Every so often the Daegu YMCA hosts cultural activity days where you can learn traditional korean arts and crafts. The YMCA is a lifeline for foreigners in Daegu with Korean language classes so I'm on their mailing list. The event was free and I had nothing planned this weekend so I signed up.

The morning introduction in the main hall was a rather long drumming duet performance on two different types of traditional drums. We were later to find out these would be the two instructors for each of the seperate sessions.

For the morning session we had a choice of Janggu drums which are banged from the sides, Modeumbuk drums which are banged from the top, old downtown walking tour which I've done myself, or traditional calligraphy. I chose the Janggu side drums.

We were divided into groups and taken to seperate rooms. For the Janggu drums first we laid the drums on the floor and slid the rope bands to the right to tighten the drum. There were then two sticks seperate for each hand.

The left hand stick is shorter with a round ball end, the right hand stick is longer with a flat end like a chopstick. We were then told the right way to hold each of the sticks. The left one has the thumb and small finger divided from the middle three fingers to hold the stick. The right hand is a normal grasp.

Then we were taught basic drumming techniques. 'Deong' is to drum the two sticks together, 'Ta' is to use the right stick only, 'Kung' is the left stick only. Then it started to get tricky. First they taught us a traditional rythmn called 'gut geo li'.

The first line was D-D/DTT/KTT/KT- which is repeated four time.
The second line DDhey/DDhey/D-D-D-D- is repeated two times
The last line D-D/DTT/KTT/KT- is a single time.

The last line gets more confusing as during the beats KTT you shout 'ul-sa' and during KT- you shout 'jo-ta'. The final one confuses you as the drum KT is two beats but you pronounce 'jo-ta' over the third beat which is silent.

The second rythmn we learnt was called 'Jajin Mori'. The four lines are
1: D--/D--/D-T/KT-
2: D-T/KT-/D-T/KT-
3: D-T/KTT/K-T/KT-
4: DD-/DD-/D--/T" (the final T" is tapping the outer edge of the drum)

It was an interesting experience and I have more respect for the traditional drummers I always see at festivals. It helps to pronounce the names of the beats deoung/kung/ta so long so you which one is right and left, but then you're thrown off in 'gut geo li' when you have to shout out the 'hey's' and 'us-sa' and 'jo-ta'.

For lunch we then rode a centipede style tandem bicycle over to the restaurant. Again I've seen these at fairs with little kids all cycling. Its actually electric powered so the pedals dont do anything other than give you the impression of cycling.

The afternoon session we had a choice of four food activities; making dongdongju an alcoholic drink, kimchi koreans most famous pickled cabbage, kalguksu noodles, or buckwheat acorn jelly. I like eating kalguksu so chose this one. Kimchi I dont really like eating and acorn jelly has no taste.

I was told by the YMCA we would not learn how to make noodles from dough as this takes too long and we would just watch a demonstration and boil our own. I thought it would be a bit boring as I know how to boil noodles but when we arrived I was pleasantly surprised as there were dough balls on each table prepared for us to make noodles.

The chef demonstrated we are first to flatten the dough ball then use a rolling pin to roll it out till 2mm thick. We then folded the large sheet in half, then folded in half again in the same direction, and a third time till we had a long 10cm strip.

Then with a sharp knife we were to cut diagnolly away from us 2mm strips of noodles. Once we did the entire strip of dough, which took quite some time, we boiled our noodles. Unfortunately they only had three stoves so the three pots had some of everybodies noodles. I was eating a lot of my raw noodles in the process.

Some people got to take their cut noodles home but they moved all the trays to one side so I had no idea which one was mine after that. We then ate our freshly boiled noodles and toasted with some homemade dongdongju (the alcoholic beverage) which was a very strong brandy so I only had a sip as I dont drink.

It was quite a fun day and I look forward to another similar event when Daegu YMCA holds one.