Field Trip Part 2: Borigoge Village

The first thing we did at Borigoge Village was having lunch. We all sat down on the floor, Korean style, and enjoyed our Bibimbap, rice with seven different kinds of vegetables (as our itinerary informed us).

Eating Korean style

Self-mixed Bibimbap

Afterwards everyone could build their own miniature 솟대 (Sotdae). Sotdae are carved wooden birds errected on poles in order to protect the village and to grant the wishes of the villagers. Usually they are really big so we made miniature versions of them, which were used as toys by Korean children in former times.

My Sotdae Pieces

The base of my Sotday with my name in Korean

 The finished product looks like this:

It's so simple and easy to build and I think it is really cute :) plus we got to take our Sotday home afterwards. I hope I can get mine back to Germany without it falling to pieces...

Afterwards we went into the yard where we could make tofu ourselves. Tofu is used in many Korean dishes and I really like food which includes tofu in any way. I've never before though thought about how tofu is produced so I was very curious about the production process.
You start by grinding beans into a white smelly paste which doesn't look very appetizing:

Grinding the beans is not as easy as it looks because the stones are quite heavy and you need a lot of strength to do it. I guess if you do it often you get very muscular arms ;)
The result is a white paste which looks like this:

White bean paste

You get all the bean paste and put it in a special kind of cloth which you then have to knead thoroughly. The solid stuff collects inside the cloth which you can use to make some other food stuff but what you need for tofu is the liquid actually.

Kneading in progress

The white liquid you collect through this method is soy milk. Next thing to do is boil everything and then comes the difficult part. You add a certain amount of sea salt water which has to be stirred into the hot soy milk in a very special way. If you stir to slowly or to fast, add too much or not enough sea salt water, you can start grinding beans again because your tofu will taste very bad and you have to throw it away.

Boiling the soy milk

Stirring the sea salt water into the soy milk

If you want to make tofu you need to be very patient!
The result now is something called "soft tofu". You can further solidify it by putting it into casts and pressing it into form but soft tofu is already often used in stews and soups. We simply added some salty soy sauce to it and it was incredibly good! Together with a bowl of rice I could have this for lunch or dinner!

Self-made tofu with soy sauce :)

After eating we had some free minutes and walked around the small village.

Village life

Even though the village was very small they had their own small temple complex:

Similar to Yongmunsa there are many small (quite kitschy) figures around the temple grounds:

The entrance gate housed some tall wooden guardian figures, which (for some obscure reason) all (except one) were sporting guns. Well, at least I can really imagine them protecting the village!

We took the bus back to Seoul and were all glad to finally arrive back at the dormitory. This was a great day, I hope we will have another field trip soon!