I decided to use my Sunday off a little more judiciously than I have my last couple of days off, which have been spent mostly hanging around my apartment. I took the subway into Seoul in the early afternoon to meet Bryan and Carla for brunch at the COEX Mall. I’d spent the last three months or so (basically from the first week I was in Seoul for training) emailing back and forth with Bryan and Carla—a brother and sister from Ecuador who are very good family friends of my cousins—trying to figure out a time and place to meet up, and this was the final outcome of that correspondence. We ate at this American-style place that was pretty expensive but very good- I got a brunch plate that constituted the first solid breakfast food (aside from cereal) that I've had since I've been in Korea. It was great to talk and get to know them a bit; both of them have been in Korea about a year teaching English as well, so we shared stories and exchanged our experiences about life in a foreign land, the spiciness that is Korean food, and the ridiculousness that is the Korean education system.
After brunch, I headed over to my friends’ apartment—only about a 15 minute walk from COEX—and hung out with Kevin and Jae for the afternoon. It’d been a while since I’d seen these guys, who I became really close with during training, so that was time well spent.
Around 6 o’clock, we met up with some other friends and took a subway to Insadong. There, we went to this traditional Buddhist restaurant, leaving our shoes at the door to eat dinner and watch a performance. Kevin had already been four times, so his recommendation seemed pretty solid. The meal was expensive (40,000 won) and completely vegetarian, but was actually really good, in my opinion. There were about 25 dishes overall, including a wide variety of kelp salads, a couple of soups, a number of tofu recipes, and even some kimchi for good measure. It was definitely unlike any meal I’ve ever had before, and the color, variety, and novelty of it made the dinner well worth it.
What really topped the night off, though, was the performance that came right as we were finishing our meal. At 8:45, the lights went dark and an older woman dressed in what I imagine was a traditional Buddhist outfit came out on the small square area in the center of the restaurant and began to dance to a beautiful melody of [again, probably traditional] Buddhist music. After she was finished, she was followed by four other performers, two men and two women, each of whom performed his/her own solo dance for the small crowd of people at the restaurant.
As you can probably tell by my remarks in the previous paragraph, I don’t know a whole lot about Buddhism or Buddhist dance, music, or clothing. While watching the performances, part of me struggled with this fact, feeling like I was missing something very important, almost like watching a movie in a foreign language without the subtitles. In general, when I observe cultural practices or performances like the one last night, I feel a little cheated when I have no sense for the context of what I’m watching. After a few minutes, though, I realized that there wasn’t much I could really do for myself at that point, and in the end was contented to sit back and watch a really interesting performance very much different from anything I could see back home.
After the dancers had finished, they all came onstage together and invited a few members of the audience to join them in dance, which I (with the help of some rice wine in my belly and the strong urging of my friends) decided to accept. I was handed a drum and a large stick with which to bang it and given some brief instructions on the beat by one of the woman dancers, and then we were off. Going round and round in a circle in the small performance area, I started to get pretty into the dance. Again, while part of me felt a bit ridiculous for partaking in this dance that I didn’t know and in which I was clearly an outsider, another part of me said: “Hey, just screw it and have a good time!” And that is what I did. I didn’t come to Korea to become a Korean; I came to Korea to experience and learn about a people and place that I knew almost nothing about. And last night was a perfect example of that process in action.
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