eating my way through Seoul

Two weeks in Seoul, South Korea, and we spent most of it eating.  

We stayed in Gangnam, the plastic surgery capital of the world, in a hotel that was mainly for guests recovering from their various cosmetic surgery procedures. While our bandage-covered neighbours embarked on their journey towards perfect beauty, we went on a culinary adventure to eat all the Korean food we can't get in Ottawa.

Stew in Gangnam

With the thirteen hour time zone difference, we were pretty jet lagged when we arrived. We tried to sleep but awoke at 4AM, ravenous with hunger. But where would we get something to eat?

It turns out that Gangnam is pretty bumping at 4AM and lots of restaurants were open, including the stew restaurant across the street from our hotel. Hordes of young people were pouring out of night clubs at that point, filling the restaurants in search for a bite to eat and maybe more soju and beer to drink to keep the "night" going, often  to kill some time until the Seoul metro trains were running again so they could stumble home to sleep, while others made their way to church.  

Bindaettuk from Kwangjang Market

Kwangjoon Market was busy, crowded with people sitting on stools at the street food stands eating mandu (dumplings) and ttukbeoki (spicy rice cakes). We couldn't get a spot anywhere, and instead we grabbed some bindaettuk (mungbean pancakes) and kimbap to go, and enjoyed them with a refreshing drink of sikhye (rice drink) next to the much calmer Cheonggyecheon stream.

Lotte Department Store Food Court

If only we could get dishes like bibim naengmyun (mixed spicy cold noodles) at department store food courts in Ottawa

Sae Bohm Tteukguk (sp?)

 

Found this place while my partner was in search of tteukguk (rice cake soup). It's his favourite Korean dish. It's one of my favourites too, actually. The menu for this place had pages and pages of different kinds of tteukguk. Also, makgeolli (traditional Korean rice liquor)!

Mini fish buns at Hammersmith Coffee

We liked to start our day checking out different coffee shops and nibbling on the little cakes that they serve there. Korea has tons of coffee shop on every corner - Koreans really like their coffee! My family likes to buy these fish bun things at the Korean grocery store in Canada and this coffee shop franchise serves miniature versions of them.

Kwanghamun Seokgalbi restaurant (sp?) at Coex Mall

Tasty dishes, and a popular lunch spot for the workers near by.  This restaurant was located above the Starfield Library, which was one of the most spectacular libraries I've ever seen.

I also saw an office worker in a suit riding around on a longboard during his lunch hour, which was kind of cool.

Chodae Restaurant (Gyeonggi-do)

This was an amazing restaurant that my aunt recommended. It's located outside of Seoul on the Han River, nestled in a beautiful garden. The restaurant offers an inspiring riverside view while you dine on the set menu of many, many, many courses (I lost count of how many), featuring playful yet elegant modern takes on traditional Korean dishes. All for, like, 30 Canadian dollars, which is an unbelievably reasonable price.

There's also a nice cafe next door in the garden where you can enjoy some ice cream or milk tea.

Hongdae District

Hongdae is an artsy hip neighbourhood in Seoul where the university students hang out. It's a pretty bumping place, with clubs and bars and karaoke bars and clothing stores. There were entertainers singing on the street and food stands everywhere. I bought a kebab of fruit dipped in liquid sugar syrup from one of the snack stands and made a total utter delicious mess of myself. I dripped/exploded syrup all over my face, hair, shirt and even my spouse. It was totally worth it.

In Hongdae, we stumbled upon a makgeolli salon hidden in an alley off a side street. It featured a biggest selection of makgeolli we've seen since we arrived in Seoul, including some really eccentric fruit flavours.  We asked the server for his favourite recommendation and drank the whole bottle with an anju plate of bulgogi jeon (pancakes).

Myeongdong Kyoja

Some fifty years ago, my grandmother used to meet up with her friends at a restaurant in Myeongdong to eat kalguksu (knife-cut noodle soup). Today, that restaurant is now a popular Michelin Guide-listed hotspot with long lines out the door during meal times. Luckily, the lines moved quickly so I could eat at this famous spot and re-trace my grandmother's old life in the home country.  Besides their noodle soup and mandu, they're also famous for their super-garlicky kimchi, which I couldn't get enough of. Also, they had robot busboys! It was totally worth the wait in line.

