Shikdang 3

I know I've posted a lot about food, but it's an irresistible subject. We've been eating, usually, three meals a day, so we accumulate lots of material.

In previous posts I've talked about street food and simple restaurant/cafeteria food. But of course there is also fancy Korean food served at expensive restaurants, more along the lines of what the kings used to eat. Before showing you some fancy food, though, I've got some more pictures of anthropomorphic foods (as at the end of this post) to show.

This be-bowtied pig is so excited at how inexpensive he is that he is punching his fist in the air.

And here are some chickens parachuting into a big mug of beer. Don't ask; I don't know.

On to the fancy foods. In Shinchon there is a mushroom specialty restaurant called Il Seok Sam Jo 일석삼조 "Three birds with one stone". This is the sign:

Here's some mushroom-dumpling soup:


Some mushroom squid tteokbokki soup:


And mushroom shabu-shabu:


This is the only thing served at another restaurant in Shinchon, called Shigol Bapsang 시골밥상 "Country Table":


Basically, it's 20 side dishes with soup and rice, to be shared by two people. Actually, it's not really fancy food -- only 5000 won, around $5.

Koreans have in recent years become fairly sophisticated consumers of foreign cuisines. It's easy enough to find Chinese, French, Indian, and Thai restaurants. By far the most common is Italian. Koreans really love spaghetti.

Most "Chinese food" restaurants in Korea serve only two or three heavily Koreanized dishes (the best-known is jajangmyeon 자장면, noodles in a brown sauce), which actual Chinese people turn up their noses at in horror and disappointment. But there are also actual Chinese restaurants with more authentic food. Of course, as with Chinese food everywhere in the world, there is still accommodation to local tastes. For example, at this restaurant where we ate with Erma's uncle's family, the fried rice came out at the end of the meal with kimchi and jajang sauce:


It also came out with soup (in obeyance of the CoURSE law), even though we'd ordered a soup course earlier in the meal.

Early during our stay here, Erma and I had a delicious dish called jjim dak 찜닭 "steamed chicken". It's chunks of cooked chicken, potatoes, and noodles in a very spicy sauce. It was pricey but worth it:


In Insadong, Erma's mother took us to dinner at a restaurant serving a fancy cuisine derived from traditional vegetarian Buddhist monk food. As at Shigol Bapsang, there were about 20 dishes, but it was much more expensive.


The soup was served with this neat bamboo ladle:

Here we are enjoying our meal:


Our most recent fancy meal was two nights ago, here in Erma's parents' coastal city. We went to a restaurant specializing in raw seafood. Many Korean restaurants have private rooms that can be reserved by larger parties, with low tables and mats on a heated floor. When we arrived the table was already set like this:


The appetizers were chestnuts, peanuts, raw oysters, jellyfish, lettuce, and corn:


We got a big plate of sashimi.

The big specialty here is gwamegi 과메기, a kind of raw Spanish mackerel that is preserved by being strung up and wind-dried. The fisherman who is the father of the chef came into our room and prepared the fish for us. (This is normally done in the kitchen.) First, he cut the heads and tails off the fish:


Then he pulled out the guts.




He trimmed off the edges with scissors:

And extracted the meat:


It had a chewy consistency halfway between soft fresh sashimi and hard jerky, and a strong, pleasant flavor.


We also got this absolutely terrifying looking noduled sea cucumber:


Some steamed mussels:


Octopus:


And for the grain (either rice or noodles served at the end of a multi-course meal), rice with side dishes.

The grain or staple part of a meal, by the way, is called the shiksa 식사 食事. It's a bit disquieting and amusing for a Jew with only an elementary Korean ability to sit at a table full of Koreans and hear "blah blah blah shiksa blah blah blah shiksa blah shiksa". I'm used to it now. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, look here.)

Some fancy restaurants, those that have been deemed by the government to have good food, service, and hygiene, get to display this sign:

Two food trends are very popular these days. Any restaurant with pretensions to cater to current fads advertises its food as pyujeon 퓨전 ("fusion") and welbing 웰빙 ("well-being"). As far as I can tell, things described as pyujeon aren't necessarily fusion, and things described as welbing aren't necessarily healthy. Case in point:

This pair of chopsticks says welbing baeleonseu pudeu "well-being balance food".


To tell the truth, none of this fancy food has been as good as what Erma's mother has been preparing at home. It's not particularly fancy, but always delicious. Here's tonight's meal: galbi jjim 갈비찜 (stewed beef ribs with potatoes and carrots) and side dishes: seasoned bean sprouts, seasoned cucumber, cabbage kimchi, radish kimchi, and gim 김 (salted fried seaweed squares).


Sure am going to miss the food here!

Gwanghwamun

There is a construction project going on front of Gyeongbok Palace in downtown Seoul. It looks like this:

You can see some of the buildings of the palace compound on the right.

During the Japanese occupation of Korea in the first half of the 20th century, the Japanese constructed their main administrative building in this area. They deliberately obstructed the view of Gyeongbok Palace from central Seoul. Adding insult to injury, the German-architect-designed neo-classical structure was, viewed from above, shaped like the Chinese character 日, symbolizing Japan.

