The Hobbits

The Koreans love food, I mean really love it - they are like the all the Greek and Jewish grandmothers in books or movies who are always urging you to eat more. This obsession with food can be sen from a brief narration of our hike yesterday. Aaron and I went to a Korean national park with a group from our church. In the morning we stopped for breakfast at a traditional Korean restaurant that served kimchi and beef soup at 7:30 in the morning. Spicy beef soup mind you. That was a little rough on the stomach- fortunately they had rice, nice, mild-tasting rice. After breakfast we settled down for a two hour bus drive. The Korean sitting in front of Aaron and me gave a us a bag of full of crunchy-sweet things (I'm not really sure what they were since the words on the bag were all in Korean) A little later they passed out the lunch we were supposed to carry up the mountain - two cucumbers, two clementines, a soy drink, a package of beef jerkey, two chocolate bars, a water bottle, and a handful of mints. To this we added three packages of kimbobs, a kind of role made with seaweed, rice, and other fillings like pickles, cucumbers, ham, and chicken.
The hike was beautiful, but pretty intense. We climbed for a solid 4 hours and often up flights of almost vertical stairs. Fortunately, we had enough food to sustain us :) On the way up we saw a Buddhist monastery , complete with their oddly shaped roofs and elaborate painting, and a number of trees whose leaves had changed to a luminous orange. At the top the view was spectacular - I saw other high mountain peaks all around and a clear, blue sky above. We finished up our lunch at the top. Someone in the group had brought a pear and he shared with the rest of us. We also tried some kind of nut that has a potatoe like consistency on the inside and a smooth texture on the outside. After such a strenuous hike up we took a gondola down and then had to wait for the bus. Lest we starve to death during the 45 minutes we waited for the bus our Korean friends provided more food. First Mr. Jin, the director of my school, bought some "fried sweet potatoe bar."It was a bad translation. They were like dried french fries with sugar instead of salt. For some reason the Koreans are adverse to salt.
Then some random vendor provided us with free food that looked like, well, birdseed. I kind of liked the crunchiness of it. Lest we waste away after finishing the bird seed, Mr. Jin bought a Korean dessert - it involved a cup of ice topped with jam, whipped cream, and some strange crunchy pieces that looked like tiny beans. The beans were a little much for me.
Finally the bus arrived to rescue us from our starvation and take us to dinner. Well, we did play Korean football which is a combination of soccer and volleyball before that, so we went almost two whole hours without eating. It was tough.
Dinner involved pieces of lettuce in which we placed raw fish, peppers, sauces, mushrooms, and a number of other unknown dishes, spicy fish soup, rice, and a rice-based alchohol that surpassed any of the wine I have tried in Korea. Koreans are not know for their wine. On leaving the restaurant a member of our group, an older gentleman who speaks a tiny bit of English and was very kind to us throughout the day, gave me some more potatoe-like nuts. You know, I needed my strength to walk from the restaurant to the bus. Ironically, dinner was so spicy and salty that Aaron and I both wanted something sweet so we bought icecream and chocolate in our city.
I have decided that the Koreans are like hobbits; they eat all the time and are very short :)