Budae Jjigae

My first time trying budae jjigae (army stew). This became popular after the Korean War, thanks to the influence of the US military based in South Korea. It's basically instant ramen with a bunch of weird random stuff thrown into it, like canned sausages, processed cheese and baked beans. This was my first time trying budae jjigae because we never had this kind of stuff growing up. The budae jjigae place across the street from our hotel cured its own bacon for the stew, which was delicious, especially when accompanied a bottle of soju.

Kyo Bakery

This was our favourite bakery to start our day with. The coffee was good and they always had an assortment of yummy creative pastries, like bulgogi pie, buns with cream cheese and corn filling, red bean buns... I wanted to try them all!

Chan In Dak Galbi 

This was an amazing restaurant that specialized in this dish that we called "Korean paella" - it probably has some other name but I'd never had anything like this before. You order your chicken and accompaniments (including cheese!) and it all comes cooked in a pan that gets dropped in front of you. It came with an abundance of lettuce too, so you could eat it as lettuce wraps.  Before I came to Seoul, I've never had so much processed cheese with my Korean food before, because obviously it's not "traditional" - but I've really come around on this and think that cheese works in Korean cuisine... as long as you're not lactose intolerant.

Bonsuwon Galbi (Suwon)

This was actually not in Seoul, but the nearby city of Suwon, where much of my family is from. Suwon is famous for a number of things, including the Hwaseong Fortress that is an UNESCO heritage site, but Koreans are also known to go to Suwon for galbi. And Bonsuwon is the place to go for galbi that you can have cooked on the grill at your table. There was a long wait to get a table and it was a bit pricey for Korean standards, but again, totally worth it.  As usual, we ordered too much and came away completely full from the feast.

Bukchangdong Soondubu

Whenever I go to Koreatown in Toronto, I always eat at Bukchangdong Soondubu for its famous soft tofu stew. It's so hip and popular that it even appeared on Kim's Convenience. Anyway, I was excited to finally have Bukchangdong Soondubu in South Korea!

Jin Jin Sura

This was another fine dining restaurant in Gangnam offering a set menu of many many courses of Korean dishes. It seems like it's a popular place in Seoul for Koreans to go for 상견례, the formal introduction of the prospective bride's family and the groom's family before the wedding. I guess my spouse and I could have pretended we were about to get married.

Korean fried chicken

It had to be done, right? You can't go to Korea without getting chi-mek (fried chicken & beer). As usual, we ordered way too much and it was delicious

Korean baseball game food

We caught a baseball game at Jamsil Stadium, and maaaaaan do I wish we can get these kinds of baseball snacks in Canada. More chicken and beer, dumplings, milk tea, tteokbukki, Korean pizza with corn, bulgogi, and pepperoni. The baseball game was really fun. The cheerleaders danced in perfect K-pop choreography, everyone was singing all the time, and I think the team we were cheering even won.

Ssam kyup sal

I like to call this Korean bacon, but my spouse says it's misleading because it doesn't actually taste anything like bacon. Anyway, this is thinly sliced pork that you barbecue on a grill, dip in sesame oil and gochukaru and wrap in a lettuce. So delicious. I think I'm going to have to have a ssamkyupsal party at home in my backyard this summer...

Now that our trip is over, I know I'm going to miss the plentiful Korean food during our trip. I'm not going to miss the delivery guys on motorcycle riding on the sidewalks though. 

Itaewon

We went to Itaewon today, an area that my friends keep telling me to check out but have been avoiding because I don’t see a particular need to visit what is essentially Little America in Korea when I normally live in Little America (Canada), But my sister’s on a shopping mission, and her shopping comfort doesn’t really extend beyond Bayshore, so the best place we though to find her style and price in Korea was Itaewon.

Itaewon is where the foreigners in Korea seem to hang out. That’s where you'll find the Quizno Subs, the Hard Rock Cafe, the english-style pubs, and steak houses. Most importantly, that's where you'll find clothing in non-Korean sizes ("CLOTHES FOR BIG WHITE PEOPLE WHO EAT STEAK"). So many signs advertising "Big Sizes".


