So long, Korea! – 10 things I’ll miss about life in Korea

So long, Korea! is a series of posts dedicated to the two years that we are wrapping up in South Korea. These posts are a little bit of a departure from the normal food and travel type posts, but I feel like it’s important to reflect on the past couple of years and all of the changes we’ve been through since then. Don’t worry, this series will come to a swift end before March 1st, when we’ll be back to food and travel in Tokyo, Japan.

Yesterday’s post about all that touchy-feely psycho-babble growth and change was a bit deeper than I normally like to dig on the blog. I feel like you’ve all seen me without my pants on or something. Today I want to keep it light. Obviously I’m pretty excited to move back to civilization the United States, get married, visit Europe (I feel like starting my life as an international man of mystery in Asia was skipping level 1 of the whole game) and all that jazz. There’s quite a bit I’ll miss about life in the ol’ Republic of Korea, though, and I’m going to do the impossible task of narrowing it down to a list of only 10 items.

10 things I’ll miss about life in korea

This is the sexiest mass transit in Korea

1. Mass transit. This country has a killer mass transit system. It puts our transit system in the U.S. to shame, although we’re a much bigger country so it’d be way more difficult to get the rails set up as quickly as they have here. I love the fact that we can get downtown for less than a dollar, or to Seoul for less than $40 on the high speed train. They’ve built a method of transport for every level of susceptibility to motion sickness budget, and it’s pretty much all (except for buses) foreigner-friendly. C’mon U.S. of A., let’s get on par with this! Let’s not model our schools after the ones in Korea though, okay?

Doenjang Jjigae – Korean soybean paste stew

2. Cheap (and sometimes delicious) food. Carolyn and I used to go out to the Korean BBQ place next door to our apartment and both eat until we were stuffed. While Korean food isn’t my favorite in the world, or even Asia, they’ve got some pretty tasty dishes if you are blissfully ignorant of what’s in it know what you’re ordering. I mean, you’re not going to get the really good homemade kimchi at a cheap place, but you don’t always eat super cheap, do you? Anyhow, there’s more than enough places to stop off for a bite to eat without opening your wallet too far, and I’m going to miss that a lot.

3. The lack of English speakers. This one will likely appear in the upcoming list of 10 things I won’t miss at all about living in South Korea also. Look, it might be a pain in the butt to try and communicate with someone when neither of you speak a common language, but the upside is you get hassled less often, you can play ignorant and pass trouble by, and you don’t get worried about the things people are whispering around you. Ignorance is bliss, sometimes.

Seoul lighting up at night from Namsan Tower.

4. The whole city of Seoul. We’re headed up to Seoul at this very moment to get our last few glimpses of some of the historic sights, monuments, and cool architecture before we head home. Seoul is a super cool city, sort of like Korea’s riff on New York, but without all that diversity that you would get in New York.

Busan’s Gwangalli Beach waterfront dazzles after dark.

5. While we’re naming cities, I have to throw Busan in the list, too. Busan was our first stop when we arrived two years ago, a frequent spot of visit to see friends and sights, and a city that is certain to have a special place in our hearts for a long time to come. I’ll miss being able to hop a 45 minute train and go to Busan on a day off, that was a cool little perk to living in Daegu.

6. The joy of finding long lost western products. Do you have any idea how exciting it is to find a six-pack of bratwurst at the grocery store? OF COURSE YOU DON’T. There’s some cliche old saying about how you don’t know how much you love something until it’s gone, and that is so. true. When the grocery store here stocks something from home, we get all excited and giddy. That’s joy, right there. Joy.

7. The supreme overarching fear of causing confrontation that keeps public settings pretty drama-free. Okay this is another love/hate item. I don’t like it when my coworker won’t tell me something I need to do, or something she thinks will upset me (I’ve never, ever lost my cool at work) because she’s afraid of a confrontation. I do like it, however, that I’ve very rarely seen any sort of drama in public. I can count on the fingers of only one hand the number of times I’ve seen people yelling at customer service representatives or their spouses in public. For real. It would take several more fingers to count the number of times some crazy old lady on the street here has started yelling at me for no reason (I assume it’s some “foreigner, go home!” crap because I recognize a few words) and old drunk men have tried to get us riled up on the subway, but whatever. You expect old people to be a little xenophobic, right?

We had a heck of a view at our cheap (but nice) hotel on top of a hill in Jeongdongjin.