Quite a few historical buildings were demolished to make way for the building, including Gwanghwamun (광화문 光化門), the gate that was the major landmark of downtown Seoul. The gate had been first built at the end of the 14th century. In the 1960s, the Korean government rebuilt the gate as close to its original location as they could.

In the mid-1990s the Japanese administrative building, a symbol of Japanese occupation, was finally demolished. It was now possible to rebuild Gwanghwamun in its original location. Construction began in late 2006 and will be completed in 2009.

Here are some side views of the construction. You can see that it is still in the early stages.


If you click on the picture to see it larger, you'll notice English and Korean slogans written on the wall.


The Korean says "Seeking the proper form of Gyeongbok Palace's Gwanghwamun".

I took these photos last week, when we were still in Seoul.

Sanso

We are spending our last week in Korea with Erma's parents in southeast Korea, not too far from Gyeongju. In a few days we will return to Seoul to pack up for our flight home.

As noted in a comment to an earlier post on street addresses in Korea, the government is switching over to a street-address system more like that used in the US. We saw direct evidence of this in a new sign attached to the side of the building where Erma's parents live:

"So this is Jigok Street," Erma helpfully remarked, supplying an appropriate quote for this blog entry, "Who knew?" This isn't a small street by any means. It looks like this:


In the lobby of the building there is a sign up informing residents of "your new address".

Korea is a fairly small country and that makes it easier to do certain things than in the US. The widescale changeover of the address system can probably be done more quickly and efficiently than I would imagine in the States. Another nice thing about small-sized Korea is that you can ship items by taekbae 택배, home delivery service, quickly and cheaply from any place to any other place in the country.

I'm not that familiar with the satellite navigation systems currently available in the US, since Erma and I don't have one in our car. But I suspect that certain features of the Korean system are missing in the US systems, again because of the relative sizes of the countries.

Here's Erma's dad driving with the navigation system on.


The software knows the location of every single speed-enforcement camera in the entire country, as well as the speed limits on every stretch of road. So as you approach an enforcement camera, the system measures your speed and issues a warning if you are going too fast. You can see here that we are approaching a camera (marked by the yellow triangle) in a 100-km/h zone. Erma's dad is driving at a law-abiding 97 km/h. The symbol on the lower right of the screen indicates that a tunnel is coming up in 2.2 kilometers.


The reason we were all in the car was to visit the ancestral gravesite of Erma's family, located about four hours away in southwest Korea, out in the countryside.

The graves are cared for by a distant cousin with the same surname (a seventh cousin, to be precise) who lives here:


There are a mix of buildings, some in the older Korean style, others of concrete or brick. The cousin is a farmer, so there are also some greenhouses around the property:


Here's Erma with her sister, aunt, and father, heading up past the greenhouses toward the burial area.

Korean graves are traditionally marked by mounds of earth. Of course, for ordinary people the mounds are much smaller than the massive mounds marking the graves of Shilla royalty in Gyeongju.


Most of the mounds are unmarked by gravestones. But it is not uncommon for descendants to collect money and erect gravestones, so some mounds are marked with stones that were carved within the last decade or two. Erma's father and his siblings had paid to have several gravestones erected. The "youngest" relative we visited was Erma's great-grandfather. The graves go back many generations before that.

We made the round trip in one day, which meant eight hours in the car. Some of it was on the Gyeongbu Expressway, which Erma's father informed us is part of AH1--Asian Highway 1, which runs in a nearly unbroken line from Tokyo in the east to Turkey's border with Bulgaria. It's the first I'd heard of the extensive Asian Highway network. (The Wikipedia article has a good map detailing the network.)

The rest stops along Korea's highways are far nicer than anything I've seen on American interstates, and the bathrooms in particular are impressive: clean, comfortable, and attractive. Many are decorated with polished marble. Some play classical music and other have elaborate water sculptures. There are even little baby-sized toilets for small children. We stopped at Geumgang 금강 for dinner. According to Erma's father, Geumgang has the best rest stop in the whole country. The public bathrooms have giant picture windows along the extensive back wall looking out over a scenic river. (Since we were there after dark we unfortunately didn't get to enjoy the view. It may have looked something like this.)

But there is one very odd and unsettling thing about public bathrooms in Korea. They seem to all be deliberately designed in such a way that men peeing are visible to passersby of both sexes. (I noticed something similar in Japan. But not in China.) For example, I took this photo at the Geumgang rest stop, from the doorway where both men and women enter. (Men proceed to the left, the direction I'm facing, women to the right. It was pretty nerve-wracking taking this picture, since there was a lot of traffic going in and out, and as you might imagine I didn't want to get caught photographing people using the bathroom.)

Even in small bathrooms in restaurants and bars, where the men's room might have just one urinal and one toilet, the urinal is invariably placed along the one wall where it will be visible from the hallway when the door swings open.

The bathroom in the restaurant we ate dinner at is a good example. Men and women share a doorway leading into an outer area with a sink. Straight ahead is a stall for women; next to it on the right a stall for men. If you look to the right after going into the outer area, you can clearly see the urinal.