See what I mean? All this Western stores...and also a sign, if you can read it, that says "A&H BIG SIZE OUTLE". That's right, outle, not outlet. the clothes are so big, you don't even have room for that final T.

my sister didn't end up finding anything (strangely enough, she found her stuff at a stand in the subway station), but i was surprised to find the Shin Jung Hyun records i'd been searching for, at a sidewalk music stand. score for me! also, that's the only place in pretty much all of Korea that I saw black people. And a Jewish rabbi.

In the evening, we went for Korean buffet with Mom's side of the family, the Mins, where i got a glimpse of what i'll be like when i'm older, if the Min genes hold strong. My forecast seems to be lots of white hair and a cheerful disposition, which is kind of hard to believe if you know me now at my present (cynical) age.

mother's day sightseeing

ughhh...having a cold and allergies at the same time is a deadly combination for your sinuses. i sound like the dead right now. still, we managed to see a lot today. being sunday, we first went to the English church service at Saemoonan, which was the first church established in Korea during the 1880s by the missionary Underwood. it was also the church that my mother's family attended in the 1960s, and it brought back a lot of memories of her and her grandmother, as well as the pastor who led the church at the time. we also got to pass by my mom's old elementary school, which was right around the corner. i tried to picture my mom as a little girl, walking down these streets, but it's hard to imagine the same person who constantly reminds me not to enjoy my vacation too much because i have bar ads coming up.




after church, we went to the Korean National Museum, which is something like the fifth largest museum in the world. it was pretty huge, and we only had time to explore a portion of it, so we focused on the history of korea. i have to say, it was pretty enlightening to learn about the thousands of years of Korean civilization, but the most interesting thing i learned today was that while i can't speak fluent Korean, for some reason i seemed to have picked up some Chinese.


ninja stars. korean style.



a ten-storey pagoda built, like, a thousand years ago. koreans are pretty amazing

after the museum, we browsed through the dongdaemun markets, particularly the pyunghwa clothing market, but i found that unless you have a burning desire to buy skull-printed suspenders or ridiculous hats, there wasn't much for vintage clothing shoppers like me. we did enjoy perusing through the various designer stands at Doosan Towers, which was amazing simply because of its sheer size - imagine a Bay Street skyscraper, filled with clothing shops.

by then, my cold had overpowered my excitement for fashion so we headed home, walking along the Chunggyechun stream. This is a particularly beautiful part of Korea, a stream that runs through the downtown core. it used to be a stinky place where people would dump their garbage. then the government filled it up and built a road over it. then the next government decided to open up the stream again, clean it up, and open it to the public as a nice canal to walk along. it sure beats garbage river or cement city any day.



look how ridiculously fat i've gotten on this trip. it's a wonder i didn't break the rocks i was walking on to cross the stream.

okay, going to bed now. i have some epic backpacking ahead of me for the next few days and there is a korean-war style battle going on within my body right now...

bathroom self-portraits: seoul and jejudo

washroom at Doosan tower (doota!), seoul, Korea.

this was a huge shopping complex where the washrooms had an extraordinary view of the mountains as well as the cityline, and the magnificent Dongdaemun gate, which is visible in this photo if you look closely.



public washroom in Jejudo, South Korea

another one of those weird washroom stalls where there was a child-sized urinal and child-sized toilet in the stall. i was fascinated. as i took the photo, a child whined outside the stall because he actually had to use it. i'm a horrible person.

korean music

my little sister is the kind of generous individual who will gladly share many things with me - like chicken pox, when we were small children, and on this particular trip to Korea, her cold. despite delays caused by my nonstop sneezing and fever-induced ramblings, we managed to go out and explore more of Seoul today.

knowing my love of exploring local music, my dad bought us tickets to see a show at the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts. originally i had been hoping to see some pansori, a form of traditional folk music where a singer tells a story while a drummer accompanies him or her along with verbal responses - hence sharing components of the call and response format of black gospel music as well as the simple yet tremendously expressive nature of the blues. i've been working on this theory that pansori is the korean form of the american blues, only centuries older.


an example of pansori - starts at 37 seconds

it's cool enough to make me want to learn korean just to put on interesting pansori shows in Kensington Market.

