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Dreams of kimchi-land

August 13th, 2010

“We live, as we dream – alone…” Joseph Conrad

There is nothing quite like travelling alone to a foreign country to isolate one. This is not to say that I haven’t been loving every moment of seeing friends and family since returning. It’s amazing to see everyone but it also a reminder of how experiences isolate us. As a friend observed the other day, it’s the little things – the food, the household practices, cultural idiosyncrasies of a place far, far removed from anything those around me have ever known. A couple of months returned and I am particularly aware of those little things. I keep thinking of something or noticing things that remind me of Korea. It doesn’t seem rational. I am so very happy to be home and have no desire to go back. I guess when you live in a place for month upon month it gets under your skin and I always miss the places I’ve called home.

Some of the things I miss are obvious. I’m still subscribed to the ROKetship feed so I get each new cartoon and find myself laughing and thinking of the people who share that context. Some mornings I also wake up full of the urge to head to DongDaegu to take a train or a bus to Gyeongju or Busan or Seoul and go exploring. It’s a lot harder without that super-efficient public transport system. It’s also harder without a thousands-of-years-old Silla Capital and museums around every corner. Or an Opera House just across town. I miss living in a country that invests heavily in history, tourism and the arts.

I miss the little things too. Not even miss – I’m just aware of the difference and less comfortable in my own culture than I used to be. I feel just a little bit uneasy every time I suddenly register that I’m wearing shoes in the house. Anyone’s house. I miss having a ‘mart’ on every corner selling the basic essentials – like garlic and instant rice and plastic cheese slices and Spam. The shops are lovely and western and modern here – not to mention clean and pleasant – but they are so far away and wandering down aisle after aisle makes everywhere feel like Costco or HomePlus (which isn’t as good a thing as it seems like it should be). I find myself reverting to Korean – strangely most often when I’m trying to use a language other than English. Saying ‘Kam-sa-ham-nida’ to an Afrikaans-speaking bag-packer at the local PnP gets odd looks.

Other things are less expected. I miss eating with chopsticks. It’s not intellectual, either. I miss the feel of metal chopsticks in my hands. I feel the need to eat (ramen) noodles with chopsticks just to be eating with chopsticks. But really what I want is pajeon or galbi. Korean food. Proper Korean food, with all the side dishes – even the ones I don’t like. And, of course, kimchi. I miss kimchi. It is strange and odd and a little embarrassing, but I really do. I keep thinking about that Galbi place next to Festival downtown. Or the Hut. I miss the Hut. I miss the people and the place and the music and ‘Congratulations’. And dongdongju. Bizarrely, I miss Korean beer, but I think more for the sake of Somaek. Some days I want nothing more than to be able to head to the Hut after work at 9pm.

I miss that part of my life – far enough away now to be something that happened, another chapter. Missing places and people, like regret, is probably futile, except that it strengthens memories, histories. Things experienced alone only really exist in the mind of the experiencer. In remembering, we travel back to those places and those times and revisit, reinforce, sometimes recreate, what exists nowhere else. At least, that’s how I think of it – with a secret, private smile – when I suddenly feel that crazy urge to go to the hut or drink dongdongju or eat kimchi with metal chopsticks.

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Posted in Daegu, travelling in Korea

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Stopping by Hongdae

June 6th, 2010

Korea has had both good and bad moments. I’ve travelled more than ever before and learnt to enjoy exploring by myself, among other things. The place where I spent the most time, however, was a relatively small (by Korean standards), fairly conservative and determinedly ‘normal’ city. A city unlike any other I’ve lived in or known. In order to ease the transition, and also to take in one of the major Korean tourist experiences I’d so far missed, I decided to spend a few days in Seoul in the way out. This ended up being just one day and two nights, thanks to the usual Korean complications of bureacracy and poor planning, but turned out to be a particularly choice.

