Mum and Dad's Visit. First Stop: Seoul

Our first visitors in Korea!

Oct 27th - Nov 6th

When I told my parents I was going to live in Korea for a year they were happy for me, but not necessarily bursting with excitement to come visit. Fortunately though, my Mum realised she could make the trip with a 6 day layover in Abu Dahbi and that swung the vote.

It was wonderful to see them again looking so happy and healthy a year into their retirement and I was excited to give them a massive culture shock with Korean food, language and general oddness. As it turns out, this required no input from me and simply being in Asia proved traumatising enough.

Following what I can only imagine was a very dry, sober stay in Abu Dhabi, we went straight from the airport to our [small, seedy] hotel in Gangnam (Bangbae Olso Hotel, I wouldn't recommend it), and then straight to a bar where we ordered the biggest pitcher of beer we could find. To give my parents that extra special welcome to Korea there was even Premiership football on the TV!

Welcome to Korea Dad!

Gyeongbokgung
After an alcohol induced nights sleep in our pokey room we headed out for some sightseeing, to Gyeongbokgung, for some Korea history. The palace is beautiful, set against a backdrop of mountains it feels a million miles away from the centre of the capital city. The autumnal colours in the gardens and the crisp October sunshine were just perfect for our family reunion (gush gush).

Centre of Seoul? Chincha?

Family holiday shot.

I heart Autumn in Korea

The National Folk Museum is inside the palace walls

Insadong

Insadong is supposed to be the cool, arty neighbourhood of Seoul but it was so busy it felt more like a theme park. The touristy shops had some good traditional [tacky] presents and I really liked Ssamzie shopping gallery, a spiralling ramp of arty shops and boutiques with a centre courtyard and trendy cafes. We had some traditional bulgogi for lunch and my parents got their first taste of kimchi! It didn't go down well.

Ssamzie shopping

Han River
We walked all the way through Insadong to the Han River which was being decorated for the Seoul Lantern Festival. Having exhausted my poor jet lagged parents, we jumped in a taxi to go to Namsan Tower but failed when we got there and realised the queue for the cable car would take us into the early hours of the morning [I didn't dare suggest we take the stairs!].

The Han at dusk.

Next stop: Cheonan....

Korean Food

As Momma and Poppa Wood are arriving in Korea in less than two weeks, I've written this post especially for them; to inform and in some cases warn them of what's in store.

First of all to dispel a popular myth: everybody eats dog in Korea. When I first arrived I admit that I expected to see puppies lining the shelves at the supermarket and filling the meat section of the menu. I pictured myself ordering a medium rare Alsatian with a side order of fried Labrador. On the contrary, I haven't seen dog on a single menu, I haven't been served it at lunch time at school, and they don't sell dog ready meals at the supermarket. Some Koreans do eat dog, but it's a speciality; it's only sold in special restaurants and it's only eaten for special occasions. I'm told it's served as a soup, it smells terrible, and is extremely good for the skin due to it's high collagen content. Yum.

Fish and pork are the most commonly eaten meats in Korea. Most of the beef is imported from Australia and is extremely expensive. 

 This is pork galbi. Delicious marinated pork that you cook yourself on a grill in the middle of the table. Galbi is eaten by wrapping the pork in lettuce with onions, garlic, and samjang sauce.

Beef galbi. Pork galbi's inferior, less delicious brother.

 Korea is a country of sharers. If you like your own plate with your own personal dish I suggest you go elsewhere because in Korea meals are a free-for-all. An excessive number of side dishes that you have neither ordered nor want, will be brought to the table and placed at random.

This is hanmari, chicken and onion broth. Very bland. Also cooked at the table on a built-in stove. Korean's are big on making you cook your own dinner even in a restaurant.

It's hard to survive in Korea if, like me, you don't eat fish. There are so many seafood restaurants around, almost all with tanks of live fish at the front. Odeng (fish curd) is in everything. You can also order a live octopus and eat it still wriggling at the end of your chopstick... if you like that sort of thing!

Ddokbugi - glutinous rice cakes in spicy sauce.

