Korea: food!

Okay, so final dispatch about South Korea. This one focuses on the food, that is, the food we sat down for, and, in most cases, cooked ourselves. The food in South Korea was generally far spicier than in Japan, but often served in a very practical, no-frills manner. The top stone bowls were probably the mildest dishes of the whole trip. On the left was a kind of abalone goulash and on the right was the house specialty, ginseng chicken. There were glass jars of ginseng (which looks like a skinny, hairy ginger root) all over the restaurant, and really all over Seoul. Not sure what the medicinal purpose is supposed to be, but the taste is just extremely subtle.

Every meal in Korea comes with all you can eat kimchi on the side. Somewhere in between the temples, we ducked into a tiny shop for an afternoon snack of cheesy rice. Yummy!

At dinner time, all the dishes come out. Honestly, all we did was point to the kind of meat that we wanted and all this other stuff came out to accompany it. Some of it was tastier than others.

Following the cryptic directions in our awful Fodor's guidebook, we somehow managed to find a famous potsticker joint (after failing to find our previous three choices). They only have 4 options on their menu, so we chose three of them: soba noodles in a spicy sauce, thick noodles in a broth with I think ground beef and of course the potstickers, which were pretty amazing.

And we had to do the thickcut bacon cooked at the table with all the fixins. Once it is fully cooked, the proprietor comes around with big scissors and cuts the bacon into bite size portions. Dip the bacon piece into the sauce and place it in the lettuce leaf, roll, and Voila!

Truth be told, we had the bacon thing several times. If you have never had the experience of eating kimchi soaked in bacon fat, you must run now, NOW, to Korea, or at least to your local Korean BBQ. Hopefully they too will have the grill propped up like so.

And finally I got my bibimbap. This is the perfect meal. Veggies, pickled things, kimchi, rice and an egg served in a hot stone bowl so that the bottom gets crispy like paella. 

But over a 10 day trip, we didn't ALWAYS eat the local fare. Sometimes we dipped back into the familiar. In the shopping district near Jagalchi, we found a burger joint with all of the burgers named after states. I went with the Texas burger, which had BBQ sauce and was thus the only one that had any actual connection to its namesake.

But while we were eating our burgers up on the second floor, we looked across the street at the strangest thing. This coffee shop has set up little semi-private cubicle rooms for its customers. Each room has a tv and a pile of pillows and I guess folks rent by the hour and just lounge a bit between shopping. Couples cuddled, girlfriends gossiped and displayed their shopping finds and one exhausted mom slept while her kid jumped on the couch and waved to people out the window. Fascinating.

More meats and miscellaneous sides.

And for something different, imagine throwing all those ingredients into a pot...here is kimchi and bacon stew. Awesomeness in a pot.

Korea: markets and street food

The best thing about South Korea was by far the markets. Whether it was dried fish...

(of all shapes and sizes),

two-foot long sticks of cinnamon,

 or other dried bits,

  

big welcoming bowls of toasted silk worm larvae,

or heaping mounds of dried peppers, you could find it out on the streets of Korea.

 There were also outdoor clothing markets to buy everything you can imagine,

street vendors selling deep fried fish paste on a stick (it is far better than it sounds)

or a kind of fried potsticker stuffed with pork and cabbage.

One vendor after another.

This one selling these amazing fried dough balls stuffed with brown sugar...

to which they add some more sugar and sesame seeds. A-maaaa-zing!

 But of course Pusan, being located right on the Sea of Japan, is mostly about the fish markets. Here a is long row of vendors selling the day's fresh catch.

 In case you question the freshness of their fish, they demonstrate with bowls of live, just skinned squirming fish. This was the scene at every other one of these stands (warning, this is a bit disturbing)

Larger fish markets have big aquariums, where you can point to, or retrieve with a net, your next meal.

Be it king crab

or shellfish, the likes of which you've surely never seen. Just point to it and someone will cook it and serve it up at these yellow tables

Some of it was downright alien-looking.

Korea: Busan (aka Pusan)

 

Ahh, Pusan. I don't know if it was the unexpectedly nice hotel room with a view of the sea, or the resort-like area of Haeundae Beach where we were staying that felt like Hawaii, or that the rainy season  was ending, or just that we finally stopped packing too many things into the day...but ahhh. Pusan was heavenly.

  

The first night we strolled down the boardwalk toward the Westin, which is perched on a cliff, and around Dongbaek Park over wooden walkways, suspension bridges and stairs until the Gwangan Bridge and Pusan skyline came into view. Folks were jogging, families playing, it was just a completely different vibe from the rest of our trip.

 

Heading the other direction on the boardwalk we made our way to "Raw Fish Village" (which I'm sure sounds more romantic in Korean) for some extremely fresh sashimi.

and some other things that we didn't exactly recognize.

The next morning we went to the Jagalchi Fish Market to see where all the seafood comes from.

 

I have no idea how these buckets of hooks work...

but they certainly get the job done.

We've got pictures a plenty of all the fish being sold at the nearby fish market. I will include those in the next installment about markets and street food.

Korea: DMZ

On a particularly dismal day, we made our way (with tour guide and driver, in a minibus) up to the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea.  The weather seemed somehow appropriate to the subject matter as we learned about the many families that remain separated by the barbed wire and heavily guarded border.

This bridge is where prisoners of war from each side were exchanged. It is called Freedom Bridge and also the Bridge of No Return, I guess depending on which way you are traveling on it.

There are several very long infiltration tunnels built by the North Koreans in order to make a surprise approach under the border. So far four have been found. Who knows how many actually exist. We took a tour down into the Third tunnel, but only after donning the appropriate personal safety protection. 

We couldn't take any pictures inside the tunnel itself, but here is the story we were told: Apparently the North Koreans first denied digging the tunnel, but the South pointed out the direction of the dynamite blasts as proof of which side it came from. Then the North said, "OK, but we were just mining for coal" and pointed to the thin layer of coal that had been smeared onto the walls, but the South pointed out that there wouldn't be any coal in the solid granite through with the tunnel travels. Finally, when the North found out that paying tourists were visiting the tunnel, they admitted they built it and demanded their cut of the tourist dollars.

But despite these stories of aggression on the part of the North and the lines we couldn't pass and the armed military personnel that we needed to obey, there was this additional message of hope and eventual unification. A little amusement park was even built at a time when relations were particularly good.

Of course no destination is too somber to avoid having a selection of kitschy chocolate souvenirs...

...and some mascots. seriously.

Korea: Gyeong-ju

After a few days in Seoul, we made our way via fast train to the UNESCO World heritage city of Gyeong-ju. Our hotel was near the Bulguksa temple, which was originally built in 528AD and has been restored/rebuilt numerous times, most recently in 1973.

At Bulguksa temple there is a compound with multi-storied pagodas...

and pretty gardens.

And nearby is shrine built into the mountain, called the Seokguram Grotto.

You can't take any pictures in the grotto, so I am going to steal this one from the web:

We spied this clever inverted pagoda building on the bus ride back into town.

Our last stop was the Daeneungwon Royal Tombs. Ancient emperors were buried in these elaborate boxes with heaps of jewelry and riches and then covered with stones and a mound of dirt shaped into a steep-sided hill. This area is the site of a half dozen tombs, only one of which has been excavated so far.

One day was all that we really needed in Gyeong-ju. From there we took a quick and very cheap bus to Busan, also known as Pusan.