I arrived in Seoul on Monday around 5pm. I took the KTX up from Daegu. It would probably have been simpler to take a bus, with my life-for-one-year-in-a-foreign-country-sized suitcase, but the KTX was faster and I wanted to travel on a high-speed train just once more. Once in Seoul, I hopped in a cab and headed for Hapjeong Subway, where I found myself at completely the wrong entrance for the directions I’d been given. After lugging my large case up and down various staircases, I found the right exit and set off, dragging said suitcase behind me. I was booked in a Kims’ Guest House which was perfectly nice, if rather annoyingly far from the subway when dragging 20kg of luggage.

Having settled in and dumped the bags, I headed off to explore a little and find some dinner. I vaguely thought about going to the area I’d visited with a friend not too long ago (Hongdae) but wasn’t particularly concerned, really. I was just walking. How strange to think I’ve become comfortable and confident enough in Korea to set off ‘just walking’ in a city I barely know. A year ago, I would most certainly not even have come close to considering it. As it turned out, my wandering led me, by gradual and unintended twists and turns, to something that looked familiar. Sure enough, before long, I spotted the bar I had visited with that friend.

I was pretty tired, thanks to all the suitcase-lugging and leaving-Daegu admin, combined with a late night on Sunday, so my first thought was to stop into the first place I liked the look of and get some dinner. But then I saw another place that looked interesting. And another. And another. Each with its own unique style and atmosphere. Each as interesting as the last.

As sunlight faded into romantic dusk (with candles on tables and couples sipping wine), I wandered the streets of Hongdae, almost overwhelmed by it all. French Bistros sat next to Spanish grills. Japanese Sake Bars shared pavements with galbi-on-the-street. Cafés offered coffee and wine. One place was selling pork cutlet pizza (pizza topping on a giant port cutlet). Another offered “ethnic oriental food”. And the music! Sophisticated wine bars spilled elegant jazz onto the pavements. Rasta-style taverns echoed with laid-back rhythms. Cafés moved with hip-hop. Bars pounded old-style rock. Cellphone stores and clothing shops kept the usual K-pop in the mix. Music drifted and mingled and enveloped.

In restaurants, on streets, tripping up the stairs to drink cocktails and beers, Koreans (and not a few foreigners) of all shapes and sizes, styles and fashions populated the area. There were punk rockers, emo kids (appropriately blonde in contrast to the standard black), jocks, tattooed bikers, pretty girls in summer dresses, stylish women in six-inch heels and all manner and form of doc martens. Hair ranged from black, through red and orange and purple to white-blond and yellow with a streak of pink. It’s hard to accurately express the significant difference between Daegu downtown and Hongdae but I suppose the key is contrast – Daegu’s peaceful, controlled, highly-(over)valued normality against Hongdae’s effortless, unconcerned energy and variety.

I stopped into a lovely place called Piccante and had a simple (but good) thin-base margherita pizza and a glass of wine. Wine by the glass? What a novel idea. Behind me, on the raised edge of the main restaurant level, was a row of wooden letters, table-high (and holding up a glass counter) spelling out PIZZA&PASTA. Just great.

I could have wandered Hongdae all evening but I was tired and had a (relative to what has been my usual) early morning planned, so I went back to the hostel and slept like a baby.  I went back the following evening, though, and spent a very happy few hours – my last night in Korea – with pen, paper and glass of wine, in a delightful Italian Restaurant and Bar called The Gabriel.

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Extreme eating

May 24th, 2010

A long weekend is a rare blessing in Korea, particularly as a Hagwon employee. This long weekend – courtesy of Buddha’s birthday on Friday – was a chance to take a trip to the less touristed, less famous South West of the country. Except that there are no trains that run across the country (east to west). In order to go from Daegu to Mokpo, it is necessary to travel half way to Seoul (heading North), change stations and catch another train back towards the south. Frustratingly complicated, especially because the whole country was on the move. Having bought my tickets 2 weeks in advance, it took me leaving Daegu at 7:40 in the morning (having worked until 10:20 the night before) to reach Mokpo at 12:20.