Patbingsu is somewhere between dessert and breakfast. Crushed ice, milk, sweet red beans, cereal, tinned fruit and rice cakes. It' not bad, but give me a piece of toast any time.

 Bondeggi - tastes like what you imagine bugs to taste like!

Perhaps most important for my parents: BOOZE! From left to right:

• Beer. You'll generally only find lager in Korea. Max, Cass and Hite are main brands. These big bottles only cost a couple of quid but they go flat within minutes and generally taste terrible. You can find IPA's and dark ales (mainly in Seoul) and they're likely to cost a fortune. In Cheonan you pay over £4 for half a pint of IPA.
• Makoli. Rice wine. Comes in different flavours: nut, strawberry, etc. I can't stand it, Ric loves it. I find it tastes both chalky and tangy. #shudder#
• Soju. I once heard a comedian say that a soju hangover feels like you've drank all the evil in the world distilled through the devil's arsehole. I tend to agree. It's a 20% proof spirit that is ridiculously cheap to buy. It's almost flavourless and does the job of getting you drunk pretty quickly. The next morning though... my Lord!  No wonder Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world!
• Raspberry wine. Korean wine is bad. Very bad. Like normal wine mixed with golden syrup and Ribeana.
• Cass red. Beer. Extra strong.

Korean tasty bits:

• Jayukbokkum - spicy pork and veg, my favourite school dinner.
• Mandu - dumplings. Possibly the best food in Korea.
• Paajon - Pancake made with spring onion and carrots. Yummy. But sometimes it has scary squid tentacles in it.

Not so tasty Korean bits:

• Kimchi - whoever decided that rotting cabbage fermented in vinegar and chilli should be Korea's staple dish deserves to be shot in front of their family (Jeremy Clarkson style) 
• Tentacles - disturbingly common: as a dried snack, in soup, in pancakes, deep fried in batter...
• Full fish heads - my least favourite school dinner. Why would anyone want to eat fish heads??
• Cold noodles - noodles good. Noodles served in a bowl of iced vinegar baaaad!

Out and About in Cheonan

Team Wonderland

This week...

On Tuesday we norebanged with Min, Sydney and our newest Wonderland recruit, Alex. I'm beginning to think that by the time I get back to the UK I'm going to be a regular karaoke addict. Korea has changed me.

4D zombies

We also introduced our friends to the wonders of 4D Ride. You know those simulator rides that move you about as if you were on a rollercoaster? They're very popular here; there are shops dedicated to them. They're "4D" because you get given 3D glasses and it occasionally blows air in your face. We chose 'Zombie New York', it was terrifying.

Frozen cow tail

On Thursday we got home to find that our gas had been cut off. It's the school's responsibility to pay our bills, we just give them the bills and they deduct the amount form our monthly pay packet. But apparently this isn't high on the president's priority list. Unable to cook (or shower, or most importantly DRINK TEA!) we headed out for dinner to a restaurant by our house that we have always said looked nice. It's a galbi restaurant where you cook you own meat on a grill in the middle of the table and the waiting staff do their best to fill your table with as many side dishes as possible, usually a dozen small dishes of decaying feet-flavoured kimchi. The meat was pretty diabolical: it came to the table frozen, it was fatty, and I think it may have been cow tail.

And today (Saturday) Jenny Burns came to visit from Suwon. Lovely to see her, mainly because she's excellent, but also because Jenny is ENGLISH and understands my sarcastic bitchy nature. I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here but the ex-pat community of Cheonan is a mix-match bunch. Most of the English teachers are American or Canadian, I haven't met a single English English teacher yet, so me and Ric are a minority. There are a couple of English engineers here, mainly old men who my Dad would get on with really well.

Anyway Jenny and I went to the Arario Gallery next to Shinsegea. Art galleries aren't usually my thing due to the huge scope for interpreting the meaning of "art"; one man's "art" is another man's "pretentious modern crap". Arario fell comfortably into that category; bare, minimalist rooms with creepy monochrome lighting and random items of "art". There was barely anything there either, which is odd considering it's such a striking building with such a prime location. I can cross it off my Cheonan to-do list now though.

 Arario

It was very blue.

This room was called "Scum"

Scum/Artt

The charming postcard I bought from the gallery.