Kim Ill Sungs place

There is a lot of history here in Sokcho. A little known fact is that the town I live in is actually above the thirty eighth parallel. The 38th parrallel is actually quite famous as the dividing line between North and South Korea, so in reality, I am actually above it.

After the war, when the cease fire line was drawn, North Korea wanted more territory on the west side of the peninsula and, as a trade off, South Korea was given the land that I know call home, Gangwon-do.

So why the little history lesson?

Because the place where I live is incredibly scenic, and until 1953, part of North Korea, the Great Leader, Kim Ill Sung, the leader of North Korea until his untimely death in 1994, had his summer villa just a few miles north of my apartment and this is where I took these pictures.

The great mans villa is a castle like house high on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. It was orignally built by an English missonary in the 1930's and was taken over by the "Kimmer" after the Second World War. While he only visited the home a few dozen times before the Korean War, it is now a monument and museum to the trials and tribulations of the North/South conflict.

Pictures

1. The sign says "On this spot in August of 1948 the leader of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, Kim Jong Ill sat with his brothers"

2. The Great Leaders bedroom and some of his belongings

3. The view from the great mans rooftop terrace twoards the ocean

4. Another view from the same spot looking at the mountains.

5. The picture that accompnies the sign in picture one (this is what the arrow at the bottom of picture one is pointing at.

Temple picutres

These are some pictures I took at a Buddhist academy near my house. The buildings, actually the compound is huge, it seems to have no end. It is not old but it is pretty neat to look at. The most amazing thing about this place was that there was virtually no one there. No monks, no students, nothing, just an empty complex devoted to Buddha.

1. A view of one of the main temple buildings through the trees. Even though it looks old the bottom half of the building, which you cannot see in this picture, is a modern, cement, disgrace.

2. A wall panel on one side of a temple in the complex.

3. I really like this picture. I took it from under a walk way looking at the monks dormitory.

4. The bell that beats with the call to prayer.

5. A small flowering maple, red in the fall sun.

A little trip to Seoul

Seoul

12.11.06

After almost four months in Sokcho it was finally time for me to take a little trip up to the big smoke and get away for a while.

Seoul, I love this town! Over ten million people live in this metropolis that sits only about forty miles from the last Stalinist state on earth. The lights, the food, the crowds, it is like another country to me after having lived in the wilds of rural Korea for a while.

I had been planning this trip for a little while now. I had been saving my money, budgeting carefully for a weekend that I knew would cost me a pretty penny, what with all the goodies I planned on buying. As the week before my trip dragged on with agonizing slowness I counted the hours to the time I could take the bus and head to one of the most vibrant, alive cities on the planet.

I went to the bus station early, about eight, after Conner had rung at seven asking if I was still going and we fairly ran to the station to buy our tickets. It was lucky that we did since a lot of people must have had the same idea that I had and the bus was pretty crowded.

In the battered duffle bag that I totted with me I had my list of things to buy, cell phone, wallet, cheese, memory card, pirated dvd’s, a new bag, all things that I could get in the throbbing foreigners hotspot of Itaewon but were pretty much unavailable in Sokcho.

After a quick three-hour ride through mountain passes layered with fresh snow, we finally hit the outer edges of the urban sprawl at about 10:30 in the morning.

It was bigger than I remembered it. Seoul is not a compact city. It stretched out in on both sides of the Han River, along ridgelines and up the sides of hills. Everywhere you look you see apartment building being built, huge cranes, the rubbish of construction. Every third or fourth vehicle on the road seems to be involved in construction. Huge dump trucks loaded with building materials roar down the road to some distant construction site while in the other direction flow flatbed trucks loaded with the debris of some old building demolished to make way for yet another high rise.

We got into Dong Seoul, the east bus station, about eleven and were immediately reminded that we were no longer in the country, but in a thriving, throbbing city, home to millions upon millions of people all going to and fro, running errands, making deals, going for lunch, all manner of things as they filled the side walks and the metro station that we headed to to take the subway into Itaewon.

Itaewon is the heart of the foreign community here in Korea. It has been this way since the early seventeenth century when the Joeson kings decreed that this was the one place in Korea where foreigners could live and do business. Today it sits in the middle of Seoul, just east of Yongsan, the huge, sprawling command base of all United States forces in Korea. All of these factors have made Itaewon the place for non-Koreans to go here in Seoul.

In Itaewon you can find a huge concentration of food and goods from all over the world. It is here where huge numbers of ethnic restaurants and grocery stores thrive as people from all over Seoul, and Korea, come to buy things that are unavailable almost anywhere else in the world. This is where I would spend my weekend.

My goals for the weekend were pretty simple. I was to take the five hundred dollars I had brought with me, buy a bunch of stuff, eat and drink myself silly, and head home broke, and I accomplished them all.

After checking into my hotel I headed out first to get a phone.

Hold on a second. I bet all of you know that Korea is one of the most cell phone crazy countries on the planet, so happy ready why do I have to go all the way to Seoul to pick up one of the stupid things? Well, unless you are able to have a Korean help you get a phone it is almost impossible for a waygook to get one. Even though they like to say that Korea is the hub of Asia, the Korean government and corporations make it very hard to get certain things if you are not Korean, hence my trip to Seoul.