I arrived in Mokpo, hopped on the city bus (thankfully described in the guidebook because there is NO English) and promptly found myself going in the wrong direction. One more try and I made it to the Mokpo Ferry terminal. The terminal isn’t particularly well sign-posted until you’re right on top of it. At least, it isn’t in English. It may be perfectly signposted in Korean.

I took a wander along the road, loving the hot sun (I even put on sunscreen) while I waited for my partner-in-travel to arrive. Her bus was slightly delayed by the traffic jam of people leaving Seoul for the weekend, but eventually she arrived in Mokpo and proceeded to follow in my footsteps and get on a bus going in the wrong direction. While I waited for her to change buses and find her way to the coast, I sat on the steps outside the Ferry terminal and watched the world of Mokpo pass slowly by.

Mokpo is a relatively small and underdeveloped city. The whole province of Jeollanam, in fact, is underdeveloped, in terms of infrastructure for tourist but also economically. This is, according to guidebooks and the other usual information sources, apparently partly because the opposition was, for a long time, based here. This was also the hot-bed of revolutionary resistance to dictatorial rule during the early 1980s, resulting, among other things, in various security-force crackdowns, sieges, massacres and other strategies of oppression generally employed by authoritarian regimes clinging to power in the face of change. Unsurprisingly, this adds to the appeal for me. As a result of being the trouble-makers, this region was, apparently, systematically underfunded and has only in the last few years begun to be given the kind of investment it needs. This is one of the reasons the transport systems are nowhere near as prolific and efficient as in, for example, the South-East (where I live) which has produced a large number of recent leadership figures.

After her bus adventure, Anna arrived. We were, by this stage, both a little hungry, hot and tired, so lunch first. There are seafood places all along the street across from the ferry and marina. You know they are seafood places because they have pictures of seafood creatures on their signs. There is also the dead give-away of the tanks of sea creatures outside. When I first saw shops with tank upon tank of octopus, squid, crabs, fish of all makes and sizes, not to mention eels and weird mollusc-ey things, I thought they were pet shops. How wrong I was.

We picked a restaurant at random, wandered in and gratefully settled onto our floor-cushions and ordered beer. The women working there wanted to know (all in Korean of course) if we’d be eating too or just drinking. Anna went off to point at something in the tank (no menu, let alone in English). She pointed, the women looked concerned. She pointed again. They told us the price. We were a little shocked by the prices but really didn’t feel like going elsewhere so we decided to pay anyway and pointed meaningfully at the tank of baby octopus. The price really did seem rather high for Korea, or for that matter anywhere. In retrospect, that should have been a warning.

Korean food sometimes arrives too quickly. I like being able to relax and chat for a while until the food is ready. Here they tend to bring it quickly and relax after. Even for Korea, this food arrived remarkably rapidly. They brought us a couple of sides first, one of which was baby potatoes – making me particularly happy – and then the main dish was brought out.

What was placed in front of us was a dinner-plate sized platter of cut up baby octopus. Under normal circumstances, this would not really have bothered me. I quite like octopus. I’m a big fan of calamari. But calamari, at least in my previous experience, does not usually move. I know, it’s probably my own fault – I should have learned a little more of the language before venturing into the less touristed places and we should have asked more questions before ordered. We certainly didn’t intend to order a plate of raw, grey, slimy, squirming octopus tentacles. They were moving and wriggling like a mass of worms. One, I am not kidding you, almost managed to escape off the plate. They twisted themselves around the chopsticks. They stuck, with their little suckers holding on for dear life, to the plate. We waited a while for them to die – after all, the tentacles had been severed from the bodies, waited for them to stop moving, but the minute you touched one with your chopsticks, they all wriggled madly. The woman who worked there showed us the red sauce to dip the tentacles in. Dipping them in the sauce had no effect other than to turn the grey wriggling tentacles into red-brown, dripping-with-sauce, wriggling tentacles.