as it turned out, pansori wasn't being featured today. instead, we saw other traditional performances: we saw court music (byeolgok) performed with five instruments i had never seen before (except the drum. i know what drums are). then there was a salpuri a folk dance that was put on originally to exorcise evil spirits in the shaman tradition. i have to admit i know a lot more about music than dance, so although the female dancer with the white scarf was quite expressive, i paid a lot more attention to her accompaniment. the music was disturbing, simply haunting. aspects of it made me think of the darker pieces of Godspeed You Black Emperor, only with centuries more suffering and brooding behind it. it was weird and abrasive and a very foreign sound to our Western-trained ears, but i found myself irresistibly drawn to it. i wish i had been allowed to record it, so i could, i don't know, learn the zither to replicate it, or something.


an example of salpuri. slow and haunting music - kind of like godspeed you black emperor

the final act was a sanjo featuring the geomungo instrument. Sanjo, from what i understand, is a folk music performance where one musician solos. it seemed like pansori, only with an instrument telling the story, rather than a vocalist. it was kind of like two friends from the deep American South, sitting on a porch on a hot day, with one man playing banjo and the other guy the washer, one man singing "my baby done left me an' i got the blues" and the other guy responding "amen!", only here these men were wearing traditional korean hanbok, not overalls, and they were playing the zither and the barrel drum. same sort of feel though, if you get what i mean. and the audience members, especially the older ones familiar with the sound, were equally moved by the music, and i heard some of them call out responses along with the drummer. it was quite the sight.

the whole show was pretty enlightening. Korea has such a long rich music history, and we are so lucky that so much of it is still preserved, especially when the Japanese invaded the country and forbade the expression of any Korean music for decades - it's a wonder that people were still around to remember how to tell it, Korean-style. i would love for elements of traditional Korean music to seep into mainstream music, like the way the blues, reggae, and even bollywood sound has. of course, i don't think i could really bear it if Avril Lavigne started belting out pansori, so maybe there is some blessings in obscurity.

Also, due to my inability to tell the difference between chun (a thousand) and man (ten thousand), i now own a thirty dollar, authentic bamboo-carved recorder.

after the show, we went to the Kangnam Express Bus Terminal and explored the many shops around there. i picked up some priceless gifts for my friends, but my favourite find was the record store where i picked up some of Korea's more contemporary musical treasures that i'd been searching for: some Shin Jung Hyun, known as the godfather of Korean classic rock, Park Ji Yoon, a pop singer turned introspective singer-songwriter/actress/photographer, and the Rock Tigers, who call themselves as the pioneers of Korean rockabilly - and are possibly still the only Korean rockabilly band that i've ever heard of anyway.

mini post before the plane ride

yesterday morning, we explored the Hongik University area, which was full of yummy Korean restaurants, hip clothing stores and clubs to suit the artsy student population. i finally was able to do a little record record store shopping and picked up the latest release of this korean indie band that i like called 검정치마 (the Black Skirts). my favourite single from them has this awesome shoegazer-influenced dream pop feel that isn't typical in Korean pop music.



today's bathroom self portrait comes from the Korean city of Suwon:



no, i didn't sneak into the little boy's room. the stall in this women's washroom outside Suwon's magnificent Hwasung fortress seemed to be a family stall which had a miniature toilet and a miniature urinal right next to the regular toilet. apparently the mayor of Suwon was so disgusted with the state of public washrooms in general that he underwent a major bathroom reform, and now the city of Suwon has the cleanest bathrooms in Korea.



it was hard getting a good picture of the other toilets, but i think you see the general arrangement.

more noraebangs than you can shake a stick at

we had a packed day yesterday.

• i watched a man delivering a cart of propane tanks on his motorcycle have a very bad day in the rain, stalled on the shoulder of the highway.

• we wandered through the market at Namdaemun, where a man dressed up in a woman's hanbok dress complete with false breasts called to me in Japanese to check out his wares (people seem to think i'm Japanese here - my sister says it's because i wear ugly shoes, but i'm sure it's because i have the world's most startlingly bad Korean accent). My father also surprised us all with his ninja-stealthy haggling skills in the market.

• i bought some nifty new glasses at a shop, which was a pretty interesting experience. i basically got a free eye examination and my optician got a free English lesson, because my dad decided it was time for me to be a man and try to navigate through the eye exam on my own without translation help. Despite many language barriers, the good news is that my glasses turned out perfectly, and dirt dirt dirt cheap (unlike in Canada, where i'd have to drop $400 on a pair that i'd have to wait three weeks for). The bad news is that it is clear that law school has worsened my eyes to the -10.00s now (shakes fist).

