Parents visit to Seoul part 2: Insadong and BBQ

So, here's the second post about my parent's visit here to Seoul. We were all a bit tired after Noryangjin on Saturday night, and went to bed. I dropped my parents off at the lovely "Motel 21" love motel. This motel does not even try to hide what it is there for... check out these door handles.



In case you can't tell, they have naked ladies for their door handles. In order to open the door, it's hard not to grab indecent lady parts lol. But the price was really right, and the place is only 1 block away from my appartement... the location was really it's appeal. Luckily, my parents are the adventurous sorts and found the whole experience hilarious and good for a story.

After a leisurely breakfast at my place of fried eggs, fresh pineapple slices, and assorted pastries, we decided to take the subway to the Insadong neighborhood.


I am pointing to where we started, at Seoul National University. Ryan is pointing to Insadoing, where we are going. Dad isn't even pointing in the city of Seoul.

Insadong is the tradional arts and handicrafts area of Seoul. While we did get lost trying to find the shopping area, we found beautiful streets covered with large fall leaves.



It was almost like a little piece of Canada, but our leaves are nowhere near this huge. We were all completely charmed by the huge mapple leaves.

Finally, we found the shopping area. Insadong is the touristy neighborhood of Seoul, where you can best buy traditional Korean handicrafts. Lots of scroll paintings, art galleries, tea shops, clothing shops, and much more. We had a lovely time searching the tea shops for the perfect teacups, and looking through fabulous art galleries. We encountered some of the local sellers, who were so friendly.



Mandarin oranges are in season now, and they are sold everywhere. This street orange seller insisted that before we could take a picture, he needed to clean up his cart and tuck in his shirt all nice.

After a great time wandering around the shops, it was supper time. We went to a fairly new BBQ restaurant in a neighborhood close to my home, Guro. Korean bbq is really an experience worth having. BBQ here is by far my favorite korean food. I know i've posted about this before, but it's well worth repeating. It's all in the process.

You pick your meat, and then they bring you a big plate of your raw meat and turn on your grill. This one was a charcoal grill. You grill the meat to your desired level of crispiness.



Korean bbq is about more than just the meat, like all korean food it's also about all the side dishes that come with it. We had kimchi, dwenjongjiggae (ryan's favorite korean spicy tofu soup)an order of mushrooms to grill, cabbage salad, rice, seaweed soup, and raw onions in a sweet soy sauce. As for other accompaniment to the meat, we had lettuce, spicy chili sauce, and garlic. Washed it down with a large bottle of beer (really, they're huge here).



Going clockwise from the bowl of soup at the front, Dwenjongjiggae, Onions and sauce, seaweed soup, cabbage salad, lettuce, leftover sauce from onions, spicy chili sauce, garlic, Cass beer, more garlic, kimchi, and rice. We really had quite the full table.



Here's Ryan making his meat wrap. You start with a whole leaf of lettuce, then put rice (if you're me, but many don't). You then put spicy sauce and meat fresh off the grill. Top with garlic (grilled or raw is your choice) and then wrap like a tortilla.

After groaning from eating so much good food, we all went home to sleep it off. Said goodbye to Dad, as he had meetings the rest of the week. The next day I took mom to the school to have her meet my kids and see the school. After suitably impressed her, it was off to the airport for her flight back to Singapore. All in all, a great trip.

This is what i can promise any of you if you come visit lol. Meat, street sellers, fish, art, tea and chillaxing. A good vacation, if you ask me.

Parents visit to Noryangjin

A couple weekends ago, my parents came to town for the weekend. It was great to be able to show them around the city, and to see them again. As I will not be going home for Christmas, we got together and celebrated an early Christmas.

So, this is the kind of thing you could be in for if anyone came and visited me out here *hint hint* lol.

My parents arrived Saturday morning after an overnight flight from singapore. As they were rather tired, we kept it pretty low key on the Saturday. We mostly just stayed in and gave christmas presents. My parents gave me a vareity of beads and art supplies... they know how to spoil a girl :). Incuded was a package of this powder they picked up (palm tree?). You mix it with water and get a mouldable paste. After you mould it and it dries, you have a beautiful, rather hard and durable-ish piece that you can do with as you please. My mom made beautiful praying hands that she showed me. Traditionally, they are made to be burned, but i bet it could work well for jewelry pieces too :). I usually post pics to my other blog, but for these ones i'll post here when I finish a couple of pieces.

After all the present excitement, it was time for supper. I decided to take my parents to Noryangjin, the huge fish market here. Mom had WAY too much fun wandering around, picking the two best fish to eat for our supper. Really a great time. We had a flat long fish, a fat fish, scallops, and shrimp. Such a great meal :). The picturesdon't show just how large the place was.



picture from upper balcony. The grey things in front there are all shrimp.


Plates of sashimi (you get the whole plate for about 20$). Also, large rays. Delicious? I'm unsure.


We didn't eat any of these fish.


We ate the long, silver fish here. They were a little bony and soft for my tastes, but still very tasty.

So, that's the saturday. More to come about our sunday in Insadong and Korean BBQ.

