All Aboard! Exploring Korea’s tea culture in Insadong

In Insadong, tucked away behind the colourful market shops and street vendors selling fried doughnuts filled with red bean and cinnamon, there is the entrance to one of Seoul’s coziest tea houses.

Open the door to escape the winter chill, and you find yourself inside a 1940’s locomotive train, complete with railway tracks, plush red velvet train car seats and tray tables. There is even a luggage rack, strewn with suitcases reminiscent of a bygone era. The centre of the tea house is like a fancy dining car, with draped silks and large wooden tables and benches. Our seats were two of several that lined the periphery of the Tea Train; cozy, quiet nooks perfect for an afternoon escape from the bitter Korean winter.

Our tea arrived in large ceramic cups, full to the brim with a steaming, aromatic blend of cinnamon topped with thin slices of almond.

To find it, take Line 3 to Anguk and walk out exit 6. From here it’s about a 1 minute walk to Insadong’s main shopping street. This tea house is on the right, towards the end. Keep an eye out; you won’t want to miss this train! ^^

A Balinese Christmas: Observations from Indonesia

Having only so few vacation days as an English teacher in Korea, I wanted to take full advantage of my Christmas holiday. This year I decided to spend Christmas in Indonesia. So on the morning of Thursday, December 24th, I made my way from South Korea to Bali, by way of Taiwan. I had the most ridiculous layover in the Taipei airport, and for the sake of your sanity, I won’t elaborate. Suffice it to know I had duty-free liquor and the Taiwan National Museum of history to entertain me. And this sign. For seven hours.

After a lonely Christmas Eve dinner consisting of terribly tasteless Taiwanese noodles and an equally disgusting can of Taiwan Beer, surrounded by happy families and smooching couples, I was beyond ready to leave the country at 8pm. I had a window seat, and I may or may not have spent a good amount of our flight time glued to the window searching for reindeer. And though I didn’t catch any Rudolph sightings, we did fly over a few thunderous tropical storms. I’ve never seen electric storms from the air, before. I’ll be happy if I never see them again.

The hot, humid, sticky air hit me like a sledgehammer when I walked off that plane. The giant red signs warning “Death Penalty to Drug Traffickers” had me panicking for no good reason at all, and I welcomed my first Bali Hai beer like it was my Christmas Day saviour. Yes, it was a convenience-store beer, but it was cheaper than water and I was already dehydrated from standing outside for 30 seconds (note to self: if you’re traveling to the tropics from a snowy-climate, for the love of God bring a change of clothes. My thick hoodie and long pants weren’t quite cutting it). By the end of the trip we’d started to measure distance in terms of liters of sweat lost.

The first thing I noticed about Bali (after the humidity, of course), was how the illuminated sign on the roof of my taxi boldly declared “taksi”. Which actually sounds about right, if you ask me. I soon learned that Bahasa Indonesia (the local language) is a form of pigeon English that often makes more phonetic sense than the English I’ve become accustomed to. And while we’re on the topic of taksis, if you ever find yourself hopping into one in Bali, don’t bother looking for the seatbelt. They don’t exist.

“Excuse me, is there a seatbelt back here?”

“Seatbelt? What you need seatbelt for? It’s nighttime!”

Of course. I should have known. 😉

In point form – some other observations:

• There are Hindu shrines everywhere. Most of the dieties have 4 arms. I want four arms.
• The locals leave offerings to their gods, and they leave them everywhere. They’re like little palm-leaf baskets full of berries, crackers, incense, etc., and I swear they leave them in the middle of the sidewalk just to get a laugh at the tourists trying to hop over them.
• Aside from the huge Hindu influences, I could have been in Australia and I wouldn’t have known the difference. There are so many Aussies in Kuta Beach that the locals have adopted an Australian accent. They yell out to you, addressing you as “mate” in such a voice that for the first few times I actually believed they were Australian. It was very much like being on the Spanish island of Mallorca, only instead of Australians, it was German tourists swarming the beaches there and the locals addressed me with a “guten Tag” even though we were literally in Spain. Of course, in catering to tourism, Christmas was still everywhere.
• I’m not sure whether it was intentional or not, but my friend’s Christmas dinner involved the hottest green pepper he had ever tasted; I actually thought he was going to die as I sat there watching him struggle with it across the table. No, I didn’t do anything about it. But it was rather an entertaining sight, watching his eyeballs bulge. When his eyes stopped streaming and his face had returned to a more neutral shade of red, he asked the waitress about it. She responded with a laugh, “oh, you must have got a spicy one” and then winked at me as though he was the biggest baby she’d ever seen. Ha!

