Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Another Day of Drumming!

January 11th, 2010
I woke up a tad before most of the group again, we all went to breakfast at 8. In case you didn't know, Korean breakfast is the same as every other Korean meal. We had rice, kimchi, soup (seaweed with nothing much in it to give it flavor besides MSG I hope not, maybe just salt), the side dishes were sausage in spicy sauce, flour and fish paste reconstituted into a pancake of fishy tasting flour, sauteed in a spicy sauce, and spinach (steamed).

Morning practice was a bit more frustrating for me than yesterday. The teacher, 수희Suhee literally only stops talking when she's hitting the drum or ggwaenggwari, and not always then. She talked for 35 minutes straight at one point. Yes, much is related to what we're studying, but one of her soliloquy was about a program she'd seen on the news on censorship in a high school. She didn't even explain it well. There was less testing of people's ability to make the rhythm this morning, I guess she's more sure of our ability now. Although she still did some checking (only once on the janggu players but several times on the ggwaenggwari) and spent a long time explaining 호허굿 (Ho heo gut). There seems to be some confusion over how to do it.

We had lunch and then I ended up helping to shovel snow off the very steep path to the cafeteria, it's incredibly dangerous the way it is. It's starting to snow again right now, so having one part of the path without snow or ice to be covered by more snow and ice will be nice. It's been a bit terrifying even to go to the cafeteria, and I've come back the long way almost every time.

Afternoon practice was more of the same; we practiced, but more than that we listened to Sohee speak about a wide variety of things. I continually space out or nod off when she's talking. Bad researcher, bad! Must take detailed field notes (my notebook is just next to me, uncapped pen at the correct page). After dinner, another meat heavy meal that I could barely eat, I felt so weak. I tried to do the evening independent practice—I put on my 상모 sangmo and spun for about thirty minutes, then I sat down and fell asleep for about twenty minutes, waking up I decided it made more sense to just give up entirely, and I went to sleep (until they came back from practice, because it's hard to sleep before everyone else has, but eventually they went downstairs to have 뒤풀이 duipuli and I fell back asleep). I think this was less because the surgery on Friday taxed my body and more because two meals in a row with mostly meat (lunch I could barely eat at all) meant that I wasn't fueled properly.


Seungmin:

Yeongnok:


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