New Years on Jeju Island - Jan-04-2010

Random Korean Cultural Trivia

Ssireum (씨름) - Korean style wrestling from the Goguryeo kingdom. Two opponents stand in a sandpit with sashes tied to their waists. The competitors would grab each other's sashes by the side hips and would try to take each other to the ground. Methods of winning are done by throws and sweeps using mind games and strength.

For New Years we went to the island province of Jeju. The island is a common tourist destination (mostly for Chinese and Japanese visitors) and is a favourite dating / honeymoon spot. We left at 6am and after a rough, noisy five hour boat ride we docked on the island. The island always looks different wherever you go. The main city looks like Florida where the sun shines and theres palm trees everywhere. Oh yes I forgot to mention, it's ridiculously hot over there even in the winter time. Probably because it's close to the equator but I actually got a mild tan as a result of it. Other parts look like the mainland with it's mountainous range and the coasts are high with strong waves and a strong fishing culture. Since it's a volcanic island, the land isn't very suitable for agriculture so seafood is the main food source.

The culture is much different then the mainland, especially their language. Most dialects I'd understand or at least figure out but over here they sound like gibberish. The island was only a part of Korea for about 1000 years when the Tamna kingdom was officially absorbed, much like Okinawa was to Japan. To serve the high amount of foreign guests most things are written in multiple languages (Japanese, Chinese and English specifically). Most of my time on the island, there was a Japanese tour group of about 20 people touring the island with us. The rest kinda came on their own.

The island is apparently very well known for three things: (1- Rocks) (2 - Wind) (3 - Women)

Rocks
- The island is formed by volcanic eruptions, resulting in tons of volcanic rock. With the exception of road pavements and cement buildings everything on the island is made of volcanic rock. There's so much rock that theres actually a stone monument park. It's common for people to go by the shore side and stack rocks on top of each other making little statues.

Wind (and weather)
- The city is damn windy, aside from the wind itself, the weather is really random. Weather can change in a matter of minutes. When we arrived on the island by boat it was snowing with strong wind, ten minutes later it was drizzling with rain and about 30 minutes later the sun was shining and later in the afternoon it was snowing again.

Women

- The indiginous people had a different social structure. The family system was run on a matriarch system where the matriarch would get most of the income and sort out the stuff of the house. Men apparently just went fishing and doing less important things. I did notice that the women here were particularly more brutish looking with a rougher personality while the men were really small and puny by stature, kinda like the physical appearance is swapped by the gender. Yea.. my eyes were depressed the whole time I was here.

We visited the Jeju Island Folk Village, basically its like a modern made village based on the people their from a few hundred years ago. There was music, folk dancing, restaurants with their unique cuisine.

I had a taste of the village's unique style of rice wine and green onion juhn pancake (해물파전).

For dinner we had Korean sashimi. It's basically raw fish of course but using fish that isn't normally seen in Japanese sashimi. Koreans use (go-doong-uh/고둥어) mackerel and (gal-chi/갈치) cutlassfish. I had a small drinking contest with my uncle and we downed soju and beer bomb mixed drinks. All in all it cost over $100 (100 000 won).. that's a LOT of bottles.




 


The most messed up thing I learned was that there was a way of raising livestock pigs which is quite nasty. The pigs (lit. s**t pigs) were fed s**t because they naturally cleaned it up and they grew on that. As nasty as that sounds it's actually a convenient way to feed them without wasting animal feed. There was a Japanese tour group of about 20 people touring the village with us. When they got to the pig part, I just heard a loud mixture of screaming, disgusted groaning and laughter. Can't really blame them, I feel creeped out as I write this blog. The same pigs are served as food today, but of course they don't raise them the way they did back then.

This rock... as you can probably tell is the shape of a penis. It's like a symbol of good luck, fertility and a healthy child. If a house owned one, it meant that they were planning to have children and that the parents were praying for good fortune.

The rock is not carved by people and is a natural volcanic rock formation.

There's also cultural aspects of the olden days of mainland Korea that was brought over. Probably the most notable one ssireum wrestling. There's also a set of pillars where contests of strength was held. Basically you climb onto the pedestal and try to lift an egg shaped stones. The lighter stones would be about 50lbs and the heaviest weighs about 200lbs. Back then, the young men in the village would show the young women that their strength is much greater than the other men and that they are more suitable husbands. I tried three times to lift the stone and believe me it's a LOT harder than you think. The egg shape makes it awkward to pick up, let alone hold in your arms. I picked it up and held it for about 10 seconds until my arms and back gave out.