Hiking stories

With spring here, hiking has resumed. I've been able to get out the last three weekend and two of those were spent at a nearby mountain named Yongbongsan. Its not a famous mountain, but popular throughout the region because its short (only about a 2 hour hike on the main path) and it climbs very quickly to jagged granite peaks. It attracts hiking groups who want a beautiful climb that won't take up an entire day and that is short enough that copious amounts of food can be lugged up top to eat at the peak. This gets to insane proportions: 2 weeks ago a group had a 10-pound rice cake, dozens of jugs of rice wine, and a pigs head on a spit that they were handing food from to everyone that passed. What I thought was a weird, one-time occurrence was there again this past weekend when I hiked the same trail -- a big group with a huge pigs head that they were offering to people that passed. Another interesting part of the trip was riding with a well-dressed Korean man who told me that he lived in Washington DC for two years, despite knowing very little English. He kept pointing at his tooth and I thought he was trying to tell me that he had gone to Washington DC to get his tooth replaced and wondered what kind of great dentist America has in Washington DC to attract international customers like this man. As he tried to talk to me about the election and I mentioned that I liked Obama I was able to make out that he saying an African American man who had walked across the street in Washington DC, punched this man in the face, and so he had to get his tooth replaced in Washington DC. This, he told me, was why I should like Hillary and not Obama.

This isn't the first conversation that I've had with someone who had this kind of sentiment and it gets into a whole other issue about how race is perceived here that I'll write about -- or point to someone else who has written about it here -- some other time.

Health

Suddenly it is spring and I am back in the country. Since returning to Hongseong and starting school again I've learned that it is Namul -- or wild greens -- season. Koreans believe that the winter slows down your metabolism from lack of activity and that eating wild greens in the spring helps to restore your appetite. My host family's dinner table has been filled with all kinds of interesting greens that are found in the mountains or creek beds and in the afternoon I can often see old women out there picking them to sell at the market. On a recent trip to Cambodia, my homestay parents also invested over $300 dollars in forty-year-old medicinal mushrooms called Sang-Hwang mushrooms (Phellinus Linteus). We now brew the mushrooms at night in a big crock pot and drink the tea in the morning. At least the immediate effects are pretty amazing -- the tea's really calming and dispelled a few big headaches I've had after stressful days with kindergarteners.



Koreans care alot about health. When local media published stories about GMOs and their ubiquity in soybean crops, tofu prices dropped dramatically throughout the country enough so that the government pushed through pretty liberal GMO laws that require products containing GMOs to be labeled. Organic foods -- while they are incredibly expensive here -- are also gaining major ground. This is a small town and even the local grocery store has an organic produce section. And while junk food is gaining quick ground here, people still that I've run into eat fresh food at most meals and reserve junk food for snacking in between. I've grown really interested in traditional medicine here and have been trekking down to the local traditional medicine shop to buy different herbs, mixing them together to see what effect they have (I do research about them first). Possibly unhealthy, but nonetheless an entertaining past-time. My current mix is fo-ti (an herb supposedly drank religiously by a chinese man that lived to be a 130, and renowned for its purported ability to return color to grey hair), Astralagus, and Polygonatum -- both supposed to do a bunch of cool stuff as well. Whatever the case, its a nice tasting blend to drink in the evening that has a vague coffee resemblance. Other herbs that I have been enjoying: Schizandra berry, Goji berry, ginkgo picked from the trees outside my school, cinnamon bark, ginger, licorice root, reishi mushroom, red and white ginseng, and local green tea.