps wash hands.

The musicians file in, taking their seats in one of several places on Jongmyo’s large stone pavilion:

Instrumentalists and dancers both had their performances in-between prayers offered to the spirits. Although the large screens to either side offered a nice view and some English, everything else was in Korean.

Considering it only comes around once a year, there was plenty of media on hand.
Although the same ceremonial elements were happening in front of each of 19 spirits, the press were only allowed close to the left-most side.

A solemn ceremonial dance – one of several different dances.

The mortarboard-like coronet, which according to my book had 12 strings with jade beads of seven different colors.

While extremely elaborate and detailed, I couldn’t tell you it was fun. At just under five pages long, the procedural list of who gives what to whom and when makes a Western wedding look like an elementary school play. If you’re a big fan of traditional Korean culture and have read enough to truly appreciate the details, this would be a lot more interesting. Jongmyo itself is a wonderful experience – calm, quiet, and peaceful – but the annual ceremony probably won’t be your cup of tea.

Ratings (out of 5 taeguks): How do I rate destinations?
Ease to arrive:

Foreigner-friendly:

Convenience facilities:

Worth the visit: