How restaurants work (Part 1)

Erma and I have been eating lunch out just about every weekday since we've been here. It's economical, healthy, and filling. The cost is between 5,000 and 7,000 Won per person (less than $5 to $7).

There are more than a half dozen restaurants on this block, a convenient three-minute walk from our office in Herren Haus.

Erma in front of our local "Restaurant Row", with "coffee" (more on that later)

The lunch crowd seems to be a mix of middle-aged ladies, elderly retired men, employees from the nearby hospital, and young businessmen.

While some of the restaurants have a few tables with chairs, most seating is on the floor, at low tables on raised heated platforms. You remove your shoes before stepping onto the platforms. Quite a few of the restaurants have multiple rooms separated by sliding doors.

Floor seating

The heated floors are really nice to sit on when the winter weather is cold. And because the floors are clean (no shoes), you can set a coat, purse, or backpack down without concern.

I should say also that these are very workaday places, with simple food and basic service. Korea has plenty of fancy, expensive restaurants too.

Until you get used to how these places work, you may be baffled by the lack of cutlery on the table. Nor do the servers bring you any. Indeed, if you are an ordinary American, you might not even notice this nondescript box resting serenely on the table:

You should open it.

Spoons and chopsticks!

In lieu of napkins, there is usually just a box of small tissues. Many restaurants also drop a couple of "wetnaps" on the table for each customer. These might be individually packaged, like the ones you get on an airplane, or loose. Only at one restaurant in the neighborhood have we seen this do-it-yourself version:

Need napkin? Just add water.

You also will be given a small cup and a plastic bottle of potable water, or sometimes warm or cold barley tea.

The restaurants almost all have minimal menus, specializing in one or two dishes. You're not expected to take time deciding what you want. It's assumed that you already know what you want before you walk in -- otherwise why would you be there in the first place?

This menu is pretty typical:

This place essentially has two dishes: knife-cut noodle soup (kalguksu 칼국수) and bibimbap 비빔밥. The noodle soup comes in a few variations.

There are also two dishes—braised pork loins (dwaeji suyuk 돼지 수육) and scallion pancake (pajeon 파전) that are meant to accompany alcohol and are sized for groups. They're essentially the "happy hour" menu, as these places turn into drinking establishments in the evening.

Here's an even simpler food menu, with only three items (all the items in the yellow box are alcoholic drinks):

Menu at one of the local loach soup (chu'eotang 추어탕) restaurants

We've noticed something else at these restaurants: they all have signs posted listing the country of origin of the basic ingredients. This is a legal requirement.

Menu on the right; on the left is the list of ingredients and source countries

These signs look surprisingly permanent. It seems that the restaurant owners commit to sourcing their ingredients from the same countries for long periods of time. This sign says

• rice and kimchi: Korea
• pork: Belgium and Chile
• beef: Australia and New Zealand

Here's one more menu, from a slightly fancier restaurant that we ate at with Erma's mother. The selection is broader, the prices are more higher.

Left side is headed "Duck Menu"; right side is headed "Korean Beef Menu"

This is the place where we had delicious duck bulgogi. I didn't intend to post pictures of food on this post, but I can't resist.

Nearly every restaurant has a little "milk coffee" machine near the front door. They all say a cup of coffee costs 100 won (less than ten cents), but in fact they are rigged up to be free. They dispense about 3 ounces of low-quality coffee cut with milk and sugar into a small paper cup.

This one says "tea time", but it dispenses coffee.

Most people take them back to their tables, but Erma and I usually take ours to go for the short walk back to our office. (Refer back to first photo on this blog entry.)

I forgot to mention that the coffee machines are self service. Sometimes a sign makes this explicit.

"Coffee is Self"
(with "self" written in Korean and then again, for unknown reasons, in English)

I kind of love the little coffee machines. Erma says that the coffee "tastes like Korea".

Namsan hike

Yesterday we hiked halfway up Namsan 남산 南山, located south of Gyeongju. The mountain has extensive hiking trails and many excellent specimens of well preserved greater-than-thousand-year-old Buddhist statuary and carvings dating from the Silla kingdom period.

Our starting point marked in red at the bottom, our lunch spot in dark blue.

I'd been hiking there seven years ago with Erma's mother. This time it was the whole gang: Erma's parents, me and Erma, and little Tek. We had no idea how much his three-year-old body would be capable of, we were hoping he might be able to walk for half an hour. As it turned out, he's a born hiker. We did a three hour trip (including lunch break) with a total elevation gain of 160m (525 feet, a tenth of a mile) and he did the whole thing himself.

