I was invited by some of my adult students to attend the Tug of War Festival (Juldarigi) in Dangjin. Many other foreign English teachers were also attending the festival and my friend, Jack, asked a bunch of us to go as well.
I'd made plans to meet with my students on Saturday morning so we could all go to the festival together. We met up outside Talking Club and I brought my friends Bennie and Ducky, too. It was gray and rainy, which completely bummed me out.
When we got to the festival, only about a 10-minute drive, I felt like I was in the opening parade of a circus act. Everyone stopped to stare at us and point and chatter and take our picture. One high school-aged girl asked me in best-rehearsed English if she could get a picture taken with me. (Note to self: Dye your blond hair brown STAT!)
She wanted me to bow my arm over my head in a 1/2 heart while she did the same. Koreans are big on making hearts with their arms for some reason.
We walked through the main gate of the festival, which took a ridiculous amount of time because everyone was stopping us and staring at us.
My Korean students wanted us to stop and try everything. So we attempted to do this jumping see-saw apparatus and us whities completely sucked at it, but everybody had fun watching us try and we had fun looking like complete morons in the attempt.
Next we walked through the artisan area and there was a potter throwing a pot. One of my students turned to me and asked, "You know Demmmi and Patrick Swayze? Movie Ghost? Sexy!" Ummm, yeah. I'm well aware of the movie and the "Sexy time."
There was also tons of food stalls and scarves and clay plates.
We came to a huge wooden table with a gooey paste spread on the surface of the table. There was a man pounding the paste with a huge wooden mallet. The paste turned out to be rice paste (you don't say? something made of rice....?) A group of old men pointed at me and handed me the mallet, which was a helluva lot heavier than it looked.
I swung it over my head as best as I could and nearly missed the table altogether. I tried again and hit the paste right in the center, sending it oozing to the sides of the table. All the old guys cheered and shouted, "So strong!" Gaaawd, just what a nearly 6-foot tall girl wants to hear. I was slightly embarrassed and tried to pass the mallet off, but the old guys said, "One more, one more." So I obliged and managed to whack the paste again before handing the mallet off to the next Waygook.
One of my adult students turned to me and said, "Rice paste, can eat, but taste is terrible," then she scrunched up her face in a disgusted look to hammer the point home that the rice paste tastes like crap.
We walked a little further and came to an archery exhibit where an old man was giving us pointers (in Korean) on how to shoot the arrow correctly. He kept grabbing our hand that was holding the bow and twisting it back in an unnatural position and repeating the same words over and over in Korean. I have no idea what he was on about.
We finally made it into the area where the rope was being kept until the start of the actual Tug of War began. The rope was massive and made in two seperate pieces. Each piece weighed 4 tons and had to be dragged for about 3 or 4 miles by hundreds of people. There were two teams; the orange team and the green team, which most of my friends and I were on.
One-half of the rope was said to signify the female and the other was said to signify the male. When the two pieces got together it was supposed to signify sex. It's so strange because there are countless times since I've arrived in Korea where I've heard about everyday products and produce being good for stamina, vitality and virility. Everything is based around sex, yet sex is such a taboo subject in Korea and it's almost never discussed in the open or in conversation. Korea is such a place of contradictions.
Anyway, so I eventually meet up with my other friends at the festival and everyone is well on their way to becoming three sheets to the wind. It's about 11 in the morning. It's going to be a messy day.
I continue walking through the festival with my adult students and we stop to have lunch. We have a lunch of Korean pancakes, which are made from eggs, various vegetables and pieces of seafood, like octopus. They are so freaking good. We also have kimchi (of course, it's served at every meal, even breakfast), toppoki (a really hot dish made from rice paste and red pepper paste) and we start drinking makeoli. Makeoli is a wine made from rice. It's delicious.
One of the adult students, Teresa, had woken up at 4 a.m. to make kimbap. Kimbap is awesome and it's actually part of my daily diet. It's basically like a sushi roll, but instead of raw fish it has pieces of ham, egg and vegetables. So yummy!
We all walked back to Teresa's car to get the kimbap, but by then it had started to rain. So we all sat in the car and ate kimbap.
All the Korean ladies had something to do that day, so after we ate the kimbap, we all went our seperate ways. Teresa gave me a big plastic container full of pieces of kimbap for my friends and me. She's so incredibly amazing.
I walked back to the Tug of War rope where all my friends were waiting for the ceremony to start. Half the rope had already been dragged up to the site where the Tug of War would actually take place. I'm not sure which part was male, the orange team or the green team, and which part was female, but I was on the green team.
It was time to start what turned out to be a very long, very slow and drunken process of pulling our half of the rope to the Tug of War site. Everyone was given cotton gloves to protect their hands and there were several ropes leading off the main rope to pull from. I can not emphasize enough how much this thing weighed and literally hundreds of people were needed to pull it. Couple that with the fact that both my friends Ducky and Kippy decided to hop on the rope and ride it like it was a bull. They were yelled at by ajumas, though. Obviously it was mostly Korean people pulling the rope, but we were all getting into it. There were South Africans, Irish, Americans, Brits, Canadians, Kiwis, Aussies, everyone was working together to drag this 4-ton rope through town. Rather metaphorical and touching, I'd say.