8. The Mountains! Look, I’m not much of a hiker. I thought I would be, but honestly it’s a lot of work, I don’t like bugs, and Korea has very short time periods where the temperature isn’t just too hot or too cold to really do stuff outside. I do, however, love the views of the mountains I get when I’m on the street here. My neighborhood is ringed by mountains. Out of the office window I get a view of a short one, and out of the stairwell at school I can see one of the bigger ones in the city. They’re pretty. They change color. They remind me what season it is. I’ll miss them.

9. The large selection of instant noodles. It’s been fun trying all of the different flavors of instant noodles available at the convenience store here. They’re not healthy, and they probably all contain the right ingredients for a home-grown kidney stone in each bucket, but it’s a colorful slice of life in Korea to enjoy a bucket of ramen lamyeon noodles every now and again. Also, I kinda think they all taste the same. The terrible spaghetti flavored ones are not included in this entry, by the way. They’re truly a thing of terror.

10. The nice old Korean ladies that think I’m handsome. I get some serious smiles and old-lady eye bats when I go to the convenience store or grocery store. There’s not really very many nice old Korean ladies that bat their eyes at me (see number 7) but the two or three in the neighborhood here make me smile and probably blush a little bit. It’s nice when I haven’t been to the Lotte Super in a while to have someone notice and say in a very mother-is-disappointed way orenmaniyeo? (long time no see…but I think in this context, where the hell have you been?) It makes you feel a little less invisible in a place where people want to avoid having to speak to you (in any language, because they’re “embarrassed about their English”) and you often get shuffled around between three or four people so that you can ask for 30 Liter trash bags in Korean. I’ll miss my two old ladyfriends, and doubtlessly pick up some new ones when we get home…because I’m good with old ladies.

Now I’m looking back at the ten things I chose for this list and laughing a little bit. There’s no mention of cherry blossoms, fall foliage or anything of the kind. I’ll probably have to write one of those huge 50 awesome things about South Korea kinda posts at some point in the future. Probably while starting a new job, looking for a new job, going stir crazy between jobs, or something similar. Let’s just say this list is not complete, Okay?

After Dark: Cities all lit up

This gallery contains 11 photos.

One thing I love is a city at night, all of its lights twinkling like so many stars looking up at the real stars in the sky (and washing them out so that we can’t see them.) For me a … Continue reading →

Oh man, I love vegetables.

A couple of years ago I would have never imagined myself eating a mountain of vegetables like we did tonight. Of course, a couple of years ago I imagined that life in Korea would be about 90% eating Korean barbecue and 10% Korean soups. Well, the truth of the matter is going out to eat and cooking your own food does in fact get old after a while, and Korean soups aren’t what you want all the time.

Even before this place doubled their prices and lost 75% of their business, galbi was a once a week kind of thing.

 

Korea loves its meat…and sodium…and red pepper flakes

In Korea your food and flavor options are fairly limited. Korean cuisine is based on a relatively small number of flavor profiles. Let’s see, there’s bland clear soups, spicy red soups, and seaweed soups; unseasoned meats, smoked meats, and marinated meats (all to be cooked at your table); spicy rice cakes and fried chicken bits; Korean-style Chinese food (sweet and sour pork or seafood soup or noodles with black bean sauce); and about four million variations on instant noodles.

There’s clearly more than this to Korean food, but there’s just not a ton of variation between dishes, and lots of them come covered with tons of sauce made out of who knows what. Sometimes you just want to eat something that tastes clean, well seasoned, and not slathered in too much sauce. Tonight I did just that, with a giant pile of vegetables.

Vegetables make you feel good.

Vegetables are great. You can eat a ton of vegetables without feeling like a total lard-bucket. Yesterday wasn’t exactly a day of clean eating, so today a vegetable heavy meal sounded pretty good. Combine that with Korea’s asinine grocery laws making today an impossible day to get any meat nearby, and you’ve got a recipe for a vegetable dinner.

What’s that about the grocery laws, you ask? Well, Korea has this silly law that requires the large chain stores and their subsidiaries to close every other Sunday. The problem is that there aren’t that many small mom n’ pop neighborhood markets that sell decent meat (or produce). Since we went to the big grocery store last Sunday, today wasn’t exactly a “bodes well for grocery shopping” kind of day. Just as well, we had more cheese, meat, and bread than necessary yesterday anyhow, and it was time to get our  healthy eating back on track for the week.

Zucchini, carrot, and broccoli.

