Every third weekend of the month, the Hongbeopsa temple near Nopo-dong, Busan holds free cultural activities for foreigners to learn about traditional Korean life. The activities range from cooking many different types of food to traditional Korean instruments and music.
This past weekend Amy, Matt Hailey, and I made it out to the temple to learn how to make Kimchi!
Kimchi is a traditional fermented Korean dish, made of vegetables with varied seasonings. However, Kimchi may also refer to unfermented vegetable dishes. There are hundreds of varieties of kimchi, made with these ingredients: napa cabbage, radish, green onion or cucumber. Kimchi is the most common side dish in Korean cuisine. We've had Kimchi virtually every day since we've moved here. It's usually a little spicy, but I learned this weekend that it has only been spicy since the 1500s....Because, all peppers are New World foods (foods that were not introduced to the rest of the world until Europe invaded the Americas). Something that most people don't realize. Other New World foods include: corn, coffee, peanuts, pumpkins, chocolate, turkey and potatoes.
We met up at the Nopo-dong subway station, where the temple had vans and buses that filled up with foreigners (Weh-guks) and took us out to their beautiful temple. The temple had recently finished constructing a massive golden statue of Karishna, seated on top of the temple, that must've been 30m high. It was so big, that you can see if throughout the entire valley.
Warm faces greeted us as we entered the grounds. Upon arrival, each person received name tags, a head covering, an apron, gloves, and these forearm coverings that went over your sleeves. We made our way into an open room at the bottom of the temple, where they fed us free rice (bop) with tofu, veggies, and this awesome spicy red pepper sauce. After the quick meal, we washed our dishes and met in the adjacent room for a short powerpoint presentation-which the monks/volunteers were very excited about.
The presentation, was led by a Korean Paula Dean and a translator. We were fortunate enough that many of the volunteers at the temple spoke at least some English. She went through the ingredients and the processes that take place. She explained about the different types of Kimchi and what the type we made was like.
After the presentation, we suited up in our gear and went outside for cooking time!
There were about twelve tables set up in a circle with Kim Paula Dean at the head.
The ingredients were laid out for us already with our tools. Kim Paula Dean proceeded to show us how it's down. The spiced sauce was already prepared, but we still needed to chop and mince and mix and stuff and wrap. I'd give myself about a B..I think I could've had some more sauce in mine. I'll find out in three days, because they let us take our Kimchi home!
We're supposed to wait three days before we eat it....Amy
All the weh-guks helped wash all the dirty dishes, which had to be inspected by a Korean woman who put them into the dry rack. Amy was turned back three times..hehe. And while I was ferociously scrubbing the red sauce from my plate an old Korean woman pointed at me and said 'good housewife' with a huge smile.
Group photo.
After we de-geared, everyone went back into the hall for some kimchi-jeon, which is like a sweat flat-cake cooked with kimchi...delicious! The head monk of the temple came and said a few kind words which were translated.
One other monk got up and said.
-"I am happy. One sentence."
-"I hope you are happy. Two sentence."
-"I hope you make the people you meet happy."
We shuttled back to the subway and headed for Haeundae to a new pub that opened a few weeks ago called the Wolfhound Pub. They have some legit beers on tap. They also have a real-quark dartboard! All of the dartboards in Korea are electronic plastic ones, which do work quite well, but just aren't the same.
The pub was packed with friends. After a few pints, a group of our friends started the 12 Days of Christmas..we couldn't remember the order after about the ninth day, but we had the 5th-1st down pat. The bar started playing a nostalgic mix of Christmas tunes for the rest of the night. And by 'nostalgic', I mean awesome. It made me realize, while I was eating a delicious half-pound burger, that it is amazing to be with your family and doing your own personal traditions for the holidays; but you can have an amazingly love-filled holiday with friends and new loved ones that is just as special.
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