Okay, so time has passed since I last posted, and stuff happened. Probably. I’m not known for my memory. So without checking with anyone or anything, I’m going to recap what’s happened.
As my Mum put it, the constant theme of this trip so far has been her researching an activity, knowing seemingly everything about it, and then showing up and it’s randomly closed or just straight up not there. That’s happened so many times it’s hard to keep track.
I’d say the most memorable thing so far has been the dance-cooking show we saw four or five days ago. It’s called Nanta, and… well I’m having difficulty describing it. It started off with a very strange PowerPoint presentation to give you context of what you need to know going into the show. This was done so people could read it in Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese. Sounds like a good idea, sure, but really none of it needed to be said. I don’t remember what it was exactly, but one of the slides said that it was the head chef’s birthday, and that was not alluded to once during the rest of the show. After watching it, my review was, “when it first started I was like ‘oh this is Stomp on crack (and not the good kind),’ but by the end of it I was like ‘woah this is Stomp on LSD (and not the kind you suggest your daughter try in an attempt to alleviate her depression, but the kind that freaks you out so much you end up in the hospital.’”
The plot of the show was that there were three chefs/cooks working in an undefined space, preparing for a wedding. None of their names are said during the show, but you could see the cast list outside the theatre which is how I know that they’re called Head Chef, Sexy Guy, and Female. In addition to them, there is the manager (named Manager), who is barely on stage but wears a suit I guess, and his nephew (named Nephew) comes home from the army or something. Immediately Nephew is given a job as one of the chefs in the kitchen, demoting Sexy Guy to… wear a smaller hat? The chefs don’t like Nephew due to his incompetence, but they have an about an hour to make a whole wedding menu and they spend most of it dancing. They do cut quite a few vegetables and it all ends up fine in the end, so I guess whatever works. I really don’t know how they managed to pull it off.
Speaking of weird shows, yesterday we saw a traditional mask show, somewhere about an hour outside of Daegu, where we’re currently staying (and Jayden lives). My Mum read to me the plot of the show beforehand, which helped quite a bit, but I still had no idea what the fuck was going on. The actors were speaking in Korean with subtitles on a screen behind them. I found the subtitles quite distracting as I dedicated a lot of my brain power to trying to figure out who they were translated by and how. My leading guess is that the script was put through Google Translate and then someone who doesn’t know English super well looked over the translation and made a few changes.
The plot of the show to my best understanding was this: A butcher is living his best life, just dancing around when he notices a bull. At first he doesn’t really react more than just dancing around it. The bull gets angry and head butts him, and it occurs to the butcher for the first time that he should kill this bull. He kills the bull and talks about how happy he is about having all this meat. He cuts out the heart and testicles and leaves the rest of the animal to rot for some reason. (Quick side note: the translation never says “testicles” it says “balls” and never uses a synonym. The word “balls” was written at least 40 times and I do not believe I’m exaggerating at all.) The butcher tries to sell the balls to the audience, but assumes he is unsuccessful and leaves (if it was in English I would have asked if he takes Visa). Then, some kind of noble woman comes out and just kind of walks around for a bit before peeing in the woods when she thinks no one is watching. Unfortunately for her, a corrupt Buddhist monk sees it, and drinks her pee off the ground before scooping it up, smelling it, and then saying it’s disgusting. He then pressures the noble woman in having sex with him, which she eventually agrees to. Then a bunch of other men come out and have a long conversation about who knows what before the butcher comes back out and tries to sell these noble men the bull balls. They’re like ew gross, but then the butcher tells them it will make them more manly and they start fighting over it. There’s also an 80-year-old woman who I forgot to mention, who I think they refer to as a whore, and she responds that she’s not a whore but just old. As the men are fighting over the balls, she’s like these men are so stupid because I’ve never seen men fight over bull balls before. Then it was over. So… yeah.
I think Jayden way undersold Daegu. The way he describes it makes it sound like it’s a town of 100,000 with nothing to do. I’ve found it to be the complete opposite. The population is over 2,000,000, and it seems to me that everything’s open late. Jayden complains that the subway closes at midnight, but that seems appropriately late to me. I’ve yet to look up a store’s hours to see it closes before 10:00pm. Even the “craft store” is open an hour later than my local Michaels (excluding their holiday hours).
Overall, the trip has been really fun so far. I’m surprised how much I like Korea, because before coming here I thought its culture was similar to Japan’s. I enjoyed my time in Japan when I came in 2019, but I wasn’t overly fond of the atmosphere itself. I felt sort of trapped by their customs. Korea has some similar customs, but they’re quite a bit more laid back. Nobody’s really watching what you’re doing unless you’re being super loud (as some of my travel partners are known to be). Seoul was a really cool place and if I had a shopping spree with unlimited money, I’d definitely start there. There are a lot of weird things here that just exist for the sake of art. I feel understood.
I only have two more days in Korea, so we’ll see if another blog post is coming. If not, I’ll see you in Zoey’s in Japan.