 

Off to the mom n’ pop “mart” to get some vegetables I went. The little mart behind my apartment sometimes has decent produce, and carries nearly no meats. Today on the shelves were about 4 heads of broccoli, three zucchini, and a stack of carrots. Two of the three zucchini were no good, so I snagged the good one right away. The broccoli looked surprisingly good for Korea, so I picked up one of those too. The stack of carrots looked great, but I only picked up one because for whatever reason the carrots here in Korea are HUGE. Sometimes as thick as my wrist. I also picked up a couple of sodas, eggs, and an eight pack of yogurt. All of that was less than $10US.

So, what did you do with the vegetables after you bought them?

I didn’t want to do much work or make anything complicated tonight. Some days you’re just not as into it as others. Here’s what I did though, and I apologize in advance for the lack of pictures…it might have been tasty but it wasn’t super pretty.

First, I peeled the zucchini and the carrot, and washed the broccoli. I cut up the florets of broccoli, cubed the zucchini and the carrot, and tossed them all in a large mixing bowl and tossed them around a bit, then let them come up to near room temperature so they’d cook at the same rate.

In a very large saucepan, I heated up just enough canola oil to cover the bottom of the pan. Once it was hot, I added a bit of taco seasoning, salt, and pepper. After the spices bloomed a bit, I dumped in the vegetables and let them get a sear on one side before flipping them and stirring a bit. I added a bit more taco seasoning, salt and pepper.

Before the carrots were completely tender, I dumped a drained (but not rinsed) can of black beans, tasted it, adjusted the seasoning, and let it all get up to a nice temperature of “hot.” After making a witty remark about wishing I had a ring mold, I piled it ever so artfully onto our plates. It wasn’t long before all of those vegetables had met their end in our brutal jaws.

I love eating a ton of food and not feeling like a complete pig. That’s the magic of vegetables right there.

Now, just for fun:

Maya: My favorite Indian food in Korea

America is a great place to live if you love food, because contrary to the prevailing belief here that American food is all burgers and fries, American food is basically a cross-section of all of the people that live in America. If you want Thai, you can probably find Thai. If you want Vietnamese, it’s probably easy to find in any big city. Folks from small towns may not have as many options for world cuisines, but they might be persuaded to try them when they visit the big city nearby and certainly see them on television enough because food television is popular all over our great nation.

Korea reminds me in a lot of ways of how America must have been in the fifties and sixties. Things like gender roles, sexual repression, and the general covered-uppedness of the social scene are working their way towards a chaotic time of liberation. This country is going to be a wild place in ten or fifteen years, I think, if America in the sixties can be used as an example. Anyway, this applies to food too. There was a time in our country when eating sweet and sour pork and lemon chicken from an Americanized Chinese restaurant was freaking worldly. Foreign foods had a distinctly American spin on them. I’m reasonably certain that I can get a good facsimile of a Thai meal in my hometown in Texas, not exactly a culinary Mecca or anything. You can’t do that in Korea quite as easily.

We’ve tried lots of ethnic foods here in Korea. Generally you get a very Korean spin on the dish, and a side of pickles. After hearing our friends talk about it for months, we finally visited Maya, an Indian and Nepali restaurant owned by a Nepali man near Kyungpook National University. The food was amazing, and there was no side of pickles. The service was great, he spoke English perfectly, and did I mention the food?

Recently Maya has opened a second, larger location just outside of exit 3 of the line one subway at Beomeo station. The menu is the same, the ownership and cooks are the same, and the food is sublime. We’ve been three times recently as it’s a hell of a lot easier to get to, and this has allowed me to try a few new things, because the worst case scenario is that we just make a return trip if we don’t like what we ordered.

We always start with the samosas. They are a perfect fried shell wrapped around potatoes, green onions and sweet peas seasoned with turmeric, fennel seeds, and chili. They come with a fiery, and I mean fiery, red sauce that will clear out your sinuses while painting the wall behind you with your grey matter. This is a must have every visit.

The curries are delightful. I really can’t think of a better word to use than delightful. They’re spicy, but not too spicy. The flavors are bold, the food is rich, but you can eat it all without feeling like a total lard ass. There are vegetable, chicken, and lamb curries. My current favorite is the lamb. The chunks of lamb were perfectly tender and the curry itself was almost a bit sweet with a spice that grew.

The channa masala was a good vegetarian option, but as neither of us are super fond of raw onion it was a bit of a hard sell. We do love some damn chickpeas though, and this is a curry of…chick peas!

