Waiting....for the best time to tell stories about Chansaem village that we visited.^^
..Now it is the time. I got my energy back and ready to bring back the memories I had when I visited this village. Chansaem village is one of the 20 villages selected by the Korean Minister of Farming, Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. Its purpose is to provide village-based experiences for everyone who probably come from cities.
This picture above is the first one I took even while I was on the BUS before entering the gate of the village.
Rivers--small ones--, paddy fields, green forests were the wonders that I surely cannot experience back home in Seoul. So, I was pretty much excited about it.
The first impression as soon as we arrived at the intersection of the village, oh..I see! Even the solar panel is set up there. I guess the village itself has indeed utilized the latest renewable energy power plant to support itself. A nice touch.
First thing first. What to eat. We arrived there slightly passed noon, so...the only thing that came to our mind was what to eat and "let's just have lunch" kind-of-thought. But......we got to suppress that desire since we needed to prepare the food by ourselves.!! (shocker!!)
Anyhow, since one of the main purposes of visiting this village is to experience the real village food, what is better than....cooking our very own food with the village's best organic produce.
That day...we were making bibimbap or mixed rice with lots and lots of vegetables.
Here are some of the ingredients we needed to prepare and use. Sesame street (I mean..sesame ^^), sesame oil, garlic, pepper powder, salt, another kind of oil that I am not sure what...^^ and....well I do not remember what it was..
Than....we have some carrots, fried eggs, sprouts, lettuce, cabbage (?), reddish, cucumber...and one more thing that ...I did not what that was either. Anyway...we chopped all of those ingredients into small bits as shown on the picture above. We did it ourselves.
Then...we mixed most of the chopped vegetables with olive oil so as to give flavor out of them...
Oh, our group consisted of men. Not even one female friends in the group...which...surely made us make our very very own style of cooking. But, hey...we were the cooks! Most cooks are men, right? (Not sure if we are accounted for)
Judging from the pic. it looks like we were in attentively learning at a cooking class instead of preparing our own lunch. Well, frankly... that sort of feeling did stir into my mind.
But...it was all worth the wait. The bibimbap we made was delicious. Of course, as for me and Santos--my newly found friend from India--our bibimbap was all what it was minus beef. Though I got to admit that even my bibimbap and Santo's were different either way.
Ok, that's the look of my bibimbap.
Our friends from left: Santosh (India), He Dengke (China), Wang Chaopeng (China), Andy (China) and me.
A whole group of men trying to make their own bibimbap. We did it.
Before continuing to other programs, I might as well take a picture of a placard stating what the place was. So, the place were we made our bibimbap is actually a place where we experience making Korean food. It turns out that this place was set up ( I think in a kind of joint cooperation) with Daejon's Research for Development in charge of green tourism, Daejon Government, and other institutions in Daejon area.
Next program was so exciting. No, it was not the program, but I think Mr. Park Jun-sung (the office manager) of the Chansaem Village deliberately prepared this for us. We got to ride at back of the pick-up (see the picture?)
Well, who would not want to experience something like this? Riding at the back of a pick-up car....which took us up into the hill where we would start our next program...
On our way, I always had this urge of taking any picture of colorful flowers that I encountered along the way. This I-do-not-know-what-it-was-but-surely-nice-looking purple flowers were the first flowers that caught my attention.
This is pretty much the idyllic picture that I could think of. Additionally..the weather somewhat made it manageable for me (at least) to experience Chansaem village
This is Mr. Park Jun-sung who was passionately explaining about cassava-related class and its trivia, too. Felt like I did not learn a lot back then at school. Still, the whole point was to give us an expository before we began digging up the Korean cassava.
As for us, we could not help giggling or laughing at the how funny or occasionally intriguing Mr. Park's explanation was.
(Comment: The dress code and what we were about to do..were an unlikely match, had we done this somewhere else).
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