• The locals are incredibly friendly. Their English is almost immaculate and they are always, always smiling. I’m well aware that their economy depends on the tourist dollar, but even the local woman harvesting rice in the fields we floated by in our whitewater raft took a moment to stop and smile and wave to us. There was a little boy who approached our raft, completely naked, and burst out laughing as he used both arms to splash us as we floated past him. And Indonesia must have the nicest security guards in the world, I think. They’ve got to be bored out of their minds, sitting there all day, but they always have the biggest, sweetest smiles on their faces and always seem genuinely happy to see you. They all just seem so… kind. Friendly. Genuine. Laid back. The rest of the world could take a lesson or two from the Balinesian mentality.
• If you find yourself in Indonesia, you must go whitewater rafting on the Telaga Waja rapids at the footsteps of Mount Agung in Bali. It was a most memorable experience; especially the part where we stopped half-way down the river and cracked a beer under the waterfall.
• If you eat out, food is cheap. Like $2 cheap. Beer is even cheaper. A regular bottle of Bintang goes for about $0.65.
• Motorbikes are everywhere, and are the main means of transport. Families of 6 pile on a single bike, and usually it’s only the father who wears a helmet. Safety first!
• Women who are menstruating aren’t supposed to enter the Hindu shrines, or walk up to the temples. Oops.
• Have you ever had a “chicken abortion”? I could barely coax it down my throat with a name like that. It was egg-yolk yellow with a shot of grenadine at the bottom to make it look like blood. Barf! I don’t know whether to blame the Aussies or the Indonesians for this, but whoever it was deserves a slap in the face.
• I had every intention of going surfing when I was in Bali… until I saw all the washed up fish on the shoreline. Parrot fish, puffer fish, tropical eels. I didn’t particularly want to be floating in the water alongside their other dead friends.
• I did get to ride an elephant, play with an orangutan, ride a camel, and spend time lying next to a tiger cub. I also got bit by a monkey and am currently undergoing the intensive rabies vaccination process, which you can read all about here, if you feel so inclined. 😉
• On New Years Eve, I was “forced” to participate in a Bintang chugging contest. I’d like to say that I won, but that is so far from the truth that I can’t possibly make a claim to it. It started off well, but once I took a break it was all over. Anyway, the point of the matter is that I still got a prize: a 120 minute Balinesian massage at the Rama Beach Spa. Yes, yes I did. And let me tell you something – I have never in my life felt so relaxed. This was, hands down, the absolute best massage treatment I have EVER received. And it was fullllll body, and I got over my inhibitions in about two seconds. Yes, it was THAT good.

After throwing 2009 a great big goodbye party from the beach, I welcomed in the New Year with my feet in the sand. Life is rough. 😉

Monkey Bites in Paradise: Or, the Rabid Monkeys of Ubud

“You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown.” – Ella Maillart

Have you ever been thankful for an experience you would never wish to repeat? One of my favourite things about travel is how, regardless of where you go and how much you plan for it, the unpredictable always happens. And often times, it can be more than a little unpleasant.

These are the times when you kick yourself, wondering how on earth you managed to get yourself into such a situation. These are the unpredictable stories that have you immediately regretting the decisions that led you up to the moment, wishing you’d checked your itinerary one more time, or wishing you’d never talked to “so-and-so who recommended this place”, or eaten that questionable street food your gut was telling you to avoid. Such stories can be painful, shameful, or downright expensive. These are the stories that make you want to scream. They are the ones that really get you panicking. They are the stories where I start to believe that maybe the unknown is better left unknown.

But the truth of the matter is this: when it’s over, it almost always makes for a good story. For all the discomfort and stress, your experience is rich. You emerge enlightened; just a little bit the wiser.

My situation is this: I went to Indonesia for Christmas. I visited the monkey forest in Ubud. I bought some bananas. I took some in my hand, and put the rest in my bag. I sat down on the steps. The monkeys came. I fed them.