We order a dal fry nearly every time we visit Maya. Dal is one of those Indian foods that I absolutely love on a cold night. For some reason I imagine myself high in the Himalayas sheltering myself from the cold and digging into dal. I believe that the dal fry at Maya is an example of the most elegant and perfect way to use lentils.

The chicken tikka at Maya is just beautiful. Carolyn tried to describe chicken tikka to me for a long time before we ordered it, and you know what, she described it perfectly. It’s awesome. I love the marinade in the outside and the chicken is always cooked perfectly, never too dry to enjoy. The tandoori chicken is equally good.

The most important part of a meal at Maya, or any Indian restaurant for that matter, is the naan. Maya’s naan is probably the best I’ve ever had. It’s cooked in a tandoori oven, apparently the right way, because its got crunch, pull, taste, and texture. It’s everything that I want out of naan, and with a little garlic or butter it’s worth the hour trek over from our far edge of town all on its own.

Do I think it’s worth flying all the way to Korea to eat at Maya? No, that would be nuts. Do I think it’s worth making a trip down to Daegu from Seoul? Maybe, maybe not. Daejeon or Busan? Hell yes.

Workplace Wednesday: Typhoon edition!

Typhoon Sanba over Okinawa on it’s way to South Korea.
(image courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

This week’s workplace Wednesday is probably a good read for anyone that may want to teach English in Korea and wants to know what working in a Korean office is like. This is a story of thought processing, needing to be flexible, and shit just plain not computing. If you’re a weather nerd, you may very well know that Korea has experienced three typhoons this summer. The third, and most powerful, of the typhoons was Sanba, which is pictured above.

The first typhoon passed over at night, and had zero impact on school. The second typhoon (Bolaven) caused school to start at 10:30am instead of 8:30am. Ironically it hit right at about 10:20am that morning as all the kids were walking to school. This third typhoon was much bigger and expected to hit right in the middle of the school day, so they just had the kids stay home. Let me make that a little bit extra clear. They just had the kids stay home.

It was obviously too dangerous for kids to walk to school and be in a building that seems to have a window on literally EVERY exterior wall (there are no 100% interior rooms in this building). I agree with that logic. The logic I can’t quite comprehend is the fact that teachers were expected to be at work on time and not leave a minute early. The typhoon hadn’t hit by 8:00am, so both Carolyn and I did as instructed and went to school. When I arrived I was surprised to find all of the teachers taking a dress down day basically in their pajamas. They worked a bit and chatted a lot, par for the course on a day where we’re all expected to just sit around at our desks with our thumbs up our butts.

The storm hit at around 9:15 or 9:30 with some pretty dramatic wind. There are these little fans in the top corners of the windows that are used to prevent fan death ventilate the room in the summer or something, and they started buzzing in the wrong direction as the 90mph winds slammed the side of the building. At one point, a huge gust of wind had me convinced that the windows might break. That particular gust also did me the favor of spraying me down with rain water that had entered the building through those backwards spinning fans that prevent fan death.

So imagine, if you will, an office full of people sitting right next to plate glass windows as a typhoon pounds away at the building. Got it? The western thought process on this is “stay at home, be safe, see you tomorrow.” The Korean thought process on this is “you’d better not miss a day of work, or we will mark and note your lack of diligence and deny you the vacation days you want and talk about how lazy you are” or something like that. At home we’d say if it’s not safe enough for the kids to go to school then it’s certainly not safe for anyone to be outside. Hell. The building would be locked down with window shutters secured in Florida. It’s a different story here.

Do I think this is a bad thing? Not really. I think thought process is largely derived from language. The way we talk about things and do things shapes the order in which we actually think about something. I’ve been told that drivers here in Korea don’t think about how close cars are together but rather what space is open for them to use. Think about that. If you’re constantly thinking “is there enough space between those two cars” instead of “there is enough space between those cars” it’s going to have a huge effect on your driving, right?

Anyhow, if you work in a diverse office, or a foreign office, or just don’t understand why the guy who is contracted from country x just doesn’t do shit the way you do, it’s because shit just does not compute. His or her thought process is different from yours on such a fundamental level that some things just won’t translate. It’s not bad. It can actually be a good exercise for your problem solving abilities when trying to communicate something important like “are those vacation dates approved because I’m about to spend $1,500 on plane tickets” or “no that’s not too spicy, I just don’t like it.”

Wait, were you looking to hear more about the typhoon? Aside from the one time getting misted, it was pretty uneventful. The owners of the car wash across the street from my apartment didn’t take down their awning and it got thrashed. The river downtown flooded over the running paths. There was a ton of wind and rain. That’s about the extent of it. Thankfully there was no breakage of glass or tornadoes or anything.