Had I not heard of this ‘delicacy‘ before, I think I would honestly have assumed they were trying to play some horrific joke on the foreigners. But I had heard of it. In fact, I have friends who tried it and were warned that you have to be very careful to chew each tentacle thoroughly (and hard) to make sure that they’re dead, otherwise they can sucker onto your throat, killing more people each year than blowfish. It had never even vaguely occurred to me that anyone would assume that’s what two accidental walk-in tourists, who obviously had no idea what they were doing, wanted to order for lunch. We were horrified. Anna at least is a fairly experimental eater. I’m not. And I’m certainly not going to happily chow down on a bowl of wriggling tentacles which arrive with no warning or time to psych myself up.

Which is not to say we didn’t try it. We each tried at least two tentacles. Picked up with chopsticks (around which they instantly, squirmily wrapped themselves), dipped in the appropriate sauces and (deep breathe and eyes half-closed) stuffed into the mouth chewed as fast as possible to stop them wriggling about. We sat for a while looking at the plate, hoping all the time they’d stop moving so that we could eat the rest. They never did. We couldn’t do it. It seemed a terrible waste to leave all that expensive food but there was no way. I am very solidly a carnivore but even I cannot quite bring myself to eat something that is still fighting back after it is sliced up and sitting on the plate.

We paid our bill and left as politely as we could given that all we wanted to do was run out of there before anyone suggested any more extreme eating experiences. I have it on video (a video of lunch!) and watching it again, I can’t believe that a) I actually ate some and b) people think this is a good thing to eat. It certainly wasn’t delicious enough to make it worth the trauma, to risk death by wriggling things. That said, it didn’t taste bad, actually. Not amazing enough to make it worth it but it wouldn’t have been too offensive if only it hadn’t moved. No-one died, so I suppose we escaped relatively unscathed but we got out of Mokpo post-haste and couldn’t quite bring ourselves to eat at a seafood restaurant for the rest of the weekend.

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Posted in Adventures, trains and train stations, travelling in Korea

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Of Mirth and Merriment

December 27th, 2009

I remember once having a conversation with a tourism expert from New Zealand or Aus who said that South African tourism differs from tourism in many places because South Africans still tend to go away on family holidays. It was the first time it had occurred to me that the South African traditional holiday-time rituals of spending lots of time with the family, at the beach or a resort or around the braai, might be unusual. I still can’t really imagine a world in which people don’t do family holidays. And family Christmases are probably the best example. Which, of course, makes a Christmas 10 000 km from home, half-a-world-distant and in the wrong hemisphere, a strange and chilly experience. I am lucky to be in a country that does do Christmas, at least to some extent, so I haven’t felt it as much as, say, Richard who spent Christmas in Sudan, but I have still been very aware of the differences and the things – most prominent being sunshine and family – that I’m missing.

Luckily, I had some lovely friends, along with plenty of tinsel and presents, to make more bearable. I spent Christmas Eve alone, partly because I was working until nearly 11pm – a completely foreign and rather objectionable experience for me! – and partly because it was the best way to align the timezones so that I could talk to my family back home. Of all the merriment and gifts of Christmas, I think the opportunity to talk to my parents and siblings in Stutt, just before they sat down to dinner on Christmas Eve, was probably the best present of all. It was accompanied by the gifts from them that arrived in the post a week or so before – all of which were lovely and South African and made me very happy.

Christmas day was spent quietly pottering around the house, opening the last couple of presents and watching Christmas episodes of QI (who wouldn’t?), at least until the early evening, when I set off for Christmas dinner. Maeve Binchy talks in one of her books about the idea of a group of ‘chick-less hens’ celebrating Mother’s Day together because they don’t have families with whom to celebrate. This was a little like that – a group of foreigners, orphaned by distance this Christmas time, gathering to share an evening of determined delightfulness and merriment. Our excellent culinary champion tried hard to ensure that there was something familiar for each of us, which resulted in a slightly unorthodox mixture of foods but made for a great dinner, nonetheless. Of course there was no roast – as there would have been at home (and was this year without me) – because the facilities required to roast things (i.e. proper ovens) don’t exist in most of our flats  We did however have (a lot of) pasta salad, green salad, beef-a-roni, rice-and-beans, chicken, beef strips, biscuits (of the American type – thanks to KFC), humus, salami, a variety of cheeses (yay!) and several other bits and pieces. I added some biltong to the selection because I felt there needed to be something from South African. To drink, there was, along with soju, makju and ridiculously expensive spirits, mulled wine, which was lovely and hot and familiar. The pièce de résistance was the Yorkshire pudding which our excellent culinary champion managed in a toaster oven and which cooked pretty much perfectly, once the oven was plugged in – although those of us closest to British heritage were made a little uneasy about the suggestion that it should be eaten with syrup and sugar. There was also a beautiful Christmas cake, complete with Christmas penguins.