After grabbing the phone and getting three months of service it was time to have a little lunch. What should I have? Conner and I had made a vow that at no time this weekend would we have Korean food so we looked around for something. The choices of food were endless but we ended up going for Moroccan.

Ah the joys of eating hummus, babagounash, lamb kabobs, washed down with mint tea. The hummus so garlicky and oily, scooped up with fresh pita, the babagounash, studded with chunks of fresh eggplant, so rich and filled with juices that I ate it with a fork, then the kabobs, a little tough but the taste, the juices bursting as we ripped at the meat.

After that, well it just only got better. We headed to Yongsan, the big electronic market and browsed through computers, I-pods, watched live TV on the new generation cell phones, and played with mp3 players and video cameras with features that I have never seen. Then the real fun started as we headed out the front doors to where slightly disreputable men sold the newest movies for three dollars. After buying a whole host of movies like Borat and the new James Bond, movies that had not even been released to theaters in Korea, (as we previewed them the owner of the stall where we were shopping assured us that they were “genuine copies”), we headed north, to Insadong.

Insadong is the art district of Seoul. Crammed with bars, restaurants, galleries, and souvenir shops, it is a mecca for tourists as you can buy all manner of Korean products.
Walking the streets I bought some North Korean stamps and stole some cool posters showcasing new art shows while Connor busied himself taking care of some last minute Christmas shopping.
And that was pretty much it, at least that is all I am going to tell you, at least about that night. We headed out for Indian food after that, back in Itaewon, mutton, rice, nan bread, cold beer and amazingly met some friends from Sokcho. Amazing, in a city of ten million, where I know maybe five people, I can meet friends walking into some random restaurant.

The next day I headed to an Indian grocery and bought some food to take home with me and then stumbled on to an authentic German deli where I did my best to blow the rest of my cash on sausages and cheese to take home with me while waiting for a four star chef to cook my breakfast of ham, eggs, and an exquisite roll.

Pictures

1. Just a random tower in Insadong, all lit up for the holidays

2. The view from Yongsan train station

3. I just had to put this one up. It is a ladies apparel store.

4. A girl on the subway

5. Cyon is a phone maker, but note the word with the misplaced "e"

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

11.12.06

So this post is well, a little late, but anyway it’s finally here.



Thanksgiving arrived here in Sokcho with a bang at the Dongjin Pleasure Palace!

Every since November had started Kelsey and I had been thinking about what we would do for a very American type holiday with a crowd of people who would have no real idea of what the sacred holiday would be. With a little help from Christina, the only other American in our circle of friends we tried to pull off the holiday and give everybody a taste of the Thanksgiving experience.

We decided on a potluck type thing. With the size of my kitchen facilities, well I could host the party but it just wouldn’t work if I had to cook for ten with a rice cooker, one burner gas stove, and a tiny oven.

When we mentioned the idea of a potluck to our British, Australian, Canadian, and Chinese friends we were met with cries of dismay and shouts of, “What the hell do we know about Thanksgiving? What in the name of Christ do you want us to cook?”
We just assured our friends that what ever they brought would be fine and they left us with confused looks and crazy talk about hummus and mushroom soup.

We decided to hold the little party on a Sunday rather than the traditional Thursday because of work commitments so I had to start cooking my stuff on Friday.

I took it upon myself to make a roast chicken, mashed potatoes, pudding, and stuffing and worked hard for two days to get all of my stuff ready.

The chicken and spuds were pretty easy, that kind of stuff is easy to find here, as Koreans love it as much as Americans. It was no problem finding some really nice Yukon Gold potatoes and a huge roasting chicken in the market. The stuffing took some work.

For the stuffing I decided to use my rice cooker. First I cut up two big baguettes and toasted them in the oven. From the market I got some exquisite green onions and fried them in butter with a bunch of mushrooms and pine nuts.

After the bread was done I combined it with my butter rich mixture of onions and mushrooms and through it all in the rice cooker with a can of black olives that I had been saving for a while and let it cook for about an hour. The only thing that really sucked was that a rice cooker has an internal timer, it just stays on long enough for the rice to cook and then just keeps things warm so I constantly had to reset it but it turned out all right.

The chicken and spuds, that was simple. I peeled and boiled a ton of spuds on Friday and cooked and mashed them on Sunday. The chicken I covered with spices and butter and cooked it almost all the way through on Saturday.

The hardest part of the pre-cooking was finding room in my tiny fridge to keep everything. I ended up having to farm stuff out to my various neighbors in the building.

The dinner itself went off without a hitch and was truly a multinational affair with even the Welsh and Scottish members showing up, drunk as usual.
The menu was half traditional and half, well half world cuisine. We had everything from duck to hummus to kimpap and a good time was had by all as we drank and ate through the evening.

Kelly and Suan showed up late after their trip to Seoul bringing the biggest cheesecake I have ever seen and lo and behold, a pumpkin pie made an appearance and was quickly gobbled up, the non-Americans proclaiming it excellent.

Pictures

1. Hard at work in the kitchen, as usual. My precious oven is to the right.

2. Stuart arriving late as usaul, and a little in the bag.

3. Christina, Hong, and Karen

4. Salmon pate and vegetable dip

5. Wojtek, the life of the party as usual