Here’s my last thought on the subject. I lived in Florida from 2007-2010. We didn’t have any hurricanes hit during that time where I was living. We moved to Korea last year, and I’ve had 3 hurricanes this summer. I would have never expected that.

 

Daegu International Body Painting Festival

This weekend was pretty great. Saturday we took care of business (meaning cleaning) around the house and only left for a quick lunch down at the “spaghetti” restaurant that we call Yummy Pasta as we typically don’t call any Korean restaurants by their real names. We didn’t really manage to get up to any super exciting adventures or anything, although Carolyn did play a bit of Diner Dash on my brand spankin’ new iPad. Pretty exciting stuff, non? Non. Anyhow, that brings us to Sunday.

We woke up and went straight over to DaVinci Coffee for a breakfast and coffee and did a bit of wedding planning. Man, there’s so much crap to take care of that my head is still spinning a little bit, but what’s a guy going to do? Needless to say we made a fair bit of progress with the planning and decided that our brains deserved a break. We spent about an hour and a half or two hours at the cafe, so it was time to get moving along with the day anyway. We headed home to drop off computers and iPads and pick up cameras, and then headed out to the Daegu International Body Painting Festival.

This body art was perhaps our favorite, as we just love giraffes.

It took us about an hour or so to get to the festival on the city bus. It wasn’t what I expected. My experience with Korean festivals has always been pretty much the same, a lot of music, a lot of drunk old men, and fried foods. This was different. There wasn’t much in the way of music, and instead of drunk old men there were tons and tons of cameras. It seemed to me that there was a bit of a penis-showing contest going on (not literally) with photographers and their giant zoom lenses. Seeing as the subjects of most people’s photos were standing about ten to fifteen feet from the lines of security tape, the lenses couldn’t have been super functional. We elbowed our way (Korean festival etiquette is similar to Korean shopping etiquette) up to the front of the lines and took some pictures with our not-so-large lenses. I can’t imagine that anyone got any better photos than my lovely Carolyn did, either…even if she didn’t have the largest penis lens in the crowd.

This girl was checking her very ornate face out in the mirror.

This girl was being adorned with what appears to be a blue Chewbacca.

This girl was all smiles as she was painted by a Korean body painter.

This model was painted by an American artist.

This painting was by a Romanian artist.

This coral reef scene was by a Korean artist

This gal was posing away as a body painter from China brushed away.

We made a lap or two around the grounds watching people in varying states of nudity get their bodies painted. Here’s an observation: The participants from other countries were basically nude except for having their genitalia (that word should be used more often on this blog. genitalia!, Genitalia!, GENITALIA! ) covered, but those from Korea were in fairly elaborate and modest outfits basically getting their necks and faces painted. I shot a bit of video for fun and edited it down into one second-ish clips. Just fair warning, I’m not really sure if this video is safe for your workplace or not…everything’s covered but you can still see people’s bodies so use your judgement.

My homemade Penang Curry

After the festival we did our Sunday afternoon grocery shopping at the TESCO Home Plus, and we came home to have dinner. I made a pretty spectacular Penang Curry, just like I learned how to do at Pum’s Cooking School in Thailand. After that it was television and sorting through photos, and maybe just a bit more wedding planning to round out the weekend.

Thailand countdown: Five days to go!

 

  by  Narisa 

 

We’re down to five days remaining until our big summer vacation in southern Thailand! Honestly, I fully expect this to be the longest five days of the past six months or so. Anyway, the preparations are underway. This weekend we headed downtown to buy the little travel journals we so enjoy writing in over breakfast, or dinner, or whenever. It’s certainly fun to make these small purchases before a trip, and it gets better.

After our little shopping spree at the stationery store, we saw The Dark Knight Rises. It was pretty well done, I thought. When the movie was over we headed out in search of new backpacks for the trip. We found some at a pretty killer discount, then grabbed sandwiches for dinner and headed home.

It is really, really hot in Daegu right now. The highs during the days are in the high 90’s and the humidity is really high. After we arrived at home melted down for the weekend we pretty much stayed in. We have a summer English camp to teach until Thursday this week, so at least we’ll be a bit busier. Plus there’s a little bit of extra pay from the Metropolitan Office of Education for these camps.

This weekend has been a bit too busy to really find something enjoyable to write about, but I thought that maybe everyone would be able to share the excitement of our upcoming adventure.