• we ate at a deeeelicious restaurant (Koon-gi-wa-jib) where you take your shoes off at the entrance (while a dozen businessmen in suits file past you to meet their chauffeurs tending to their mercedes), and you are seated in one of those private rooms lined with rice paper walls and you sit on a bamboo mat on the floor. Then you are served dozens of different banchan (side dishes) in bronze bowls along with elegantly prepared abalone and the most tender kalbi i have ever eaten in my life. it's also probably the most expensive place we've eaten at so far, and it still came out to less than twenty bucks a person. have i mentioned how amazingly cheap Korea is?

banchan, as far as the eye can see!

• we walked along the trendy yet historical Bukchon Hanok Village, which was where all the nobility class yangban and government officials originally lived, close to the palace. in other words, where my peeps would have lived, had we not been ousted by the Japanese (shakes fist again).

• we also did a tour of Gyeoungbokgung Palace, which was where the King used to live, during the Joseon dynasty. it was originally built in the 1300's but parts of it kept getting destroyed (ahem, ahem, JAPANESE OCCUPATION...) We had the loveliest tour guide, a retired Korean banker who felt he had benefited so much from the country that he wanted to give back, and also practice his English. i really can't describe the palace grounds in words, but i did take some photos.

Our guide ended our tour by telling us why Korea is awesome.
1. Good King Sejong invented the Korean alphabet in the fifteenth century, which was a system so logical and uncomplicated that it has reduced the illiteracy rate in korea to less than 1%.
2. We keep getting invaded by countries, over and over and over again (ahem, JAPAN), but we're still around. I think our tour guide mentioned our amazing skills at sucking up to major foreign powers (ahem, USA) and i think that's an important diplomatic skill.
3. The King had a special toilet.

• but the most magical thing that i must tell you about is the JJIMJILBANG.

i'm not quite sure what "fomentation" is

I have been contemplating this in my head for a long time but I cannot think of a English equivalent at all. i think the closest concept we have is a spa, but that raises notions of white fluffy bathrobes, white marble walls, white upper class privilege prices, and cucumbers placed on your eyes for no reason that anyone can understand. At a jjimjilbang, first of all, they store all your clothes and you wear the most ridiculous outfit of a bright orange t-shirt and red shorts, so you can't hold any illusions of being a bored rich housewife at a luxury spa. Secondly you pay something like ten dollars and then you can spend hours there, even stay there all night, so you have all kinds of people (especially families and young people on dates) hanging out there, not just bored rich housewives.

while there are spa elements there, like baths, saunas, and services offering massages and "padicures" (sic), the emphasis there seems to be on relaxation (My father thinks this is because Koreans don't know how to relax in an unstructured manner). this means jjimjilbangs have all sorts of Korean things that North American spas don't have, like:

• movies
• a cafeteria that serves beer, ice cream, and pogo sticks
• karaoke rooms (noraebang)
  
• sleeping rooms - included a room designated for snorers
• a bookshelf of manga comic books to bring into the sauna
• STARCRAFT

i am not kidding you, there really was a gaming room. i spent most of my time dozing off in the various therapeutic rooms, like the salt room (apparently it is therapeutic to lie on a bed of heated salt), the charcoal room, the jade rooms, the ice room, the clay room, the oxygen room. i also checked out the baths full of naked elderly Asian women, where i discovered that contrary to popular belief, the sag factor is a real concern for all of us when aging. my favourite part was the massage chairs (massages by a robot! for a dollar!) and the signs everywhere telling koreans to be nice to the foreigners, who will probably not be very good at Starcraft.

i think what excites me the most is that i am pretty sure there is a korean jjimjilbang in Toronto, which i'll have to check out when i get back to Canada. You'll all come with me, right? I sure hope it has a Starcraft room.

burberry rag

hello 5AM once again. they say to recover from jetlag you need a day for every hour you displace...which, given the thirteen hour time difference and my two week stay, might give me just enough time to recover before i have to go back home again. oh well. it means i get to see Seoul at its quietest hour when all the clubbers have gone to bed and the businessmen haven't gotten up yet for their morning commute. Seoul has some very beautiful sunrises, poking between the mountains and the skyscrapers. moments of it remind me of Vancouver, another city nestled in the mountains.