True, there is a panel which blocks the view of the urinal from the threshold of the door. But it leaves the urinal clearly visible to anyone exiting the women's stall. Here's Erma coming out after doing her business.

No! Don't look to your left!

Oh, the humiliation.


It seems hard to square this whole urinal situation with the traditional conservatism of Korean culture. But perhaps it has roots in the relative openness of bathroom culture in the countryside. (I remember in the early '80s in China, rolling past open farmland in trains, and seeing peasants squatting out in full view to do their business. But I can't say whether Korea and China have any commonalities in this regard.) There's also a certain underlying assumption of sexlessness that perhaps ameliorates any embarrassment that might otherwise be expected from these bathroom setups. Unlike in America, public bathrooms here aren't closed for cleaning. It's quite common to walk into a public men's room and find a middle-aged woman mopping the floor. (I don't know if middle-aged men clean women's bathrooms.) In fact, once at Severance Hospital, one of these ladies vigorously but matter-of-factly mopped around my feet while I was peeing at a urinal.

Pojang Macha

As in other Asian countries, one of the great things about Korea is that city streets are bustling at night. In America, residential neighborhoods and business districts alike are essentially deserted after 7 pm on weeknights; most people are home watching TV. But in Seoul in the evenings people are out walking the streets. Not only restaurants but also retail establishments are open until 9, 10, or even later every evening.

In many neighborhoods pojang macha (포장마차 布帳馬車) are a fixture on busy sidewalks. Pojang macha literally means "canopied horse cart", and refers to mobile food stalls. Nowadays, of course, there are no more horses, but most of the carts are on wheels and some are motorized. The pojang macha serve a wide variety of snack foods, some traditional and some new. They are good for a quick, cheap meal or for an after-dinner snack. In the cold winter weather, stopping at one for a hot bite after a long walk outside is especially appealing.

Here's what a pojang macha looks like.


A disadvantage is that they narrow the crowded sidewalks and add to congestion, especially when customers are huddled in front eating.

Here's a front view of one that sells traditional fare, including a lot of dried fish and squid, as well as grilled meat:

These big hunks of squid looked pretty interesting to me:


Perhaps the most prototypical pojang macha food is tteokbokkgi 떡볶기, chunks of chewy glutinous-rice dumplings served hot in a spicy red sauce.

A newer snack that is quite popular these days is dak kkochi 닭꽃이, grilled chicken kebabs.


They come in anglicized shyoteu 쇼트 and rong 롱 sizes. The scissors visible at the bottom of the frame are for cutting off the ends of the wooden skewers as you eat your way down, so that you don't have to maneuver your mouth around a dangerously pointy length of bare wood.

At this particular stand, we had a choice of four kinds of spicy sauce. In increasing degree of spiciness, they were called: maekom 매콤 "spicy-ish", nunmul 눈물 "eye-watering", konmul 콧물 "nose-running", and poktan 폭탄 "explosive". We got konmul, which turned out to be pretty darn spicy, as Erma is about to discover:


Sweet snacks are also available. One of my favorites is hotteok 호떡, a hotcake flavored with honey and cinnamon cooked on an oiled griddle. Usually they are thick and flat, but there is one seller outside the front gate of Yonsei that makes a puffed version that is grilled dry. They cost 600 won each, about 70 cents.


Both tteokbokkgi and hotteok belong to the broader food class of tteok 떡: glutinous rice cake. There is a nearly infinite variety of tteok, some of which are similar to Japanese mochi もち.

One day in Insadong, we saw a tteok-maker preparing the sticky snacks in the traditional manner, which involves repeatedly pulverizing the rice-dough with a wooden mallet.


We also saw another traditional type of candy, gangjeong 강정, being made there. At the left edge of the picture below, you see a mixture of puffed rice, sesame, peanuts and sugar being deep-fried in oil.


The cooked, sticky mixture is then spread out in a shallow rectangular frame and rolled smooth with a rolling pin.


Then it is removed from the frame and sliced into bite-size pieces.


Speaking of Insadong, here's a picture taken there a few days ago, of me with a robot. The robot is a promotional gimmick for a brand of water heater.


Although not sold at pojang macha, a few other items are worth mentioning in a blog entry on Korean street food. Automatic coffee-vending machines are very popular in Seoul. They can be found in subway stations, on sidewalks, and in a lot of buildings (including the Yonsei Korean Language Institute). On many days during class breaks, Erma and I bought, for 150 won (about 16 cents!), a 4-oz cup of milk coffee dispensed hot into a paper cup. (These machines also sell coffee mixed with the popular local brand of non-dairy creamer, Frima 프리마. The origin of the Romanized spelling--the Korean is pronounced peurima--is a mystery.)

Nowadays, in the global Starbucks era, espresso drinks are also commonly available. This vending machine was photographed in the subway:


This is a close-up of the button at the upper left:


It says kapuchino 카푸치노, and promises a "large cup" of "whole-bean coffee" for 600 won, about 70 cents.

Lastly, you can see a lot of interesting live seafood on the sidewalk in front of some restaurants. These bivalves in Shinchon (are they mussels?) are mind-bogglingly huge.


I don't think I sampled enough street food during my time here. Something to look forward to on my next trip.