The Joys of Fishbread

There are a variety of street food options in Gunsan, but my personal favorite is fish bread. And no, it isn't bread with fish in it. The bread itself IS a fish!



Okay, not a real fish. It's essentially a waffle made in an iron with a fish mold. You can buy them in little plastic tents, which, in the winter, are hot and steamy from the fry. You can get three fish for 1,000 won, which is approximately one dollar (I use rough mental estimation here). They come in two varieties: bean paste-filled, which is brownish-red and slightly gritty, and 슈크림 (this is my best guess on how to spell it; it sounds like shukeureem to me), which is bright yellow and gloppy.

I personally enjoy the yellow goo. So strange, and yet so good! Perfect for a cheap, hot-off-the-griddle snack in winter.

What a Juxtaposition

So often my experience in one of the more rural provinces in Korea:



A busy intersection, a vast field, and a towering apartment complex all back-to-back.

Kim Jong Il is Dead

The leader of the North is gone.  This is definitely an interesting time to be in South Korea.

Snow!

It's snowing tonight! None of it has stuck yet, but the afternoon flurries graduated to real snow “showers” by the time I left work today. They're calling for some real stuff tomorrow...maybe I'll wear my PJs inside out and flush the toilet at midnight in hopes we'll have a snow day, heh.

(Note: This post was written days ago, but for some reason wasn't posted.)

One More Reason Not to Bring Your Dog When You Teach English in Korea

Eat them in the summer, recycle them in winter.

Now that's sustainability!

Could It Be? A Positive ID?

Remember this fruit, the one no one can identify?

My father suspects it might be a lychee.  It may be, although so far the kinds I’ve seen have had longer, hookier protrusions from their outer “shells,” and the seed inside the one I ate was light brown, sort of like a long, thin almond.

Apparently it’s not a chestnut either way, though, so at least one point’s settled!

A Sofa Story

On our way home tonight, my coworker and I stumbled across a decent-looking sofa set out with the trash. He thought he might want it, so we looked at it a minute.

Then we piled on the pieces and lugged it to his place.



I think it looks great in his apartment. What a neat adventure!

Monthly Tests: Windows to My Students' Souls

And that's the fate of all good things, apparently.

I hope I never get this pessimistic!

The Underworld

I've always wondered what's underneath those manhole covers. Now I know:



I think the men explained to me that they were doing something related to the phone lines. Here they are cutting some:



So fascinating!

Hug Garlic

I needed a place to sit down and grade tests while I ate dinner tonight, so I decided to check out a new restaurant that just got built over the summer.

It's billed as an Italian restaurant, and on the sign it advertises pizza, pasta, and steak in English.

Once I got inside I realized it was quite the upscale place (at least compared to usual for me). All the waiters had vests or tuxedo-imitating shirts and tiny black bow-ties. The place was dark and beautiful and boasted wine bottles from all over the world. Practically invisible grates hung from the ceiling with latticed lights to look like stars. It was a classy place.

I ordered the soup of the day (which turned out to be some sort of pureed mushroom thing--and yes, I did eat all of it) and the caesar salad (which turned out to be massive but quite good, and filled with all kinds of plant leaves and stems that were, to me, wholly unidentifiable). But before those even came, the waiter brought some kind of soft nut bread, still warm from the oven and fresher than I'd known that bread could be.

To dip my bread in he supplied a dish with oil and what I think he called “balsamic,” and since we're in Korea, naturally it was super cute. I only regret smudging it with my first piece of bread before I thought to take a picture:



Afterwards I used the restroom and found, near the sink, a “gargle dispenser”! You know the place is fancy then!



I availed myself and found out it was some kind of mouthwash, and the flavor and the feel of it reminded me of being at the dentist.

All in all, it was a good experience, and not that much more expensive than a meal at Subway (although that's very overpriced). Hopefully they didn't mind serving the foreigner in jeans and baggy flannel, heh.

Mystery Fruit: Left by Aliens?

Remember this strange fruit?

Today at the 1st Birthday Party, my friend had some.  I asked her what they were, even in Korean, figuring at least then I could look it up.  She didn’t know.

She asked her sister, who didn’t know.  She asked her other sister, who didn’t know.  She asked her sister’s husband, who didn’t know.  She asked an older woman sitting with us, who didn’t know.  She asked the waiter, who didn’t know.

But the waiter went and asked someone who knew.

Apparently their name is 람푸탄.  My phone’s Korean-English dictionary has no translation.  Google Translate has no translation.  Someone, somewhere, must know what this is, but for now I’m at a loss.

1st Birthday Party

My good Korean friend invited me to attend a very exciting event with her family.  In Korea, festivities occur to celebrate a child’s first 100 days, and a huge blow-out is held to celebrate their first birthday party.  My friend’s twin nephews’ first birthday is on Tuesday, so today their parents rented out a nice space at a party hall with an amazing (and I’m sure expensive) buffet.

 

Her other sister and brother-in-law picked me up, and I got to ride with them and her, along with her other nephew and niece, to the location of the party.  It was in Jeonju, 50-60 minutes away by bus and less by car, and we got there an hour early.

 

So we spent our time enjoying the weather and the view at a park near where my friend attended college.  Here are some photos for your enjoyment.

 

An interesting tower by a massively great bridge:

 

The view of the bridge from said tower:

The duck boats all in a row:

Other duck boats on the lake:

The bridge spanning the vast graveyard of lotus flowers:

Graffiti on the tower, the bridge, and the sea of lotus skeletons:

Apparently earlier in the year this whole place is flooded with lotus flowers:

A quaint set of wooden steps under a pretty orange tree:

An interesting, more traditional pavilion:

There was also a traditional swing there, which you ride standing up.  It was a lot of fun.

Then we went to the 1st Birthday Party!

