Kelly and Saun

Last weekend was Kelly and Sauns last in sunny Sokcho as they have decided to head back to old blighty after several years in the land of the morning calm. It was really great knowing these guys, hanging out, drinking, going to the islands, drinking, eating, drinking, you get the idea, together.
Guys, it was great to have you here and I wish you all the best! We will meet again!
1. Ruthe and Toby, before the cops arrived, getting ready to down an ice cold Cass. Remember you cant spell Cass without ass.
2. Babbie, Kelsey and Becka
3. The happy couple, grinnig because they are oh so close to getting out of here.
4. Aubrey, a very pregnant Shawna, Kelsey, and Babbie
5. Kelly, in fine form even at the end of the night.

Sloncha

Well they are dropping like flies as yet another member of the Sokcho Society of Idiots loses another member!
Conor O'Leary, the only Irish member of the soceity, departed today for heaven. Otherwise known as Thailand.
Conor it was a great year!
1. Conors goodbye dinner. Like a true Sokcho native he requested Gamgatang, pig spine soup. From the lower right clockwise, Babi, the new girl at A.P., Aubry, Conor, Paul, and Rachel.
2. Its finally true Conors last day in Sokcho arrives as we say goodbye.
From left, Kelsey, Conor, Paul, and Aubry.

walking

Went out for a little stroll to show Aubry and Paul a place Conor and I had been to a few times before. The day started out kind of crappy when I decided to get off the bus a little early due to having to cope with a little bit of a hangover and then led my faithful campanions through a trail that rapidly became smaller and eventually dissapeared in a forest of thorns and shoulder grass. The little stroll became slightly harder as I could see the road where we needed to be yet, to get their we had to go through wild grapes, forsets of thorns that resembeled vietmanese punji sticks, and then, finally, a leap across an irrigation channel.
My companions however did get to see me act like an idiot when I saw a snake on the trail.
Pictures-
1. The typical Korean atumn.
2. Conor, Aubry, and Paul coming up from a valley.
3. You always now when it is fall in Korea by the site of drying chilis and rice spread out almost everywhere on blue tarps.

hwan shi

After our little stroll through the brambles and rice paddies of northern Sokcho, we got on the one bus to our final destination a tad off of the beaten trail.
Getting off the bus a little before hitting Sokcho proper we went down a road about a mile and a half to a little restaurant in a tiny ass town whose most distinguishing feature today was the dead cat lying in the middle of the road.
So, to get to this restaurant, in the middle of nowhere, I had to be scared shit less by a snake, cut up my legs traipsing through massive amounts of thorns and brambles, and wade across an ankle deep stream. Was it worth it? Most definitely!
The picture itself does not do this feast justice, not in the picture is the big pile of bulgogi (marinated beef), our potato pancake, or the big stone pots filled with hot rice, the second fish that we got for free, or the excellent Tae-jon jiggahe, a kind of soup.
What you have here is a very typical feast of Gangwon-do, the province I live in. Almost everything on this table either comes from the land and mountain slopes of this region or the sea around it.
There were four of us for this little feast and the total cost was twelve dollars each.
The dishes as I remember them, starting from the lower left corner.
1. A crappy mayo and corn mixture
2. Pollack eggs, not bad
3. Raw prawns in soy sauce, very good
4. Two kinds of squid, really nice and sweet
5. Soy beans, raw and good, like chewy peas
6. A fruit salad, just like home
7. Jellyfish, excellent, soft and chewy
8. Cold noodles, chop chae, really nice, kind of sweet, a sweet potato noodle.
9. Acorn Jelly with soy sauce and chillies, flavorless on its own but the soy sauce and chillies very nice.
10. Pickled burdock root, chewy, nice, surprisingly sweet.
11. Pickled sesame leaves, with a hint of anise, really nice
12. Kimchi, not good, surprisingly
13. I cant remember, but it was good
14. Squid sundae fried in egg, really really good.
15. Rice dumplings stuffed with honey, not my favorite, kind of tasteless then a small sugary sensation when your teeth hit the middle.
16. Some sort of roe, possibly from a sea urchin. Tasted like salt and brine, not nice at first but it grows on you.
In the middle
The big fish, possibly a type of flounder is fried in some sort of oil. Light crispy skin, most white flesh, this is why we came out here. Three minutes after this fish was set down, there was nothing left but fins. The owner of the restaurant came over, took a look, and came back with another, free fish. It took about six minutes for this one to disappear.
To the lower left of the fish is marinated beef and steamed octopus. The beef was incredibly tender, excellent, very succulent. The octopus was chewy, loved both of these.
Above that sea snails and mussels, superb.
To the right of the fish and on the top, three kinds of vegetables. Cold, chewy, good.
Below that is crap in red pepper sauce, not my favorite, hard to eat, messy, not much meat.
We also had a nice pile of marinated beef that we ate stuffed in lettuce, sesame, and spinach leaves, big bowls of rice with Asian dates, and zucchini and tofu soup.

