So, today is kimchi making day. I got to sleep in until 9:00AM! Then we got up, ate breakfast, and went at the kimchi making! So, yesterday, they soaked the cabbage in salt water to ferment it. Today, they started throwing a bunch of ingredients into a big plastic bathtub: little shrimps, two kinds of spicy powders, a type of cut up vegetable, smashed garlic, smashed ginseng, and water. It became a sauce of sorts. Then they laid out paper on the driveway ground, put the tub in the center, and lots of bins around. They sat down with cabbages and just started smearing the sauce around on them. There is definitely a technique to make sure that all of the cabbage is covered in this firey red sauce, but it looked pretty simple.
For a long time, I carried buckets of cabbages over to those making the kimchi, I made sure that they had sauce in their own buckets, and so on. They somehow dubbed me a really good worker. LOL! Within that time, they kept calling me over to eat kimchi (there was a small place on the ground set up with cups and a little bit of the sauce that wasn't so runny and we were supposed to eat occasionally.) They shoved raw oysters in my mouth and super hot kimchi paste, but it was all okay. Oh, I forgot to mention, that since this is a small town, making kimchi is a town activity. So, yesterday I met a few neighbors that came to help today. I also met like ALL of the family except for the one older sister. The youngest brother used to work at a restaurant in Seoul, so he did the mixing of the sauce. Anyway, I was told by one neighbor to call her aunt, and the mother in law of the cousin who just got married last week told me to call her mom. LOL! It was hilarious, and I loved every minute of it!
I got up the courage to try to make the kimchi too. So, I sat down and shared a bucket with Seok and we made kimchi. It wasn't hard at all, but it was incredibly messy! If neighbors came down the road, they were offered kimchi and soju (Korean liquor). I have no idea how many heads of cabbage we kimchied (not an actual verb), but it was a whole heck of a lot!!
After about three hours of making kimchi, my headache that had been slowly progressing since yesterday morning was worse. So, I went to lay down for a while before lunch. I laid down so more (Seok's daughter Tajung (16 years old) had been sleeping all day...she didn't help make kimchi.) We headed back to Wonju around 3:00PM, and I slept almost the whole way there.
Seok's mom gave me some kimchi, ddeok, and cooking oil to give to my family. After dinner, I was pretty much gone. My headache was full blown. I don't really like taking medicine, but I couldn't have even if I wanted to...I ran out of Ibuprofen about a week ago. My host mom offered to buy me some Tylenol (which is strange since I live with an oriental medicine pharmacist), and I refused; I didn't want her to have to go out just to buy Tylenol. I was kind of a walking zombi for a while when I wasn't lying in bed. Eventually I gave in and accepted my host mom's offer the second time. It helped enough for me to get to sleep around 11:00PM.
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