The mother wore her traditional hanbok, and the twins wore cute little baby hanboks, too.  Photos were taken of the parents and the twins in front of a huge table on a stage and then the grandparents came up and posed with them.

I’m sorry that I don’t have any photos from the birthday party itself, but I was busy enjoying the festivities and didn’t know if I should be snapping pictures in the middle of it all, considering I’m a foreigner and just a friend of a relative.

After that we all went out and ate and the buffet was amazing and intense.  All kinds of food was there, from escargot to spaghetti, from Oreo cereal to Japanese raw fish (sitting in ice on HUGE—REAL—clam shells), from cheese fondue to Chinese flower bread.  It was good and I enjoyed it.  I have no idea how much it must have cost to feed so many guests at such a high-end buffet.  Experiencing this at all, especially considering the costs I can’t imagine, was an incredibly great privilege.

After that an MC in a Santa suit came.  He didn’t have a beard, glasses, or false fat.  He was just wearing the suit.  He had three earrings and talked fast, I guess because he was an entertainer.  He said a lot of things, introduced the twins, and let the parents say some things.  He led the room in the Korean happy birthday song and he and his lovely female assistant, also in a santa suit (she with a santa hat), did a crazy-looking dance.  It looked like something from a boy band concert, it was so perfectly in sync and complexly choreographed, and it was upbeat enough.

At some point an interesting traditional ritual took place.  Tradtionally, on the baby’s first birthday, you put a bunch of objects on the floor and see which one the baby crawls to and chooses first.  If it’s a pencil, he will be a good student.  If it’s money, he will become rich.  If he picks a string, he will live very long.  Nowadays people don’t seem to put much stock in this tradition’s predictive ability, but they do it just for fun, and it was fun to watch.  As history plowed on, the ritual’s been modified.  The basket they could choose from on the stage today, for example, included a stethoscope to be a doctor, a microphone to be a public speaker or an entertainer, and a computer mouse to be a programmer (or, as I think the MC joked, to spend all day in the PC rooms playing computer games).

The elder twin had a hard time deciding what he wanted, even after the MC held up each item and danced it around in front of him.  At long last he chose money, but I think maybe he felt it was too soon to commit to a career.  The younger twin seemed ready to grab almost anything, but once he saw the microphone he stole it like a thief.  While the MC was asking the parents something in Korean, the younger twin was trying to get his mouth all over the mic.  Later, when it was time to put it back into the basket, his mother had to pry it away from him.  It was funny to me how different they were in their decisions.

After that the MC asked a series of questions for entertainment gift card giveaways.  At one of them my friend and her sister looked at me and said, “Put up your hand!”  But I didn’t know yet what was going on and I couldn’t hear them very well so I kept asking them to tell me what they’d said again.

It turns out the MC had asked, “Who came from the farthest place?”  Technically I didn’t come that far for this event, but I am from very far away, and I was the only foreigner in the whole room.  So when I said I was from America, I guess I took the cake.  I got to wish the twins a “Happy Birthday” (alas, I don’t know how to say it in Korean) into the mic and gained a 10,000 won (about $10) entertainment gift certificate to use in bookstores, movie theaters, etc.

After that we saw a slideshow with pictures of the mom and dad before and after they were married, then the sonogram of the twins inside of her, then several different slideshows of them from their first year on planet earth.

At the end we were given party favors to take with us, and for some reason I was given two.  The favors were jars of grain, which you can wash and cook with rice.  My friend told me how to do it, so sometime when I have a chance I’m going to make rice with grain.

Each one had a commemorative label on it so you would never forget the twins’ 1st Birthday.

Shabu Shabu

There's this awesome food I love to eat, and I've heard it's actually Japanese. Everybody calls it shabu shabu, apparently based on the sound the meat makes when it's cooking, but I don't know the food's official name.



You get a big pot with soup, green “sticks” (onions? shoots? I don't know what they are), mushrooms, potatoes, etc.

You also get some heavy noodles and a plate (or more) of thinly-cut raw beef. When the soup is hot enough, you boil the meat and eventually the noodles.



When you finish eating all of that, they take the pot and pour the soup into a bowl for you except for one spoonful of the broth. Then they cook rice in the pot and bring it back and you can eat it with the soup.

I've never had rice as good as this. My favorite parts are the rice and the meat, though the potatoes and the noodles are good, too.



Even though it involves sitting on the floor, I have to say that eating at this place after a long day's work just really hits the spot.

A Fruit New to My Vocabulary

The other day I tried a new Italian restaurant out here, and near the end of my meal the server came and set this down in front of me:



Were they chestnuts? I had no idea. I attempted to eat one, and the white, fleshy part tasted a lot like an oversized, tough grape to me, except it was both tarter than I wanted and sweeter than I had expected.

The next day I was grading tests from a unit about food, and in a list of fruits one student wrote chestnuts.

Normally I would have marked it wrong and said, “No, chestnuts are nuts!”

But this time I thought, Huh. If those things I had last night were chestnuts, there's certainly an aspect of them that is undeniably fruity...

So, were they chestnuts? Are chestnuts fruit? Maybe so.

And if not, I apologize for setting loose a student who now confidently thinks they are.

An Aside About the Sides

Every “Italian” restaurant I've been to in Korea always serves two side dishes with your meal:



Pickles (I guess those are Italian?) and kimchi (that's definitely not).

(Just between you and me, I don't particularly enjoy either of them.)

Edible Ooze

Does this look like something you should eat?



I knew what it was so I had no problem eating it, but I had to stop and take note of how much it resembled some sort of inedible, moldy thing that had gone very bad due to negligence on the part of whoever should have cleaned the fridge (oh wait...that's me).

It's actually just kiwi yogurt. There's probably kiwi yogurt in America, but the first place that I've eaten it is here.