Friday, January 29, 2010

Apsan Park's Many Paths

I try to climb some of Apsan Mountain on one weekend day. It is, after all, right behind my house. The climb is rigorous, but the view is amazing. I like to exercise, and I've never been one for gyms, so the presence of a mountain behind my house is a godsend.

Every week I get puzzled at some point on my climb. I've always been kind of bad with directions, but even I am not so absent minded that I can't get the path on the sixth time I take it. I have been wondering what's going on, and it finally hit me. People are bushwacking new paths! Every weekend I see someone chopping wood in the park. At first I thought that everyone was fueling a stove or fireplace. I've finally figured out that this is recreation!

If I were to choose one defining characteristic for Koreans (a fallacy for any group of 30 million people, but indulge me), it would be that Koreans never half ass anything. This is evident at every 30 plate lunch spread I walk in on (my peanut butter sandwich is so sad in comparison, but luckily Koreans don't let people eat alone either), every drunken man I see fall face first on the pavement, pick himself up, and head for another bar, and the three ring circus that is my grocery store on Saturdays. This is a mixed blessing. The strength, determination, and sheer chutzpah it must have taken to pull the country from post-civil-war shambles to a seat on the G20 in 50 years boggles the mind. People who lived in Korea in the 70's warned us of primitive conditions before we came over, and instead we found talking appliances. On the other hand, English teachers I have encountered assure me that Korean momzillas would eat American momzillas for breakfast. (Momzillas being the pushy maniacs preparing their elementary age children, who have never seen the outdoors, for the LSAT). North Koreans are certainly not doing communism half assed, and have an old school Stalinist dictatorship—complete media control, maniacal devotion to one leader, widespread imprisonment of dissenters, the whole nine yards.

Anyways, back to Apsan park. It's not enough for Koreans to climb the rigorous path up the mountain. There is exercise equipment at the base of the path, and a hula hoop and push up device halfway up. I believe they throw in wood chopping and bushwacking for upper body exercise. This is bad news for the trees, but impressive to me. That climb up the mountain is, in fact, too much for me. I have never made it to the top.

*For fans of trees: the lack of suburbs in Korea is very good for trees. It balances out, I imagine.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Hobakjuk

Things have slowed down a bit here, and we've fallen into routine. I was searching for something to write about today, and I thought I would share my Saturday activity: hobakjuk.

Hobakjuk is one of my favorite Korean foods. It's a sweet pumpkin porridge. The best kind has little rice cakes and sweet azuki beans in it, and I set about to make this. I started by visiting the market in search of a pumpkin. I walked out with some bungopan—fish shaped pancakes filled with red bean jelly—but no pumpkin. I bought a hobak, alright, but it looked a little funny to me then. I got home and did some research to discover that Koreans call zucchini “green pumpkin”. I should have trusted my instincts. It certainly didn't look like a pumpkin!

So I dragged Bobby to the Home Plus, which is a bit of a nightmare on weekends. The aisles are packed and the clerks are screaming at us on microphones, dancing, singing, and trying to shove free samples on us. Bobby and I are both hands off shoppers. I do not like having help proffered at every turn, though it's less annoying when I can't understand what someone is saying.

We emerged from the Home Plus unscathed and I started what turned out to be an epic cooking session. First I sliced and deseeded the pumpkin and boiled it for about a half hour. Notice this is a green pumpkin: it's called a kobacha.



















Afterwards, I removed the pumpkin and let it cool. I scraped it out of it's shell, mashed it up like a potato and threw it back into the pot with 2 cups of glutinous rice flour.

















I added 10 cups of water—I had to boil it since tap water here is not safe to drink—and stirred it all over low heat.

















Finally, I threw in the adzuki beans, which are the same kind used to make the sweet bean paste that goes into a lot of Korean pastries, which I love too much. Koreans, like Chinese, are big fans of the color red. It's the color of good fortune. I added some rice cakes, which can be made with glutinous rice flour but I bought some from a rice cake store.




Brown sugar and cinnamon were not in my Korean recipe book, but they were lovely additions. Finally, lunch (at about 4pm)!

















I love Korean food, and have been enjoying learning how to make it myself, but I also don't have a whole lot of options. I don't have access to fresh rosemary, thyme, or basil here. I get parsley from the commissary, but it's not incredibly fresh by the time it gets to me. I think it's time to try my hand at growing things again, starting with an herb garden. Getting seeds from abroad may be difficult...



Hey, there's a mountain outside our window!

