"No, he prefers to have the bottle all for himself and he doesn't need the glass."
Last week I was hired, together with little Guryun, for a day of work on the Poet's fields - the man is actually a poet, but he's a farmer, too. Guryun's duty was to pull the weeds on the radish fields, while I was prepairing some other fields for planting the garlic. During our first break Guryun ran to the Poet's house and brought us chestnuts, boiled sweet potatoes and a bottle of beer. That was the moment when the Poet asked Guryun: "Uncle Dag surely loves to drink a glass of beer, doesn't he?"
And Guryun replied: "No, he prefers to have the bottle all for himself and he doesn't need the glass."
As you see, my Korean improved a little, but only when I hear a sentence including my name and the word beer.
It's been quite a long time since my last post here. Actually nothing spacial happened. I had a party for my first anniversary here, lots of delicious food, beers and laugh.
And this is how my kitchen looked when everybody left.
And a strange coincidence happened again. The day after my previous food festival (as my neighbors call this dinner events), we had a typhoon roaring above our heads. And this time again. Maybe I'm some kind of a typhoon god or my dinners are cursed?
It was after this one that I was looking for my tomatoes and peppers in the surrounding woods.
And than came 추석, the Korean harvest festival, usually referred to as "Korean Thanksgiving Day". I came here last year for 추석, so, according to the lunar calendar, it was another anniversary. But, since 추석 is a mass exodus and everybody goes to visit their relatives (dead or alive), I stayed the only one in our village. King of the Mountain, as they call me at such times. To not be bored I busied myself pretty much and also consumed massive amounts of alcohol. I was still fighting my abnormal obsession with anime - I made is safely for eight full days, but today I had just enough of this crap. With a terrible hangover I realized that in this time I spent so much money on alcohol that with it I could buy me a plane ticket for the Phillippines. One way, of course. In another week it would be a return ticket. Now don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no intention of quitting my beer joy, just to reduce it to a somewhat normal grade.
I still want to take advantage of this beautiful autumn weather to take a stroll on the hill behind the house and relax like this, two days ago:
I said I was pretty busy during 추석. And also the boars took care of it. One night they attacked our shiitake mushroom plantation and made a horrible mess. The logs that ure used to grow the mushrooms were all scattered around, the mushrooms all trampled on the ground. Huh, I gues that this description makes it look like a smaller disaster, but all in all it wasn't that bad. It was a few logs, a small part of one plantation (we have two), but enough to make you angry. I was especially pissed off because the mushrooms weren't eaten but trampled. I picked what looked still usable, a full big box of them, and some ended up drying, others preserved in olive oil.
Next thing I did was dye some shirts. With clay. The allmighty Korean hwangto. It's really easy, I mixed the clay with little water, just enough to make a thick paste, and then dipped the shirts in it, making sure every square inch is well covered with the stuff, from both sides. Then I hanged them to dry for one day.
The results? Like in the picture. For comparison I added a brand new white shirt, while the left one is the shirt that I dyed two months ago and wore practically every second or third day, so it has been washed at least twenty times, probably more.
For the next time I'm making kaki-shibu, I haven't learned the Korean word yet. It's a tannin dye made from unripe persimmons.
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