Korean Music Festival Guide
Wanna have a water gun fight? 🔫💦
안녕! It’s Ari, your talkative Korean friend and weekend reminder 🎉 Today’s newsletter is about a better doenjang jjigye, a music festival guide, why COVID-19 cases are skyrocketing in South Korea, and more. Let’s start!
🎧 You can listen to me read and chat on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or others.
Treat Yourself Beef Doenjang Noodle!
If you’re a K-Food lover, you must’ve heard about and tried doenjang jjigye which is a soybean paste soup. Today, I want to introduce how to enjoy this Korean food in a different and delicious way 😋 It’s very simple. Just make ordinary doenjang jjigye and then add the following three: thin noodles, bean sprouts, and thin beef. Though doenjang jjigye is mostly served with rice, it goes very well with noodle as well. Also beef and doenjang jjigye are a match made in heaven! If you add a small amount of fatty beef when making the soup, it’ll taste a whole lot better. I guarantee. If you’re a vegetarian, you can skip beef and it’ll still be delicious!
Watch a cooking video above and treat yourself a decent meal cause you deserve it!
Korean Music Festival Guide
Summer is a season of music festivals here in Korea so I want to introduce two big & different festivals which recently ended or is ongoing now. First one is WATER BOMB ☝️ As you can see from the pic above, in this nationwide festival that is held between June and August, people have water gun fights while enjoying music. The fights are not just between festival-goers. Singers have a water gun fight with audience too. It started in 2015 and this year’s WATER BOMB is the first event in 3 years since the pandemic had started. It’s known as a sexy? festival with people wearing swimsuits and singers doing rare sexy performances 🫣
Second one is Pentaport Rock Festival 🎸 which is one of the biggest and oldest music festivals in the country that started in 1999. Though it started as a rock music festival, now it covers various genres. It lasts for 3 days in an island in Incheon, a city located near Seoul. This year’s festival ended two weeks ago. The headliner was Nell, a super-popular Korean alternative rock band. Since they’re a regular headliner which performs at the end, for festival-goers, their songs are like the festival closing songs. People go home while singing along their mega-hit song called Time Walking on Memory.
The two festivals are very different though their one-day ticket price is almost the same with around 90-100 USD. If you want to enjoy active and young atmosphere and sexy performances, you’ll love WATER BOMB. If you want to enjoy music and if you love a traditional kind of music festival, you’ll love Pentaport. Watch Vlogs of the two festival-goers 👉WATER BOMB 👉Pentaport.
From The Best To The Worst
South Korea used to be considered as a country who handled COVID-19 the best in the world. But, as of August 16th, according to NYT’s Coronavirus World Map, South Korea is ranked at 2nd in a chart of countries with the most cases per 100,000 residents in the last seven days. Since Marshall Islands, the first on the chart, has population of only about 60,000, you can say that my country is recently doing the worst job handling COVID-19. So what the heck happened to my country? The answer is simple. About three months ago, South Korea elected a new president and it changed everything. As soon as he got elected, he fired Jeong Eun-kyeong, commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) who has led the nation’s antivirus efforts to success and is on the 2020 TIME 100 List. The new government also cut antivirus efforts budgets so free COVID tests became 40 USD tests discouraging people to get tested. No more government subsidies for the patients who can’t go to work which makes people hide their infections to go to work and make a living. No more monitoring of at-home patients over 60 which led the recent dramatic increase of death. Now KDCA or 질병관리청 has a new nickname of 질병관람청 which means Korea Disease Bystander Agency.
No wonder why the new president’s approval rate dropped to 19%.
Mic Drop 🎤
Today’s line would probably be the most famous and romantic K-Drama line in the decade. It’s from Goblin: The Lonely and Great God (2016). Click the above video to listen to the line.
너와 함께 한 시간 모두 눈부셨다. 날이 좋아서, 날이 좋지 않아서, 날이 적당해서, 모든 날이 좋았다. “Every moment I spent with you shined. Because the weather was good, because the weather was bad and because the weather was good enough, I loved every moment of it. (translated by a YouTube user, Em)
Words in the line,
너 You
함께 With, together
눈부시다 To shine
날 A day
좋다 To be good (Present: 좋다, Past: 좋았다)
적당하다 To be good enough
모든 All, every
👄 Practice speaking the line with my podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or others. Don’t forget to record your voice and send me your voice message 👇 If you send it by 4 pm Wednesday, August 24th ET, your voice will be on the next podcast episode!
Last thing I want to share is a free coffee truck at this year’s Pentaport Rock Festival 👇 A banner on the truck says, “I’ll see you at a DUI checkpoint after the festival.” It was sent by a local police station which wanted to remind festival-goers not to drive after drinking alcohol in a fun way. The truck was a huge success since there was zero DUI incident during the festival and people, of course, loved free coffees.
Thanks for reading! If you liked my newsletter, share with your friends or 💖 leave a tip 💖 to support my work. See you next week. 안녕!
Woww that deonjang noodle looks so good, it's making me hungry! ㅜㅜ