The Tang

Well, here it is, quite possibly one of my three most favorite foods in Korea, gamgatang.
This soup, actually it is more like a stew, is one of the best foods in Korea and every two or three weeks the A.P. crew head over to our favorite place to eat what we call the "Tang".
Grandmas Gamgatang is a little, narrow, hole in the wall restaurant down a side street on one corner of one of our red light districts here in Sokcho.
The restaurant itself is a low, L-shaped building with spots for about three cars. Three are two main dining rooms that can each fit about ten-15 people and a smaller room that is the "V.I.P" room and can hold about eight people.
The kitchen, where the goodness comes from, is pretty small, only about the size of a large bathroom and has a bare cement floor with a drain in the middle of it, this makes it easier to wash away the blood and grime after the pig spines are split and cut up.
Yes that's right, pig spines. Gamgatang is a slightly spicy potato and pig spine soup. When the bowl comes there is a pile of spine bones with pieces of meat so tender that they fall off the bone with just a little prodding from a pair of chopsticks, the potatoes, which have been boiled in the red broth, are actually tougher than the pork itself.
Along with your bowl of bones and potatoes you get piles of kicmchi and radish along with hot peppers and the tops of garlic shoots to dip in gochajong, you also get a couple of big empty bowls, after all where else would you throw the little bits of rib and spine?

crossing the line 1

What a glourious day for a road trip! Today Conor, Mark, Greg, and I took the oppurtunity of a day off during the week to rent a car and head out on what turned out to be six hundred kilometers of twisting and turning fun.
We got in our vehicle, a Hyundai Sonata, about 7:30 and immediatly headed for the far west of Gangwon do to check out a section of the D.M.Z. that is almost immpossible to reach by public transport.
After cruising up and down mountians, through valleys completley untouched by any sort of tourism, checking out little battle memorials and lakes, and travelling on the kind of twisty up and down roads more like Switzerland or NewEngland, we finally reached the D.M.Z. area.
The securtiy here up at the line was the tightest that I have ever seen in Korea. Just to go through a sector of the line we had to have our car checked over before we were issued a pass that must have said we were okay and were waved throught the barricades, but not before we got to check out the dispaly of landmines next to the checkpoint!
The real reason that we had come up to this neck of the woods was to check out one of the infiltration tunnels that the good people of the D.P.R.K. Peoples Army had dug under the border, but after being rebuffed at several more checkpoints we realized that we were not going to be able to get in and had to settle for a trip to the North Korean Labour Party building and some visits to the Iron Triangle and the Punch Bowl.
This was a great trip with some great friends. We got to see a large part of Korea that we would never have been able to get too, cool towns, great people, and some fascinating sites.
Picutres
1. This pass that got us through the security checkpoints just two miles from the D.P.R.K.
2. Commander Lester ready to lead his brave men into battle.
3. An old tank on a ridge above a place where about twenty thousand brave Chinese troops died trying to storm a hill just south of the D.M.Z.
4. A view from the same ridge that the tank is on. The mountain in the center of the picture, the big one off in the near distance, is in North Korea
5. A pretty bad shot of the Punch Bowl battle area

crossing the line 2

A few more pictures from the road trip.
1. Mist on the mountains
2. A rather startling sign of what would happen if I was not paying attention to my driving, rather fitting considering the twists and turns of the road we were on
3. Tank barricades. These cement blocks litter Korea, especially up here where every road has the potential to have tanks roaring down it. If you put dynamite in the little holes under the supports the main blocks of cement will come tumbling down, blocking the road.
4. And of course, who could guess that we would find time to visit a temple on this little trip?
5. The North Korean Labour Headquarters. Surprisingly enough this remnant of communism sits just inside the southern half of the D.M.Z. This building was the local headquarters of the communist party until 25.6.1950 when war erupted across the peninsula and this section, called the Iron Triangle, saw some of the hardest fighting of the war, (Pork Chop Hill is in the area). Because of its significance to the D.P.R.K. this building was shelled constantly throughout the war, and now stands as a memorial to "Communist Aggression", bullshit in my opinion because of the vast numbers of cross border raids by R.O.K. before the northern invasion. There were mass graves discovered behind the building but they could easily be from South Korean atrocities rather than D.P.R.K. violence.