we've been very busy fighting off the jetlag while exploring the city. food! food everywhere tastes so good! even the street meat! sold out of the back of some sketchy guy's van! absolutely delicious! yesterday my dad bought some mandoo (dumpling) and chimpan (dough pastries with red bean paste) and i think the street cred only adds to its deliciousness.


my parents buying ho-dduk from some sketchy guy out of a sketchy van.


yummy street snacks - octopus and squid for sale


this street vendor was really mad that i was taking pictures of him. but first, master the credentials.

yesterday morning we went to Youngnak Presbyterian Church, which was housed in this magnificent old building, and this was pretty much the first time i went to a korean church that actually owned the building it held its services in. often in Canada, Korean churches have to rent beautiful old church buildings from white people, or else buy a converted warehouse (as in the case of Toronto's Youngnak church). the church service offered translation services in English and Japanese, which i thought was pretty interesting, and I should also note that this is the only time in Korea that I ever had a Korean person talk to me in English. it figures. Koreans are really big on the church as a part of their culture, and even bigger on evangelism. i'd love to go into a discussion about this reflecting a fascinating counter-appropriation of western colonial influences on Korean indigenous culture, but i suspect a travel blog isn't the best venue for re-hashing my social science undergrad education.


young nak presbyterian church


i am not kidding you. it's a Korean Mother Mary and Child

after the service we went to Myeongdong (i haven't the faintest clue how to spell this in English) which was an exciting shopping and eating district. my father had planned to just pass through this area, but of course when you're traveling with three women, you can't just "pass through" a shopping area. i have seen so many wonderful t-shirts that just beg to be put on the Engrish website; it's almost overwhelming.


Korea's use of engrish is both fascinating and poetic.

i really don't understand why they love to use random english words here. is it a trendy thing, like the way in North America if we want to sound sophisticated, we slip in French phrases we don't understand ("She has that sort of je ne sais quoi about her, you know?" "Your mom just gave me a deja vu."). Also interesting is the korean phonetic spelling of english words. i don't know how many times i painstakingly read out the korean characters on a sign ("Eh-li-beh-tuh" or "Su-tu-ra-beh-ree Men-go") only realize they are actually english words ("Elevator" or "Strawberry Mango").

most fascinating, of course, is the Korean love of designer labels. So many grown men carrying Louis Vuitton handbags. i'm sure there are a lot of knock-offs (like, i'm sure the street vendor outside my hotel is not selling real Chanel earrings) but i'm sure a lot of them are the real thing, because Koreans really love that stuff here and if the rest of them are anything like my cousin, they can tell if its genuine Coach at a glance. When I passed by an optician's shop yesterday, i definitely saw a Burberry rag that was used to wipe glasses. BURBERRY RAG.

...and yet despite this love of ridiculously expensive brands, it's amazing how cheap a lot of other things are. like socks. really cute socks, all for a buck a pair. i am pretty sure i'm going to fill up my suitcase with only socks as souvenirs when i come back.

to balance out our hyper-consumerist morning, we spent the afternoon ascending Namsan, the mountain providing a startling retreat into nature, smack dab in the middle of the city. it looked like everyone else in Seoul had the same idea - the paths were pretty crowded full of families and children climbing over perilous steep steps that just screamed TORT. still, it was an amazing view at the top, allowing us to see just how far the city spans, the cityline framed by the pretty tree blossoms that cause me such woeful fits of allergies. also, intense moments of acrophobia. Bukhansan is going to be even more interesting when we get to that.
for dinner, we grabbed some bibimbap and kimbap at the Hyundai department store in Sinchon. yeah, i didn't know that Hyundai had a department store either, but if it's going to be anywhere it makes sense that it would be in Seoul. my mission for today is to find some noodle bowls that don't contain octopus. Koreans like to to a lot of weird things to a normal bowl of spaghetti.*

*yes, i know that "normal bowl of spaghetti" isn't historically correct since asians invented pasta first and Marco Polo only stole it from us to bring back to Italy, so really, the "normal bowl of spaghetti" is what you find in Asia, not East Side Mario, but still, it doesn't change the fact that i'd love to have a good bowl of noodles that don't contain anchovy eyes or octupii...


view from partway up the Namsan mountain