서울시 Spicing it Up

During my short stay in Seoul (4 days), I ate various Korean dishes, many of which I had not tried before. Korea is best known for kimchi, spicy fermented cabbage which is either very good for you or gives you stomach cancer, depending on who you listen to. Either way, it is simultaneously refreshing and scorching to the mouth. I had always thought of myself as unable to handle strong spice, but I dealt with the heat better than several of our group.

This tolerance may be due to having the spiciest dish in the universe when I visited Hong Kong with my family several years ago. We (my dad) ordered soft shelled crab which happened to come on a bed of roasted chillies. We were informed that this was the second spiciest dish on the menu (I can only assume the spiciest was on fire) by a rather concerned looking waiter, but bravely we ordered it anyway. It was like a bomb going off in my mouth that could not be stopped or calmed with other foods. My lips hurt the next day. This may have set my spice tolerance bar a little higher than some people’s.

Without further ado here is pretty much all the food that I ate in Korea, in chronological order. A country rich in culinary variety and delights, though you might learn to fear the bright red sauce.

P1040573 P1040575P1040580 Dumplings & Kimchi

Our first meal in Seoul was in a tiny restaurant near where we were staying. It was strange being unable to order and having to point at the menu on the wall in order to get food; for the first time in my year abroad I felt I had gone full tourist (which I had). The food came with Kimchi (like almost every meal in Korea) and soup, both of which were delicious. The kimchi came as large fermented leaves and we were instructed (through sign language) to pick up the leaves with the provided tongs and cut off small sections for eating. I ate most of the kimchi as the others found it too hot. It was really hot but I kept forgetting how hot it was and eating more before remembering. If you chain-eat the kimchi you don’t get hit by the spice until you stop eating it. The Chinese style dumplings were filled with meat and vegetables. Really tasty and a great culinary start to the holiday.

★★★★★

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Ice cream

Freezing out in the Arctic conditions of Seoul, what better way to escape than to head into a nice warm cafe and eat some ice cream. This stands out for me because the ice cream came with real fruit, something that Japan seems to avoid due to fruit being extortionately expensive. The weird blue lighting was interesting but they gave us free tea which was nice.

★★★☆☆

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Tteokbokki (and pizza)

This was the true spice challenge. Tteokbokki is usually street food made up of rice cake and chilli sauce, but this was a sit-down hot-pot version of the dish. The hot-pot contained instant noodles, see-through noodles, rice cakes, quails eggs, chicken, various vegetables and copious amounts of the angry red Korean sauce. This sauce permeated everything with its fiery spice that gradually heated our mouths to near unbearable spice levels. We did our best and conquered the dish, helped by the side dishes of salad and pizza. As you can see from the aftermath picture, there was a lot of red sauce. We had shaved milk to cool our mouths off afterwards. Despite the assault on our mouths, it was a fun dish to cook and eat.

★★★★☆

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Macaroon sandwich

A cherry macaroon sandwich. Not much to say about this other than I decided it would be a great idea to get this in sub zero temperatures outside. My hands slowly turned numb while I ate it so I ate very quickly. It was still delicious.

★★★☆☆

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Oyster dumpling soup

We had this meal near the palace we visited. The soup itself was okay but not very filling, the sides were great though. I really like that in Korea you get around three sides and a free tea before you start paying for anything.

★★★☆☆

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Strawberry Snow

This was the best dessert I had all holiday. As I mentioned above, the scarcity of fruit in Japan made Korean desserts even more fantastic. This desert comprised of ‘snow’ (shaved frozen milk), covered in strawberries and strawberry sauce, with a sweet bean bun on top (actually very tasty) and sweet bean in the centre. Really delicious and something I am keen to seek out in Japan. You could also go for flavours such as green tea, black sesame and some kind of yellow powder, but strawberry is the best. I later had a mango snow which was also very nice but not quite as great as this. I think this was meant for two people but I vanquished it all the same.

★★★★★

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Bibimbap

Bibimbap is a classic Korean dish in which you mix all the given ingredients together with rice and red sauce. I ate this at a restaurant near Seoul N Tower, looking out over the city. I also experienced the weakness that is Korean beer (weak, not good like Japanese beer).

★★★★☆

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The Cookie Monster Cupcake

I picked this guy up at the station on the way back from our rainbow bridge failure. He was delicious, if a little dry.

★★★☆☆

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Deceptive Chips

This was by far the most disappointing meal of my trip. We went to a rather nice pub-style restaurant which was more international than Korean. I ordered what appeared to be a basket of prawns with chips on the side. This turned out to be a lie and a basket of chips with more chips on the side with two measly prawns and a bit of corn disguising the chips. The beer was okay, a little weak but interesting.