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Not Hiroshima, and with a volcano

We planned to spend our second and last day in Japan at Hiroshima. The atomic bomb is not a part of American history I am proud of, but I felt, as Americans, that we should see it. We went to the train station that morning and asked for two tickets to Hiroshima. We had about 15 minutes to board the train: just enough time to find breakfast and coffee, get stuck in the turnstiles, and find our seats. Turnstiles are our nemeses here, and each one has some different method for crossing. All turnstiles are all the same type, which does nothing to indicate a wrong move until two barriers pop out to close on you. There are always helpful subway/train attendants who watch us carefully as we try to navigate the system and pop out to direct us through the idiot proof turnstile when we mess up. This time I had put the wrong ticket in the turnstile, as I had a Japanese and an English version.

Anyways, we were on the train and moving before I realized that our journey was 2 hours 20 minutes instead of the 70 minutes the internet said it would be. We were on a “slow” train (this train probably went about 85 miles per hour, but it was not the famed maglev bullet train). After about an hour and a half, everyone got off the slow train and boarded a bullet, so I figured the track was broken, which would explain the longer journey. I am no stranger to railroad mishaps.

It wasn't until I got off the train and went to the tourist information kiosk for a map that we realized we were in the wrong city. The lady at the train station in Fukuoka had misheard me and sent us to Kagoshima. Instead of 200 kilometers north, we went nearly 400 kilometers south. The floor dropped out from under me. All of our plans and we were in some nothing city! Bobby tried to cheer me up, saying we'd make the most out of it. We browsed our tourist map and saw a volcano island on the south side of town.

We've seen Mount St. Helens, so I wasn't expecting much. The moment we came in sight of the volcano and smoke began to billow slowly out of the top was priceless. It was an active volcano! It was truly inspiring to see. We found a nearby restaurant where we could eat lunch, and after some excellent ramen and a Kirin, we had decided we had made a fortunate mistake. If we had known there was an active volcano so close to us, we may have opted to go to Kagoshima anyways. Bobby loves volcanos. We decided to get closer.

We took a ferry to the island and a bus to get closer to the cone. Our observation point was covered in black ash, and we looked over a lava field from the catastrophic 1914 explosion that turned the island into a peninsula. Afterwards, we went to one of the island's many hot springs—this one for feet—and warmed our toes. Kagoshima was relatively warm and beautiful, with lush vegetation (once you got out of the ash covered area). The beaches were littered with black volcanic rocks. We watched the volcano turn red as the sun set, then headed back for the “road to the Meiji restoration,” which included a samurai house. We had dinner at a sushi joint—that's right, I had nothing but ramen and sushi the entire time I was in Japan—which was also a shopping mall with a ferris wheel on top. It was a long journey home, but we were both satisfied with our mistake. We lost an atom bomb memorial, but gained an active volcano.

This happened right when we came in sight of the volcano














The walkway was covered with ash


















The foot hot springs











The samurai house













The train station/mall. The ferris wheel looked much cooler at night, but my camera takes shoddy pictures of lights at night.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Fukuoka

As seeing Japan has been a dream of ours for awhile, we decided to take my long weekend to see the piece of Japan that is closest to us. Early this morning, we hopped a hydrofoil from Busan to Fukuoka. This ferry, called the Beetle, is a funny looking thing that sits above water on two fins and goes really fast. The trip took us two hours. I must say, approaching the islands by sea was a spectacular way to see the country for the first time.

Upon landing, we were immediately confronted with one of Japan's bigger frustrations (for foreigners, at least). Most Japanese ATMS will not take foreign cards. This is an issue in Korea as well, but we can at least count on train and subway stations to have foreign card ATMS. This is not the case in Japan. On the advice of a friendly tourist information counter attendant, we hiked a good half mile to the 7-11, suitcases in tow. There we found an ATM's that would accept our cards.

That blip aside, we made it to our hotel, where they told us we couldn't check in until 2. We stored the bags and set out for Canal City, a very sophisticated looking mall. There is a canal running through the center. I have never been a huge fan of malls, but in Korea I've found they're one of the best places to eat. The same seems to be true in Japan. We found a sushi restaurant with a conveyer belt. Here's how it works: various dishes with two or three pieces of sushi pass by on a conveyer belt. Each price has a different color plate. You select your sushi plates, eat them, and stack them on the counter. When you are ready to leave, the attendants count your plates and give you your bill. The restaurant also included little green tea fountains at each seat, which was icing on the (sushi filled) cake.

After checking into our room, we wandered about a bit. We ran across a Shinto shrine, which is similar to a Korean buddhist temple in structure and layout, but very different. Japanese temples lack the elaborate paintings of Korean ones, but they have these beautiful gate structures. There also appears to be far more writing on Japanese temples—Korean temples have mainly pictures. There was a vending machine where (I think) you could purchase certain prayers.

