◇ Foreigners and tea club members demonstrating ‘Darye,’ traditional Korean tea etiquette ⓒ Samsung Group

Foreign employees working at Samsung were among the first foreign nationals to obtain Korean Tea Master certificates at the ‘Korean Tea Masters’ course graduation ceremony held at the Yeongtong Social Welfare Center in Suwon City on February 11.

One of the recipients was German national Sonja Glaser, a manager at the Digital Appliances Brand Marketing Group of Samsung Electronics, who joined Samsung in 2003. Since 2007, she has devoted herself to studying ‘dado’, including three years at the Suwon branch of the Panyaro Institute for the Way of Tea and another eighteen months at the Insa-dong Panyaro Institute for the Way of Tea in Seoul. She became the first foreigner to be certified as a ‘Korean Tea Master’ at a graduation ceremony held at the Yeongtong Social Welfare Center in Suwon City on February 11.

Sonya Glaser, a confirmed enthusiast of traditional Korea culture, has organized a number of in-house Korean culture clubs at Samsung such as the Korean Folk Painting Club, the Traditional Korean Wrapping Cloth Club and the Korean Tea Fan Club (‘Samdachin’) to learn more about traditional Korean culture and publicize it whenever possible.

Demonstrating her profound love of traditional Korean culture, she said, “I would like to learn about traditional Korean culture properly and introduce it to my non-Korean friends. When I return to Germany, I would like to introduce it to as many Germans as possible.”

Along with Sonya Glaser, Roman Shpanchenko (Russian), a principle research engineer, and Evgeniya Matulevich (Russian), a senior research engineer at Samsung SDI Central Research, as well as Vivian O’ Salles (American), a professor at Woosong University and spouse of Mohammed Sharif, a principle research engineer at IT Solutions, Samsung, were also awarded Korean Tea Master certificates.

Korean Tea Master certificates are given to those who have trained more than once a week for a number of years. Because of the long training period involved, the course is regarded as being very difficult to complete even for Koreans.

ⓒ G-News Plus | Moon Ho-gwon tigermoon@lycos.co.kr

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