Day 27 & 34: Ancient Weddings, Tea Ceremonies, and Cooking

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I wanted to apologize to anyone who's been closely following my experience while I've been in Korean. Classes have become a lot more demanding and midterms were last week. Anyways, let's talk about what I've been up to in the past couple of weeks.

Day 27

This day was spent going to a  traditional Confucian temple that has been standing for several centuries. At this temple we were greeted by a group of people dressed in traditional Korean dresses called the Hanbok 한복. We were told that we were going to take part in a traditional Korean tea ceremony, well they forgot about telling us that we were going to dress up in ancient traditional wedding outfits too. Korea has been in the rainy season for a couple of weeks now, so we were pretty fortunate that it wasn't as hot as it has normally been. We all dressed up in different types of Hanbok that all held different significant meanings. Each individual Hanbok represented a hierarchical status in the family. We were all apparently dressed up in wedding attire too. I got to be the King! I'll say the overall experience was a little embarrassing, but it was fun as well!

After dressing up and taking a lot of pictures, we undressed and started to learn about traditional tea ceremonies in Korea. It was explicitly explained to us and proper etiquette was highly valued when in came to these ceremonies.

The biggest take away from this excursion was learning how Korea has Confucian ideals impeded to the very core and nature of society today.

Day 34

This day was spent going to cooking class and learning how to make a traditional dish called Japchae 잡채. For those of you who don't know me, I actually really love to cook. As a kid growing up I learned how to cook several Korean dishes with my mother at home. Since I live off campus back in the United States, I have to cook every meal. I usually spend half of the time cooking Korean food, so going to a Korea cooking class was extremely fun. I already knew how to cook Japchae, but I was glad to learn a new recipe and probably change up my personal recipe a little bit based off the lesson I attended. The group I was with was just amazing and we had an awesome time. Korean food is something I'm not going to write too much on now, because I plan to extensively write on it later on.