Fukuoka is a ramen city, apparently, and we saw several outdoor ramen shops lining the canals. Almost all of them had big red lanterns outside, and they set up at dusk. We went looking for Ippudo, a much lauded ramen shop. We actually wandered into the wrong restaurant, but the host pointed us the way to the correct one. Japanese people, like Koreans, are very considerate. At Ippudo, there were only three items on the menu, but the ramen I had was soulful. I have heard that real ramen is a treat, and I have been waiting to try it. Korean ra-myun, as far as I've seen, is very similar to the kind that comes out of a bag. This is not so in Fukuoka. The broth itself has so many flavors I can only imagine what it is made of.

There are a few things we noticed about Japan off the bat More people in Japan speak English. There are a lot of bikers in Daegu, but there are scads in Fukuoka (Bobby pointed out that unlike Daegu, Fukuoka is flat). Japanese restaurants are “your plate, my plate” kinds of places, unlike Japanese restaurants in Daegu. I have so fallen into the habit of sharing food that I still pick off of Bobby's plate, which I'm not sure he likes. Japan is expensive, more so with the weak dollar. Japanese tea is out of this world. Japanese people are not as pushy as Koreans can be, and you don't have cars driving on the sidewalks or people fighting to be the first in the door like you do in Korea. There are no public displays of drunkenness. Nonetheless, I was a little miffed when an American we met at the sushi restaurant said that Japanese people are considerate, unlike Koreans (he has not been to Korea). I remember all the Koreans who have gone out of their way to help us when we look confused. The two cultures are different, but both are considerate. Japanese people will stand back at a crowded doorway, but no one has stopped to help me while I am staring at a map, a menu, or a pile of coins in my hand.

The recycling here is confusing enough to require a class. There are different trash cans for bottles, plastic, paper, and “combustibles”, though no food waste. I had to turn on my LAN port to get internet (to be precise, I had to call the front desk and tell them my internet isn't working and have them show me how to turn on my LAN port). The toilets here all have heated seats and several buttons, though it's difficult to find the flusher.

There are less neon lights than in Korea, but there is more art to them. In Korea, there are several signs made up of lighted letters. In Fukuoka, there are elaborate LED displays with pictures.

Tomorrow, Hiroshima. (Editor's note: I left the last line on the post for novelty's sake).



The fabulous sushi conveyor belt















Canal World














One gate in the shrine















The Japanese are fond of vending machines























The river at night









The intelligent box was just too intelligent for me

Friday, January 8, 2010

Bulgogi

I have been meaning to bring my camera along to a restaurant for weeks, but I never walk out the door with it. Today we had a large, late lunch at one of my favorite Korean restaurants, and after I again forgot the camera I decided to borrow from the world wide web. (For those of you who are librarians, I “borrowed” these images from wikipedia commons and now consider my obligation to us copyright law fulfilled).

Today we had bulgogi, which is a beef stew. I was never much of a red meat person before I came here, but bulgogi is one of my favorite Korean dishes.

At many good Korean restaurants, we take off our shoes at the door and grab a cushion so we can sit on the floor. This place, which has the English name “Korean Traditional Restaurant,” was no exception.

Someone handed us a menu. They often try to explain it in Korean. Apparently they can be very fussy about explaining the particular attributes of each dish, but this is lost on us. We looked at the menu (if we're lucky there are pictures) and pointed to a dish. There is always one menu and one dish. In the west, everyone orders a plate and eats only their own dish. This is unheard of in Korea. We order one thing for two people and share it. If there are more people, we'll order two things, but we always share. If it's an individual dish, like soup, we of course order two, but they get confused if we try to order two different ones. Well meaning restaurant owners have brought us three dishes before—two of one, one of the other—because ordering separate things is unheard of.

If your dietary needs are different from everyone else's, by the way, never fear. That's why there's banchan. Banchan are the myriad of side dishes they bring us after we order. Banchan varies by restaurant. Some have several side dishes, some a few (never less than four), some have “nicer” banchan like dishes involving fish or tofu, some have the cheap banchan like spinach or potatoes. Sometimes there's so much banchan that we can't find room on the table for the main dish when it comes. Banchan always involves at least one kind of kimchi, and we've had up to four kimchi plates in one setting. We used to try and eat all of the side dishes, since it's rude to leave too much food on the table, but we soon discovered that doing that only invited the restaurateur to refill our dishes.

On a side note, I have not encountered too many waiters in Korea. Many times, the person serving the food is the only one in the restaurant besides the cook. There are no aprons or uniforms, and there is no tipping. Honestly. It's considered an insult, which makes sense if you think that the person serving you the food is probably the restaurant owner. Apparently tipping implies that they need more money than they charged for the meal. Many restaurants appear to be family owned, and there are often children running around and people sitting in the front watching TV.