★☆☆☆☆

Korean food was great, we also had a delicious meat and lettuce dish but we were so hungry we just ate without taking pictures. The only struggle with Korean food was the flat chopsticks – these make picking things up rather difficult and altogether change the chopstick game. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of Korean food and I’m keen to try more in the future.

 

 

강남구 Chasing Rainbows

Today I tell a tale of woe, of great expectations and crushing disappointment. The tale of spontaneous planning gone slightly awry while on holiday. No, it was not a catastrophic accident, the loss of a passport or some other holiday extinguishing event, it was merely a frustrating evening.  Nonetheless, it was both disappointing and a good lesson in planning.

We shall begin our tale with Gangnam. You must have heard of Gangnam by now unless you are allergic to all forms of video and have very few friends, or are simply old and wise enough to have escaped it. The phenomenon that swept the world in 2012, gaining a completely insane 2,260,370,459 views on you-tube, Gangnam style introduced the world to K-pop and the district of Gangnam in Seoul. Though many of you will have heard of the video, you may not know that Gangnam is one of the richer areas of Seoul, known for expensive apartments and shops; an apartment in Gangnam will set you back around $10,000 per square metre. In Gangnam style, PSY is making fun of the affluent lifestyle of those living in Gangnam. Here is a version of the music video with subtitles for your enjoyment:

As the only things I knew about Korea outside my course on Korean history were kimchi and Gangnam style, a visit was in order. Disappointment one of the day came when we realised that Gangnam, being a rich area, was mostly banks and tall rather uninteresting buildings. I don’t know if we were expecting some kind of continuous celebrity pageant or to be welcomed by PSY himself, but somehow we found it lacking.

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Moving on from our disappointment, we turned in search of crispy chicken, as we had been told that Gangnam was the place to find this delicacy. To cut a long story short we ended up in a pub which had no Korean chicken and didn’t particularly feel Korean at all, rather giving off a sense of international dislocation which is so comforting to ex-pats but not to those in search of actual Korean food.

At this point the phones came out, as our plan to spend lots of time in Gangnam was cut short by Gangnam being rather lacklustre. A google of ‘what to do near Gangnam’ later, we stumbled upon the holy grail of tourism – a bridge that lights up like a rainbow and sprays water. It looked like the rainbow road in MarioKart. It was just a short train journey from Gangnam, so we went boldly forth to complete our quest for the rainbow bridge, also known as Banpo Bridge.

Arriving at the train station we successfully went the complete wrong way round the block, adding at least half an hour onto our journey. We then found ourselves near a fairly dystopian housing estate with identical numbered blocks all along  the river. Bravely, we traversed this Orwellian nightmare to reach the park that borders the river and provides views of the fabled bridge.

Emerging into the park we saw beautiful views of the river at night with the lights of the city all around us. All these lights were orange or white, distinctly lacking in other colours. Where was the rainbow bridge that google had promised? A quick check confirmed we were looking at the right bridge, it was just de-rainbowed. We had spent 2 hours hunting for a bridge that was not currently running its interesting mode, instead masquerading as an ordinary bridge, mocking us.

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We walked to the other side of the bridge. I don’t know if we were expecting it to magically be rainbow on the other side, but I assure you, it wasn’t. We did find some more colours there, however, as we found the ‘wishing bridge’ (walkway on the water) to a few brightly lit up buildings which appeared to be a hangover from Christmas and New Year; there were wishing hearts tied to the bridge with new years wishes inscribed and the whole thing seemed slightly temporary. The Wishing Bridge lacking an S somehow perfectly encapsulated our slight frustration with the way the evening was turning out. Wishing for a rainbow bridge proved unsuccessful.

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The evening took a slightly creepy turn when I noticed some skyscrapers across the river, which, aside from a red light to warn planes, had no lights on whatsoever. The internet knows nothing about them either. I can only conclude that they are monoliths descended from space to observe us.

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Our quest ended with a defeated turn for home. We got lost in the overly-ordered housing development, increasingly getting the sense that we had stumbled into a horror movie, we only had to agree to split up to trigger it. Thankfully we found the way out to the train station, passing a house that had a slide out of the window into the garden, clearly some kid is living the dream.

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Thus ends my tale. Though nothing terrible happened, I can’t help but feel that we missed out. Below are photos of what the bridge looks like if you actually catch it in action. Turns out it only runs on the hour around three times a day.