Everyone kept yelling, "Yong Cha!" which means, "Cheer Up!" I'm not really sure why we were chanting "Cheer Up!" but I'm sure there was some important cultural significance to it.
We'd all drag the rope for about 10 minutes and then get a 3 or 4-minute break. There was a man dressed up in traditional garb standing on the front of the rope who was in charge of when we would start and stop. He had a flag that he would wave forward with each heave and shout of "Yong Cha!"
At each break, there would be men that came by with a stack of paper cups and a copper kettle of makeoli. they would give us makeoli and miniscule dried fish (for virality, I presume) while we rested. They were especially concerned about us Westerners; following us around making sure our cups of makeoli were always full.
I understand why the effort took so long, obviously the rope weighed 4 tons, but also the breaks were frequent and everyone was becoming increasingly hammered. The "Yong Cha!" chant turned into "One Shot!" as the day wore on. Eventually there were tables at the rest stops where high school kids were handing out the makeoli.
There were photographers and video cameras everywhere. News crews were interviewing as many Westerners as they could. I successfully avoided being interviewed. I knew I wanted no part of drunkenly professing my love for Korean Tug of War festivals and makeoli broadcast on television. Several of my friends were interviewed and put on television, however. (And their students who saw the broadcasts have made sure they would never forget it.)
We eventually ran into the orange team crew coming down from having successfully dragged their half of the rope to the Tug of War site. I asked one guy that stopped to talk to us if we were almost there. He looked at us, looked at the road ahead and flatly said, "Uhh, no."
Shit. Where exactly were we going?!?
There was a traditional drum band that was following us behind the rope. The band members were playing music and dancing for the entire time. One old guy carrying a copper makeoli kettle grabbed me and my friend and took us back to the drum band. So he and I did the only thing we could; we started dancing along with the drummers and dancers. More picture taking ensued of the nearly 6-foot tall blond chick and the gigantic 6'2" black dude dancing with the Korean drum band.
We evenually parted ways with the band and went back to pulling the rope and we got to the bottom of a hill. I remember asking someone, "Do we have to pull the rope up that hill?!"
"Uh, yep," was their response.
Another hour of pulling a 4-ton hand-woven rope up a bloody hill. Thank God the makeoli was still freely flowin', but by this point someone had given us a huge jug of makeoli to carry with us.
One of the Korean spectators had given me a Juldarigi flag to wave, so I took a break from pulling and waved the flag around for awhile.
Two of my girlfriends, Bennie and Ani, had disappeared by this point and when they returned I had found out that they desperately had to use a restroom, couldn't find one, so they knocked on a poor, unsuspecting Korean's apartment door and asked in their best broken Korean if they could use the person's toilet. They ended up staying at this person's apartment for an hour, drinking coffee with the tenant and attempting to communicate with the man who spoke no English and they only spoke broken bits of Korean.
We finally made it to the top of the hill and the other half of the rope was waiting ever-so-patiently for the copulation to commence. I raced to the bathroom; too much makeoli! When I got to the bathroom, I noticed I had white lips. The makeoli had left a stain of white on my lips! Classy.
I went back outside and I noticed another drum and dance troupe so, naturally, I joined them. I was waving my freak flag high with my arms up in the air when one of my girlfriends found me and decided to join me in the dancing circle.
We eventually made it out of the circle and she told me that before she saw me, she and her boyfriend had been looking for us and her boyfriend saw me dancing solo in the drum circle and told her, "Well... there's Erika." And she said, "Oooh! That looks like fun!" And she joined me. Gotta love the serendipitous moments of happenstance.
She and I eventually left the dancing drum circle for yet another stop in the bathroom. This time there was a line and as soon as the ajumas (old crotchity Korean women) saw my friend and me they smiled and ushered us into bathroom stalls. We hardly had to wait. Ajumas often times go out of their way to be mean to Westerners but today, they were being exceedingly nice?! What's that about?! I assumed it was because we were participating in a traditional festival? Or maybe they had had just as much makeoli as we had? I wasn't sure, but I definitely wasn't going to argue.
My friend and I got accosted by an older Korean couple who spoke English. They were asking all about us and telling us about their lives. The woman worked at an English-speaking cultural center and wanted to know as much about us as she could. Then they insisted on taking a buttload of photos with us and then a lady from the drum band stopped by and wanted a picture of us as well. And the man dragged us over to a group of men surrounding a huge pot of makeoli. They insisted we drink makeoli with them. Who were we to refuse?!
By this point, huge gongs were being sounded by huge mallets operated by tiny Korean man/boys and fireworks had started to explode. I think it was safe to say the two pieces of rope were getting it on.
It was finally time for the actual Tug of War to start. I grabbed a piece of rope and tugged with all my might!! Jack was beckoning for us to go. Apparently the head honcho of the school districts in Chungnam province was going to take everybody out to dinner.
After all that dragging of a 4-ton rope (have I mentioned that?) for 4 miles I had to leave during the actual Tug of War? What the hell? The green team looked like it was going to take it, so I decided a free meal was going to win out, especially after all the makeoli I had consumed that day. I left and went to dinner. I still don't actually know which team won, but I'm SURE the green team won. We had all the heart. And I actually got a blister and a sore back from the cultural extravaganza. That's gotta be worth something!
No comments:
Post a Comment