SamGyeTang

Ryan and I have both been hit by the cold this week that has been slowly and ominously passing down the staff-room line, myself worse than Ryan. As colds go, it's really not too bad, mostly just a racking cough. However, we want to be as careful as possible as our school isn't exactly generous with sick days. Following Korean custom, people drag their butts into work no matter how sick they are. This is how the cold has been able to roam so freely around our staff, as no one is going home.

So, our boss invited my boyfriend Ryan and I out for supper on Monday night (which was truely lovely of her). As soon as she found out we were both sick with colds, she immediately suggested that we go out for SamGyeTang, the Korean version of chicken noodle soup.


Like the bad blogger I am, i did not take pictures while there. However, I searched Google Images and found this to be the closest there. It essentially is a whole boiled chicken, stuffed with glutinous rice inside. The broth itself is filled with uncut (because they say it keeps the nutrients in better) ginseng, pieces of bark, dates, other dried fruits, garlic (as i said, uncut cloves) and various other hunks of herbs and spices. The result is an extreemely tender chicken, but with really mushy rice.

Final verdict after trying SanGyeTang... prob not for me. It was really fatty soup since the chicken skin was still on, but lacked a lot of flavour. This is a soup known for it's 'well-being' (koreans are really big on random 'well-being' things) rather than it's taste.



On the other hand, Ryan made me chili tonight. Very delish.

Hongdae

Wow... i am starting to kinda fall behind with the posting here... I am getting more pictures than i have put up posts for sure. A couple weeks ago, I was surfing around the internet, looking at some of the fun Seoul blogs that i have found, and a couple were talking about the Hongdae area in Seoul. Hongdae is the neighborhood with the major Fine Arts university in Seoul, so the area surrounding it is kinda arts heavy. For me, this works out great. I decided to go visit the area, as it was told to have a large arts supply store and also a large english magazine store.

Upon arriving, there were many restaurants around the subway station, mostly seeming to specialize in seafood (not exactly a rarity in Korea). Here in Korea, it is very common to see fishtanks with live fish, crabs, squid etc outside restaurants. It is fascinating to stop and look in the aquariums as you go by, like looking through a pet store... where people eat the pets? I have one such fishtank filled with live squid right at the base of my appartment, for the restaurant that is on the first floor. In Hongdae, the crabs looked particularly delish (they were HUGE!). If i ever get the hankering for some seafood i think that the crab restaurant there would be best. These pictures of the 'local wildlife' around the Hongdae subway station.



After walking for a bit, I was getting closer and closer to the university area. Walking around, I found MANY bars and clubs that looked interesting (Hongdae has a very strong clubscene). Many seemed to have live music, which is a huge plus for me. I also saw many many restaurants, many looking interesting. I found quite a few dessert restaurants as well... if i had been hungry i think i'd have had a very hard time resisting this awesome looking waffle and ice cream place.



In the end, through much wandering, asking for directions with much charades, and the help of one PC bong (computers with internet rentable by the minute for very cheap) where i printed off a map, I was able to find the art supply store. I was pleased to find the sheet metal i needed there that i had up till now been unable to find. However, even with help, i was unable to find the large english magazine store. Oh well, there is always next time. Next time if ryan and i ever feel like going to a club, we will go there for supper, then the magazine store, and then to a club to make an evening of it. That could be fun :).

Speaking of fun.... i will let this last picture speak for itself. HAHAHA

Jazz night, seeing Owen Hart Jr. play

This post has been waiting a bit of time for me to have a chance to type it up and post it. I am really keeping very busy here with work. The hours are kind of long... I try to get to the school at about 9:15 and i don't leave the school until 7:30 pm. It does feel like all ryan and i have time to do during the week is work, though. By the time we get home and have supper and such, it's usually about 9 pm... leaves 2 hours to do things before i try to get to bed around 11ish. It really makes for a long day... but the kids are great and the money is good so i am not complaining.

About two weeks ago, Ryan and i saw a poster taped to the ground in front of the subway station. Really... the poster was just taped to the ground. I guess they are going for a place people would be guaranteed to look? They were posted all over the place. I took a quick picture of the website portion of the poster and decided to check it out. I was intrigued by the promise of jazz on the poster, and the picture of a sax player doin' his thing. It's no trombone, but a girl takes what she can get.



When checking the website, I discovered it was in Korean (duh!). Luckily, the Korean staff at the school are very kind and helpful, and one of them helped us out by calling the phone number listed, and getting general directions to the place we are going to. We discovered it was in the Nakseongdae neighborhood, which is only one subway stop off of ours! She typed up directions as she was talking, but they were all in hangul so i could not understand them. I had to run to teach class then, and by the time i went back to get those typed directions she was gone!!!

So, Ryan and i went for a nice supper at Subway (the Nakseongdae location is the only location we know of!) and then we decided to just start looking around. Half an hour later, we were still searching for this club. We saw posters everywhere, taunting us, and the posters even had a map, but we did not understand as all the landmarks were in hangul (hangul being the korean alphabet). After a while, exasperated, i am ashamed to admit that i ripped down one of their posters with a map on it (i figure it couldn't do them THAT much good 20 minutes before the show started). I then tried asking koreans as they passed where the heck we were on the map, as we had been walking for a bit. We discovered that the best time to get koreans to help you find something is while they are waiting at the light... look for someone youngish, dressed in buisness dress, waiting for a light so they aren't busy. They usually speak enough english to point you in the right direction for what you are looking for (the buisnessy young people speak the most english).

