No Call Number: Our Neighborhood

Now that I've had a few days to explore, I'd like to write about some of highlights of my neighborhood. When we moved, we knew we were entering restaurant row, and we haven't even explored a small percentage of our local restaurants. We're certainly trying to eat our way through our neighborhood, but this project will take at least a month. In the meantime, I took a walk in our “backyard” (a.k.a. Apsan Mountain) today. It's a slog and I still haven't made it all the way to the top, but I have reached some amazing vantage points. The city of Daegu looks like a sea of white buildings with a few green islands (parks). There's a trail up Apsan mountain right across the road from our villa, along with a batrhoom and some exercise equipment. Every park in Daegu has lots of exercise equipment that Daegu's boomer population puts to good use. In America, parks are for children. Here, it seems, they are for adults.

Down the the road—literally, as we have to go down a steep hill—is our Home Plus, which is Tesco in Korea with some housewares and appliances thrown in. As I have misplaced my ration card, we do all of our shopping off base at the moment, and we spent all morning trying to find American foods in the grocery store. We were marginally successful. There doesn't appear to be wheat bread in Korea, but we did get some awesome nut tea they call Jok's tears and some instant coffee. Instant coffee is not really my style, but yesterday I discovered that none of the eight “coffee shops” around my house are open in the morning. I'm not sure I can consider these coffee shops, since they don't resemble what I expect, and I don't have a lot of patience for cultural differences when I am undercaffeinated. I have wandered into two or three hoping to get a cup of coffee to go, only to be invited to sit down, served tons of snacks along with coffee (no cream, no sugar) and charged about 5 bucks. We don't have a coffee maker at the moment, though I'm (kind of) confident that I had the presence of mind to pack our coffee maker in unaccompanied baggage, which gets here next week. If not, I will be heading back to the Home Plus to try and figure out Korean coffee makers. We also bought slippers, quintessential for every Asian home though really hard to find in Bobby's size.

Between the Home Plus and our house is our local sijang (market), where I can buy local produce, rice cakes, meat, fish, and market food. Little stalls sell dumplings, spring rolls, rice cakes in sauce, noodles, sausages, Korean pancakes, and twigim (take something, put it on a stick, fry it, enjoy) and you can sit on a stool in the stall to eat it. We can eat a great lunch for under a dollar here.