Along with the delightful meal, there were Christmas decorations, Christmas attire, an actual tree and – because, as I said, I have lovely friends – stockings for everyone. When we arrived the stockings were beautifully hung along a gas pipe near the ceiling, adding even more Christmas-ness to an already festive apartment. The evening involved much merriment and friendship and an hilarious game of Charades.

Eventually we said our goodbyes and ventured out into the freezing cold of a Northern Hemisphere Christmas night and home to bed, another Christmas celebration come and gone. I have missed home and sunshine and a thousand little traditions, like decorating the tree with my siblings and singing carols, my Mom’s amazing Christmas dinner and sharing good wine with my Dad, but I’m glad I wasn’t all alone in a foreign country, and I’m particularly thankful for the ability to talk to loved ones far away and for friends with whom to create together our own little Christmas in a far-off Asian land.

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Silkworms in a can

December 4th, 2009

Koreans eat some pretty strange things. Dog-meat, probably the best-known, can still be obtained although it is restricted to special restaurants, is rather expensive and is consequently unlikely to show up randomly in your bulgogi. Some of the snack foods seem to freak the foreigners out even more.

Koreans tend to order and offer lots of side-foods (anju) to nibble on when people are drinking. One of the most popular with my friends is the salty-fried-eggs served at the Hut – our usual Friday-night dongdongju spot. A few weeks back when we were there one of the Koreans in the group ordered chicken’s feet. Having grown up in SA, I am familiar with ‘walkie-talkies‘ and various other unusual (from a Western perspective) animal bits. I’ve even (willingly!) eaten tripe. So I was less thrown than the others and, to be honest, quite enjoyed giggling quietly in the corner as I watched their reactions. I certainly wasn’t jumping to sample it, though.

I was more adventurous last week, when the anju (I think ordered by one of our group) included bugs. When I think of edible bugs, my mind immediately meanders calmly over to mopane worms and all the things you can do with them. I once saw a menu (in Obs – go figure) advertising a starter of feta-stuffed mopani worms.

In Korea they eat silkworms. Or more accurately silkworm pupae. The silkworm pupae are steamed or boiled and then served on a plate. I tried one. It actually wasn’t too bad. It’s difficult to separate taste from texture. I’d describe them as crunchy and salty and juicy. The only problem with them (assuming you can get your head around eating bugs) is that they have a sort of gritty, cement-dust-like aftertaste which isn’t all that pleasant. Also, they’re a mission to pick up if you’re as inept with chopsticks as I still am.

But I tasted them and they weren’t too bad and I didn’t think anything more of it. Until last night. I had just been thinking about Beondegi wondering if they’d make an appearance this Friday night – not that I’m desperate for them; I was just wondering – and I was in the mart (mini-supermarket), when there, between the tinned sweetcorn and the ubiquitous Spam, were tins of silkworms. I couldn’t believe my eyes. One thing to serve bugs with dongdongju and soju in a Korean restaurant/bar, but another thing entirely to sell them, tinned,  in the supermarket. At which point I got the giggles – can’t you just picture it, ‘Honey, I’m just popping down to the mart for a can of silkworms’?

Some days I feel like Korea is a little colony of the USA and then along come the canned silkworms and I feel like I’m on a different planet.

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Posted in Adventures, Daegu, Food

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