After discovering the 'ask while they wait for the light' tactic, we finally made it to the Mo' Better Blues Bar club, 5 minutes before the show was supposed to start! The club was small and smoky, but very cozy. The owner of the club was very friendly and spoke fair excellent english. He came over to have a quick chat and drink with us, as the set was starting. He seemed like a very friendly guy. The bar made EXCELLENT tequila with lime on the rocks too... using top quality tequila (NOT Jose Cuervo!) and even top quality lime mix.






















Owen Hart Jr. was the feature musician of the quartet that night. Apparently, so the owner says, he is a very big jazz drummer in Europe. After seeing him play, i could easily see why. The rest of the quartet (a bassist, a pianist and a saxophonist) were quite good, but Owen's solos were nothing short of amazing. His solos were really quite inventive and he kept the tension tight all through his solo. I remember Dr. Lewis, an old jazz director of mine, used to say that any band can play loud. It takes a truly skilled band to play quietly. Owen mastered the art of dynamics within his solos, playing occasionally just above a whisper in his solos, with the audience so fascinated you could have heard a pin drop. Those are magical moments. Not only were Owen's solos awesome, but he truly mastered the art of leaving spaces and having quite sparse but meaningful spurts during the other's solos. In short, WOOO for Owen Hart Jr., and not only because he put me on the guest list after i messaged him about the show on myspace :).

All in all, it was really a fabulous night. Ryan seemed to quite enjoy himself as well, and was also quite impressed by Owen. I do plan on going back to that club for sure, especially after we discovered, on the way home, that it is only a 20 minute walk from our house (we didn't even need the subway!) However, i think this will have to wait until after we have been paid, as it came to quite an expensive night! We didn't get a receipt we understood and don't know whether it was Ryan's cover charge (which they put on the final tab) or my expensive tequilas that pushed it up, but for 2 drinks and 2 cokes came to 40$. If ryan had been drinking too, we really could have racked up quite the tab that night. However, it was worth it, as the atmosphere was great and the jazz was fabulous. I look forward to going back again :).

How to Eat Korean Barbeque

Friday night, Ryan had a mad craving for some Korean Barbecue. I have never had 'real' korean barbecue. I have had bulgoghi (beef barbecue) in regina. However, due to fire codes, Canada cannot have real korean barbecue.

At an authentic korean barbecue restaurant, you are seated at a low, low table (about the height of my knees off the ground) and you get pillows to sit on, on the ground. I do wish it was more like Michi at home, where they have a hole in the ground where your legs go. However, this is not so much the case here. You sit cross legged on your pillow at the low table. In the middle of your table is a grill. There are hot hot coals glowing underneath, and a metal grill is put on top.

Here is what we did at the BBQ restaurant!!

1) After your grill is set up by the waiter/waitress, go to the buffet. Here you will see a variety of vegetables, salads, dipping sauces, mandu (delicious, delicious korean pork dumplings), rice, and a variety of raw meats. You take meats on one plate, everything else on the other. Rice goes in little bowls that go along with it.



















The picture here is Ryan bringing over the rice for our BBQ.

2)Next thing you do is put the raw meats on the grill. The meats included beef strips (delicious, as beef is rare here in korea), a variety of cuts of pork, and many different types of seafood. You lay the strips of raw meat out on the grill, along with vegetables such as onions, garlic, and sweet, sweet enochi mushrooms. This is also a good time to fry the mandu. Some people do not fry their mandu here, but i like my dumplings to be hot so i do.




















This picture is of our fully loaded grill. We had beef strips, an onion, and a couple mandu on the go.

3)Once the meat and vegetables are fried, you then take them onto your plate.




















Here is my plate all prepped for it, with a little bit of salad on the side. You can see the large plate of lettuce in this picture too. The second picture is of ryan with his plate all prepped to go.

4) The next step is take a lettuce leaf and lay everything out on it. One strip of meat, some mushrooms, some garlic, some spicy pepper, and i like to put some rice. It gets layed out like a wrap would.


















Here is ryan with everything layed out on his lettuce leaf.

5) You then roll up the lettuce wrap. I like to dip mine in the dipping sauce then. Once dipped, you devour the thing. If you are a newb at this, like me, the getting of the lettuce wrap in the mouth is not always a pretty thing... More of a shoving of it in the mouth direction without it all falling apart hahaha.





















This picture is first of me dipping my wrap, and then devouring the product.

We had so much fun at the korean bbq restaurant. Final price... 18$ for both of us to eat. That is so very reasonable, for two people to eat buffet! Especially considering that they had pretty good beef, which is rare here in korea (they usually have pork or seafood instead). It was only a 2 minute walk from the subway station, so it is quite close to home and in our neighborhood. I plan on definitely coming back to this delicious restaurant again for some sweet, sweet korean barbecue.