Strawberry wasted

The Korean strawberry is a living legend. And we set the memory in our mind permanently by taking a daylong strawberry themed field trip.

First on the agenda: mix up all the stuffs to make our very own strawberry soap.

Second on the agenda: eat all the strawberries. We were given free reign to wander through the greenhouse and stuff our faces with all the strawberries we could manage…and then we were each entitled to our own box that we could fill with strawberries and take home. Talk about a bunch of kids in a candy store! 

My first instinct, in natural hunter/gatherer fashion, was to grab and eat every strawberry I laid eyes upon. That worked well at first, until I realized that the really good strawberries were a little further from the entrance of the greenhouse. No problem at all though. All I had to do was eat enough of my original collection to make room in the box for those gold-standard berries. And then eat some more, just to make sure I was definitely getting a good product.

It may look like greedy strawberry eating, but I'm really feeding my 6.5-month old peanut!
Okay, it's greedy strawberry eating.

So that brings us to phase two of the eating. There were samples galore of strawberry jam, both sweet and spicy, as well as bread, crackers, and some oddly textured soy product to serve as the base for said strawberry jams.

Third on the agenda: jam hands…aka, squish more berries with our hands to get them ready to make our own jam. And also, mix this with enough sugar to go into a diabetic coma. Winning.

I thought I was doing it right, but...

...it needed more anger.

Fruit and sugar stirring takes some real muscle and stamina.

The 'fruits' of our labor. Lol.

And finally before heading out, we popped our soaps out of their molds and got to fawn over how adorable they all were for a few minutes. And they were so incredibly adorable.

Lately it seems like our outings are not complete without a temple visit. So we traveled onward, bellies full of strawberries, to Gwanchoksa Temple.

The area of the temple grounds was the smallest of any of the temples we’ve seen so far, but it was no less beautifully designed. Plus, Gwanchoksa boasts of its gigantic stone Buddha statue that stands just over 18 meters tall and a stone archway through which one can walk to cleanse themselves of their sins. Oh Buddha, you make this seem too easy!