Kimchi and the Korean War

by Rachel

So we are in South Korea! South Korea almost feels like the U.S. - besides the fact that they eat with chopsticks and speak Korean.

First I have a couple quick funny stories to start out with before I get to the what-we-did part.

At one point today, my family decided to get a quick treat at a museum shop. After much pondering and looking around, I decided what really sounded good was the mint ice cream popsicle with a chocolate coating. I grabbed one out of the freezer my dad bought and I sat down to start eating. I took a bite of it, but it didn't taste very minty at all. And the color was the wrong shade of green. Just then Taylor grabbed the box from my popsicle, looked at it, and asked me, "Why did you get a green tea flavored popsicle?" I felt very smart and annoyed that my popsicle wasn't mint. The side of the popsicle facing me on the display had been in Korean (the English was on the other side).  I had just assumed that it was mint because it showed that it was green and it showed what I thought were mint leaves. Also, since when did green tea popsicles even exist?

Story number two and then I will get on with my post. In Turkey and China, a lot of the toilets are squatters, not normal toilets. So in one of the bathrooms at a museum we visited here, they had a sign explaining how to use the toilet. Here it is: (I find it VERY amusing.)

Yesterday, we woke up on the airplane when they fed us food at 1 am Turkish time. The rest of the day I was exhausted. After seeing my dad for the first time in the past month, we rode in a "limousine" (a.k.a. a van labeled limosine) back to our hotel. Our hotel is AMAZING! It is like this traditional Korean house so it is super cute. We can't wear our shoes in it and the doors are more like windows that we climb through. The ceiling is very low and we sleep on mats on the floor (they are actually pretty comfy).  In the past, even kings and queens would sleep on the floor because of the way things were heated. They would light fires in a fire place under the houses for heat, so the floor was much warmer.

After settling in to our hotel we visited two different Korean palaces. We even got to see the changing of the guard at one of them, which was really neat. For dinner we found some various street food places and ate doughnut like things.

front gate of Gyeongbokgung Palace

This morning we got to eat a traditional Korean breakfast. There was kimchi (which is fermented and very spicy cabbage), rice, sprouts, and eggs (not chicken eggs though). Also, this marked the first time that we were given chopsticks instead of forks. I am not exactly skilled in the art of eating with chopsticks. It took me a long time to eat.

After that we went to the National Museum of Korea. It had a bunch of interesting information on ancient Korea. I was amazed how old some of the artifacts were. This is the ninth most visited museum in the world - but there was hardly anyone there or anywhere else we visited because of MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome), a cold-like sickness that has broken out here. In the airport for flights going to and from South Korea, they screen you for it. Every place we went had tons of hand sanitizer and signs reminding everyone to wash their hands.

Then we took the subway to the Korean War Memorial. It had some outdoor monuments and a really nice museum that told about the Korean War. I learned about the cold war and the fighting that involved Korea, the United Nations, the Soviet Union, and China. In the end, Korea ended up divided with a communist government in the north and a democratic government in the south. A peace treaty was never signed - only an armistice. We'll write more about this tomorrow after we visit the DMZ - the most militarized border between any two countries in the world.

This statue at the Korean War Memorial shows two brothers embracing 

- one fighting for the south and one for the north

We finished the day with a visit to a restored traditional village. It was really cute and reminded me a bit of our hotel.

Then we ate Korean barbecue. They didn't speak English so we had to order by pointing at the menu. I felt pretty clueless eating the unfamiliar (but yummy) food with my chopsticks. I think they probably had a good laugh over us later.

I learned a lot about Korea today - and now I'm too tired to write any more.