Soaking up some sunshine on the rocks in the river at the end of the tea festival.

I know it’s been a little quiet on here lately, but with good reason. First, Michael and I took a lovely vacation around southern South Korea, finally getting to see a bit of the country we’ve been living in. Then the ever-wonderful Mel, who designed this site initially, granted me yet another request and moved the action over to greenjunkieliving.com.  I still own the old URL for another year or so, but please go ahead and reset any bookmarks and RSS feeds if those are giving you trouble.

Before I recap and some highlights of our trip, I want to thank everyone who weighed in on the name change. It made the process much easier! So now I’m going to call on your talents again: this blog needs a new banner. Ideas, suggestions, and (if you’re feeling extra awesome on a given day) mocked up banners are all greatly appreciated!

My work shut down for a week at the start of the month in celebration of Children’s Day. Seeing as I usually work six days a week, it’s been tough for us to see much of Korea, even though it’s a relatively small country. We took advantage of this guaranteed break from classes (which did feel a little silly, as I had only taught two classes since mid-March…) and booked a trip. We started with a group trip through Adventure Korea to climb Jirisan (the biggest “mountain” in Korea–at 1400 meters) and attend a green tea festival, then we broke off on our own and headed to Gyeong-ju, which was once the seat of the Silla empire. I have lots of photos to share, but for some reason with all the switcharoos on here, I keep getting “HTTP error” alerts when I try to upload. With any luck I’ll have that resolved soon, and for now, here are a few from the first part of the trip that I “borrowed” from a friend’s facebook page.

View from the top of Jirisan on a hazy day

Singing Sweet Caroline--for the first of many times that night.

Nothing like a bunch of foreigners picking green tea on a Sunday morning

The tea leaves are poured into a giant, hot bowl and then constantly lifted and tossed. We're pretty sure this is to release excess moisture, but our translator was unclear about the process.

After heating the leaves, they're transferred to a woven mat where they're crushed and massaged. Again, I think this is to release more moisture, but it was unclear.

Finally, the leaves are transferred to large screens to finish drying.