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

Seafood Fun

Down the road, is a place called Daephoang Port. This is the premier seafood eating destination on the east coast of Korea. Thousands of people come here from all over Korea to stuff their faces with the bounty of the sea.

The port itslef, well it is a port, but not like the stereotypical port that you see in picutres. Instead it is a lagoon gaurded by a breakwater on the edge of the sea with all manner of small fishing boats pulled up to a long narrow street, fronted by tents on the sea side and more substantial resteraunts on the land side. Mostly people dine alfresco, outside, huddled around coal fires and sitting on little plastic chairs, protected from the elements by beach umbrellas. The ambiance is great, people yelling, watching the show, the smells of both cooking and raw fish everywhere, all the old women hustling to get the next customer to come and eat.

1. Clam barbeque the clams, and other seafood are placed on a small grill over a coal fire, when they are done, the shells pop open, a little half of a shell to put hot suace in on the side and away you go!
The oginio (squid) to the left have been stuffed with sausege, onions, carrots, rice, and green onions, then they are lightly fried in an egg batter and cut into rings, called the dish is called sundae.

2. You can pick your fish, alive, out of a tank andwatch it killed right in front of you, it goes from life to the plate in about three minutes.

3. These are kimchi pots that have just been cleaned. In the fall (I took these pictures in late August) the fermented cabbage dish is prepared and put into the pots which are then buried before the ground gets to hard. Most people have special kimchi fridges now to hold their kimchi but the old folks still do things the traditional way, thank god!

4. More fish ready for the table, a few of these have already passed the experiation date. Note to travellers, live fish, and eating it raw, costs much, much more than cooked fish.

5. A live squid, about to be, well, munched on

More Photos

So I literally have taken a thousand pictures since I have been here in Sokcho, my computer is jammed with them! Going through them tonight, preparing to put them in disk, I thought that I would post a few of my favorites that I have not put on my blog as yet.

1-4 I have a twenty minute break for supper around six every night and sometimes I go up on the roof to look around at the city. I took these pictures during such a break, just happened to have thrown my camera into my bag before school that day and took these pics over the twenty minutes of break time. They show mountians beyond my school as the sun is going down.

5. Still on the roof but this is the view twoards the sea. I have talked about the bridge to nowhere before. This is the huge, mamouth bridge that goes over a lagoon and deadends in the ocean not a quarter of a mile away, it is just visible in the distance, see it, the big orange thing? Hard to miss!

some school pics

Just a few random pictures of school taken at various times

1. My basic diary class, my oldest students, aged fourteen and fifteen
2. My soju buddy Matthew a few days before he left in the teachers room
3. Little shytes stole my camera!
4. My TOIEC class, basic reading and vocabulary, ages twelve to thirteen
5. My favorite student, In-ho. In-ho is very quiet and I think he has some problems at home, maybe he acts out a little, reminds me of me, but man is he smart. Makes his own crosswords in english in his spare time

Today

Today............

11.28.06



The last few days have been filled with a never ending rain. Not just a lite drizzle but a constant, steady downpour with wind, fog, everything. For the last few days even the bases of the mountains, just a few miles away from my apartment, have been obscured by fog the consistancy of clouds that have fallen from the peaks and settled into the valleyes that surrond the town.

When I went to work today the rain had almost stopped but their was no sun, no blue sky, just a steel grey covering the town, the mountains, the sea.

So the day went and dragged, one class, two, three, then four, and finally, after the fourth, a break. It was time for me to run downstairs and catch the bus to go to the other branch. As I put on my coat and backpack I was so happy to finally be getting away from the students, even if it was only for a moment, and go outside into the moist air.

As I went through the door of my school and turned left to go down the three flights of stairs to the street I happened to look up and through the huge picture window that brings light into the halls of the building and I stopped short, stunned by what I saw.

There, in front of me, was the gift that all the rain, wind, and gloom in Sokcho had given us. Just behind my school, framed by apartment blocks, is Chundae-san mountain. Its not really a mountain, just a big hill, about 800 meters, but it is big, and there, from the crown almost to its base, was pretty, fluffy, white snow.

The entire mountian, almost down to the bottom was covered with it. This brilliant white carpet with the black shafts of trees sticking through the snow cover was like a white mat, covering the slopes of the hill.

Sorak-san, early winter

Sorak-San in winter

25.11.06

There is a story about Sokcho, a very old legend really that says after there have been three snowfalls on the mountains that the next one will fall on the sea. Don’t know if I believe it myself but it has snowed twice already on the high peaks, so we must be due for a little white stuff in town proper pretty quick.

Today started out pretty blah after spending the previous evening drinking beer and eating chicken at the local Hof after work.

Hof-Noun

A Korean drinking establishment that serves beer, soju, and snacks, usually chicken based

Anyway, after having a few with Karen, Kirsty, and Helen as we demolished a few plates of salt and pepper chicken getting up early was not that big a priority!

Finally rolled out of bed around eleven because of a phone call and try as I might could not get back to sleep so I rang up Wojtek and we decided to hike into the park and get some good pictures of the snow that has been falling on the high peaks for the better part of the last week.

After meeting him downtown we caught the number seven and headed into the park. We must have had the same idea as about a million other people because the road into the main entrance was backed up about five miles and we got the bus driver to let us out long before the entrance gate, we figured we would make better time heading in on foot

Our first views of the park were just amazing. Over the river, to our left, we could see a huge peak, one of the largest in the park, framed by two others that were almost all white down to about the thousand-meter line. You could see where the snow was clinging to rocks and trees and they shone through in their darkness against the white of the fresh powder.

In front of us where the two twin peaks that one sees just past the Buddhist gate that is the entrance to the park. The back peak, the taller one, is a shear triangle and it too was completely covered with snow, while the one in front, only a hundred meters shorter only had a light dusting.

To the far left of them is a narrow valley, really just a cleft between the ridges of the mountains, and that to was covered with a new snowfield that looked completely smooth, covering its rock strewn face with a velvety blanket of fresh, white, snow.

When we reached the entrance we decided, since the vast majority of trails were closed, to hike up to the waterfall.

This isn’t much of a hike, and to be honest, there is not much scenery to look at. The tree cover is too strong to see the mountains, and well, with the leaves all down; it just wasn’t a nice hike. When we finally reached the falls we were slightly impressed by the amount of water cascading down the lip into an emerald green pool at the bottom but it just wasn’t a great time and we headed back quickly, stopping only to grab some homemade wine and eat some potato pancakes before heading back into town.

Pictures

1. Snow on the peaks, the ones on the left are just a little shorter, yet the snow line has not reached them yet

2. The waterfall at the end of the trail

3. I took this just as I was leaving the park, right when the clouds were starting to come down for another night of snowfall

4. Almost the same picture as number three but from a little farther away

5. And one more