Fall is here.

It took a little longer than expected, but autumn is in full swing in the southern reaches of Korea. The wintry winds are blowing in, the leaves are ablaze, and my nose refuses to stop running. Most of the time my internal V-8 keeps me chugging on cold mornings, but it's also nice to wake up to heated ondol floors--one of the many mysterious luxuries in Korea, perpetuated in modern buildings with or without historical context.

As for heating though, I recently explored another of the strange and wonderful Korean saunas. On Saturday I headed up to Daejeon to give D. Chang a visit--though with the explicit intention of visiting a sutkam (숮감) sauna in the middle of bumble@#%$ nowhere outside of the city. I took the trip with his host family Saturday night, winding down some one-lane roads in the mysterious dark abyss. There was only one wiggly line left on the otherwise pitch black GPS, leading down to a strange little restaurant sauna in the rural hills. No hottub at this one, only hot air. You get dressed up in the typical light blue nut-house gard and proceed out into the cold starlit air, from which you can choose from a few different little huts covered in big thick fire blankets.

The story behind all this is actually fairly interesting, so I might as well explain it. There's a calbi restaurant attached to the main building, and the meat is always cooked over a distinct pine species at just the right temperature. 숮감, literally charcoal, refers to the wood itself, which they burn slowly over the the coarse of a week or so. Every couple days they move the wood to a new room--and each of these little rooms heats a different sauna, consequently a unique temperature depending on the age of the wood. Well, I'll just start by saying that one of these rooms will burn you in places you didn't know existed. I'm sure the old, thick skinned ajummas (old ladies) take it in stride, but I was about to pass out after thirty seconds or so. The hot air alone left light burns on my arm, not to mention my putzing around with the blanket on my way in and out. Chang and I settled for the next room, plenty hot and not quite so excruciating. They idea with these sauna (and I guess, with any sauna) is to sweat.
And sweat I did. Rotating between the sultry sauna and nipply cold air for a couple hours I looked, and smelled, like a skanky wet dog. The kicker: you're not supposed to shower--it ruins the, well, I actually have no idea what it ruins, but rules are rules. When I did shower, however, I felt about as fresh as the day I was born. My skin, to my delight, was nice and soft. To be honest though, I don't know if it was actually soft, or just the relative feeling post-disgusting. What difference does it make?

I'll also spend a little time describing this past Tuesday's field trip--one because that's where the latest pictures came from and two, the hilarity of seeing grown men (teachers) going through a role reversal of sorts. I had Tuesday off this week for an open house for middle schoolers and their parents. This was only in the morning though, and during the afternoon I got to tag along on the latest social debacle commonly known as a teachers field trip. Most of the teachers at my school are getting a little long in the tooth, or at least firmly situated in the middle of their careers--but once they step out of the school doors and onto a tour bus, all hell breaks loose. Picture previously stern and learned instructors walking up and down the aisles of the bus throwing out beer and snacks and having a ball. The start and end of the trip including restaurant meals, never complete without the bottomless glass of soju, but the focus of the day was actually a trip to Haenam (literally, "country"), one of the many temple sanctuaries currently ablaze in the glory of autumn. For me this was another chance to whip out the camera and catch the fall colors, but I didn't forget my friends at the trailside restaurants--having a ball with no students, good food, and local sweet potato makkeoli. Perhaps the most interesting part: 3 months in and I'm still indisputably a guest in this country. As such, all the teachers make it their personal endeavor to break bread (errrr, rice?) and share in a bottle of booze. These best part though, they always get drunk a whole lot easier than me, so I get treated to food and wine and social entertainment without feeling it the next morning. Maybe the foreigner *shine* will wear off some day. In the mean time, I'll enjoy it while it lasts.