Sunday Sept 24

Did you know chestnuts are pricklier than cactus?
Well... We went harvesting chestnuts. I thought this was weird but hey, its Korea. So first of all chestnuts actually hang off trees in softball size prickly shells. The shells aren't hard unless they've dried out. So Green prickly balls. Then you step on them (MUST wear sneakers). You put one foot on either half of the ball and then kind of let your feet (with lots of pressure) slide towards the ground so you are in effect opening the ball... Like when you use your hands to pull an orange apart from the center. Then get the prickly ball out of the way pick up the chestnuts, usually 2-3 in a ball, and inspect them. White ones arent ripe, soft ones are bad, and anything with a hole has a bug in it. All in all it was great fun. Then you take your bag of chestnuts and get it weighed. You are charged by weight. 4kg is the lowest. Well we had less than 1kg (after a couple hours of all 5 of us... well Hoyeon didnt do much, and Cherry kept getting prickles in her feet somehow... So less than 1kg they GAVE us more nuts and didn't charge anything, even gave back the entry fee... It was great fun tho. We have yet to roast the nuts.

We then went to a traditional Korean house, which really was a small village of houses. Most of the houses were like a restaurant dining area. Some showed Korean crafts, there was a shop, big cages with birds, chickens, bunnies, and a greenhouse with asian plants. So there are these little paths between houses and around the area with tons of old Korean items laying around (not in a messy way, but in a display way). All above the houses were strings like a net, which held up vines and Korean pumpkins, gourds, and cucumbers. Anyways, it was so busy. We had many small dishes of traditional Korean food. There was a mushroom dish, the mushrooms were kind of battered and fried I think and had a sweet yellow sauce. My favorite thing so far.

We finally came home and Cherry decided that she wanted to make pancakes from the night before (shubu shubu). So we went and got the ingredients and made regular and chocolate pancakes with whipped cream.

Good long day.

Still dont have a digital camera but have been taking pix with my old 35mm cam. Will TRY to scan them when they get developed.

Ciao