I ran out of bananas. The monkeys were crawling all over me. One of them looked at me and cocked his head. I told him I had no more bananas (though I had plenty left in my backpack). I shrugged, “sorry.”

He turned as if to walk away, and I started to get up. In two seconds he flung himself around and took a bite out of my left arm.

And then he was gone. Back into the jungle.

As he didn’t break the skin, I figured I was fine. I even laughed about it. But I didn’t wash the wound, and I’m sure I probably touched it and then put my fingers in my eyes or something similarly stupid. And then I read this, at 3am six days later:

“Rabies: Still a common problem in most parts of SE Asia, this uniformly fatal disease is spread by the bite or lick of an infected animal, most commonly a dog or monkey. You should seek medical advice immediately after any animal bite and commence postexposure treatment.” -Lonely Planet

This monkey has singlehandedly cost me upwards of $250 dollars.

But I emerged enlightened; just a little bit the wiser? How so? I learned an invaluable lesson.

Never, ever, lie to a monkey.

Sitting Buddah and Tea in the Snow

A few weeks ago, before I’d left for Indonesia, my friend hosted a Christmas party in Cheonan, a small city in the northeast corner of South Chungcheong. It took us about an hour to get there from Seoul and cost 4,800 won each, which works out to about four dollars. The ride was bumpy but we packed a couple pints and it flew by. When the bus came to a stop, we hopped out into a foot of light, fluffy snow. Perfect for a Christmas party. Except we couldn’t find a cab. Not to save our lives.

It took us walking for 45 minutes in sideways snow and ill-prepared footwear before I finally saw an empty cab coming towards us on the opposite side of the street. I ran across and hopped in. I’ve discovered that if you hop in and sit down before telling the driver where you want to go, he has a much tougher time saying no to you and, 9 times out of 10, he’ll drive you there (however begrudgingly).

Anyway, we got there. Their place is 400 times the size of my apartment; it is gorgeous and massive. We’d bought some crappy gifts from the subway and hastily wrapped them in newspaper (with the help of a random drunken Korean in the train station) for Secret Santa, and after we’d had a couple of jagger bombs (first time since arriving in Korea!) we started the game. There were a couple of awesome gifts (Jenga, bottles of booze), and some hilarious ones (fifteen bottles of soju, a dog-shaped bathroom mat with accompanying candles, a frying pan). I wound up with a bottle of Chilean wine. Can’t complain.

After an hilarious night of more drinks and more games, we put on Elf and passed out on the couch/floor. In the morning, we had the most epic breakfast of all time. It started with bacon & eggs and banana pancakes, followed by sauteed mushrooms and a grilled sandwich competition, then more pancakes and more sandwiches. It lasted three hours.

When we finally rolled ourselves out of there, we decided to check out the Buddhist temple recommended to us by my friend. It was snowing, and it was freezing, but we figured we were there, and why not? So we hopped a cab. And he let us out here.

The temple was picturesque. It was beautiful, quiet in the snow, and aside from a few Buddhists who appeared and disappeared behind the buildings, we were the only people there.

The path between the temple buildings led us up a snowy trail through the trees. It was in awe that we found the sitting Buddah.

More massive than I could have imagined. So majestic in the snow.

To the left of the Sitting Buddah was a small temple building with a man standing out front, drinking a steaming cup of tea.

He gestured warmly for us to join him inside, and frozen now from head to toe, we gladly accepted his invitation into the shrine to warm up. Inside it smelled of incense and ginger tea, and as a brilliantly smiling Buddhist woman motioned for us to sit down around the electric heater, she poured us each a steaming cup of our own.

Hanging from the ceiling were hundreds of blessings suspended in beautiful paper lamps. When we were finally warmed through and through, we stood to leave and the man who had welcomed us into the shrine asked us to fill out our own little blessings – we were told to include our name, our birth country, our address, and names of our family members. He then walked us to the back of the temple and showed us each to light a stick of incense, then took us outside to the statue, where he instructed us to walk around Sitting Buddah three times in a clockwise fashion.

The statue was so big that it took us a solid five minutes to complete our journey.

After we finished, we were shown to place our burning sticks in the incense pot out front. We had completed the ritual.

Not bad for a random Sunday.