Anyways, the table was crowded with banchan, which is where Korea's long chopsticks come in handy. I can snatch something from a plate in front of Bobby. The restaurateur brought a bunch of raw meat and vegetables and placed them in a pan, poured on some broth, and turned on the gas grill, which she set on our table earlier. She handed us a ladle, some tongs, and scissors. She came back to stir and cut the bulgogi, but most people do it themselves. We are westerners and they assume we don't know what's going on (they are often right). After the meat cooked, they turned the burner down. We each had a little bowl in front of us, and our server brought two bowls of rice. We mixed rice and stew in our bowls and dug in.

While we ate, I ran out of water and had to yell for it. This is hard to get used to. There are no hovering waiters anxious to refill our glasses, and Koreans either push a button on their table or yell “Yogi, mul juseyo! (Here, bring me water)” That feels very rude to me, but that's how it's done. Even if someone visits the table to bring another side dish, she will not refill my water unless I yell for it.

As usual, we were pretty full after we finished, but at this point in the Korean meal they will often order soup and fruit. If I'm not in the mood for what was ordered (Korean men are nuts for this bacony dish called sam gyup sal that I tire of), I'll then fill up on soup and rice. There is also coffee and tea. I did have some tea called sujeongwa, made with persimmon, ginger, and cinnamon, that's out of this world.

We then had to pry ourselves off the floor and walk to the cashier. In Korea, you never pay at the table. There are no taxes and no tips. The lovely meal that I failed to capture on film for you set us back 26000 won, or 23 dollars. This was a little pricey for lunch, but it was a nice restaurant with fancy bangchan.

Next time, I'll bring my camera (I swear).

Banchan. This one has three types of kimchi (now that I think about it, three or four types of kimchi is the norm). My favorite is buchingae, which is a potato pancake, though I also really like tofu covered in sauce and salad with yogurt. Bobby loves caramelized rice and mini potatoes.








Bulgogi before: many tables have burners in the middle.













Bulgogi afterwards. It's good, trust me.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Korea vs. Japan

I have been sadly homebound these past few days, so I don't have much to write about. We had a lovely snow on Monday. I'm still enchanted by falling snowflakes, though I suppose eventually the novelty will wear off.

I remember that I was going to talk about the complicated relationship between Koreans and Japanese, and I guess now is the time. I believe that Japan has conquered parts of Korea more than once, but the most recent incidence is in living memory, and it was brutal. The Japanese not only took over the Korean government, but they put the Koreans through a vigorous reeducation program, teaching Japanese language and cultures in schools. Women were kidnapped and given as slaves to soldiers. Any attempt at protest was violently suppressed. The Japanese even murdered the Korean empress, who had no political power but huge symbolic significance.

Koreans are understandably bitter. This comes out in many ways: though I learned from one source that Cheondok Palace was in fact burned by servants, every sign in the palace laments the pieces that were burned by the Japanese (except one, which admits that it could have been servants). Korean culture and Japanese culture are understandably similar, but try and call a Korean wrestler a sumo wrestler and you'll be sorry. (The only difference I have detected is the lack of a topknot on Korean wrestlers). Many places serve sushi but call it mujanwi. Korean norebangs—singing rooms-- are everywhere but Koreans are quick to tell you that they are not karaoke bars. The name “Sea of Japan” is an insult to the Koreans, and, as some Korean high schoolers pointed out to me, its proper name is the East Sea.

I don't think this antipathy spreads to Japanese people. I haven't heard any Koreans speak badly of the Japanese, and Koreans are so solicitous of me (I'm from the country that helped divide Korea), I can't imagine they act differently towards the Japanese. There are small vestiges of Japanese culture creeping back into the public sphere, mainly through young people. There's anime and manga, and Koreans like Hello Kitty as much as anyone else. I imagine teenagers are admonished by their grandparents, who remember being reeducated by the Japanese.

As someone from across the world, I see Koreans and Japanese as very similar—both bow, both use chopsticks and eat lots of rice, both are exceedingly polite, technologically savvy, and hardworking. Korean and Japanese children appear to always be in school. They both like cartoons with big eyes, intricately patterned sliding doors, sitting on the floor, and taking off your shoes at the door. To Koreans, Korean and Japanese culture are very different. Japanese are insular, Koreans form tight communities. Japanese are accommodating, Koreans are stubborn. Koreans are bigger drinkers (at least the men are). Perhaps this is like the difference between America and England. I saw everything as just a little bit different, but I wonder if an Asian visiting both countries would say we're practically the same.