In fact, he frequently scampered on ahead, making us work to keep up, even on the steeper slopes.

We got a lot higher than we originally thought we would, arriving before lunch at this lovely Buddha image.

Line-carved Buddha image 선각여래좌상 線刻如來坐像

We had a spectacular view, which included the parking lot where we'd left our car, so we could see how high we'd come.

Looking west from 194m above sea level (135m above the parking lot)

Buddhist statuary is always more appealing when fruit is involved.

Stone Buddha image 석조여래좌상 石造如來坐像 (219m above sea level, 160m above our starting point)

On our way down I got a view of one of the rock cliffs that Tek had been fearlessly scrambling up earlier, striking terror into the hearts of his parents as we attempted to keep up with them and prevent him from falling to a gruesome death.

We went on another hike this morning, less strenuous and closer to home.

Those signs are warnings about the danger of forest fires.

A close-up photo of ancient burial mounds visible among the buildings of Gyeongju, taken during our hike

From our rest stop, our car (red arrow) was visible, as was our apartment complex (green circle)

Seollal (New Year's Day)

Koreans celebrate both the Western solar-calendar New Year (on January 1)—like the Japanese, and which they sometimes call Japanese New Year—and the Chinese lunar-calendar New Year, which they call Seollal 설날. (The etymology of seol, which is not of Chinese origin, is unclear.)

This year Seollal is today, February 19, a Thursday. There is a three-day holiday centered around Seollal, so we end up with a five-day weekend.

It is traditional to spend Seollal with family. Although there is a lot of social and geographic mobility in Korea these days, there remains a strong traditional notion in the culture that for a family gathering one returns to the ancestral home town where the parents live. Increasingly this is more true in the geography of the mind than in reality. But it is still the case that millions of young people and young families leave the capital, Seoul, and head out the hinterlands to pass the holiday.

Demographically, our apartment complex is heavily tilted toward elderly residents. There is a family across the hall from us with small children, but other than them I've almost exclusively seen grandparent-age people living around us. Starting yesterday, however, there has been a huge influx of families with small kids arriving and jamming up the parking lots. The unfamiliar sounds of children laughing and screaming can be heard echoing around outside.

Today the playground at the apartment complex was busier than usual—meaning we were not the only ones there.

Tek is doing some botanical investigation.

It is traditional on Seol to eat tteokguk 떡국, soup with glutinous rice cakes in it. Though it is usually eaten for breakfast, we had it instead for lunch.

Our tteokguk

This version is flavored with strips of fried egg, scallions, shredded beef, gim 김 seaweed, and mandu 만두 饅頭 (a stuffed dumpling, equivalent to Chinese and Japanese 餃子).

The last gift to arrive at the house before the holiday was yugwa 유과 油菓, a very fluffy glutinous-rice confection. (For some of the other holiday gifts that arrived, see here and here and here.)

Yugwa

Before lunch we did the traditional jeol 절, the deep bow that family members make to their seated elders to give and receive New Year blessings. Lance and Erma bowed to Erma's parents, and then (after much cajoling) Tek bowed to his grandparents and parents, after which he received the traditional sebaetdon 세뱃돈 gift of cash.

Tek receives his sebaetdon properly, with two hands.

Notably absent are firecrackers, a mainstay of Chinese New Year celebrations that I've experienced in both mainland China and Taiwan. It's certainly more pleasant without them.

Speaking of ATMs

One thing I like about my bank account is that I have a passbook. I remember having one of these when, as little kid, I opened my first savings account at our neighborhood bank. But I think they have long disappeared from American banking.

The ATM machines at my bank have a slot for the passbook. The machine automatically updates it with a record of all transactions since the last time it was updated.

If there are a lot of records to update, and they don't all fit on the current page, the ATM will eject the passbook when the page is full, then ask you to turn the page and reinsert it.

Bank transfers

As pointed out earlier, Korea is a small country. There are many advantages to living in a small country. One is the ease of transferring money to other people's bank accounts. You can send money to anybody, at any time, using your bank's ATM.

There are few enough banks that nearly all of them fit easily on one screen.

Once you've selected the bank, you enter the recipient's account number.

Then the amount:

A confirmation screen shows you the name of the account holder, so you can be sure you are sending the money to the right account.

(Account number and account holder name deliberately blurred.)

The service charge is trivial: less than fifty cents.

This method of sending money around is so convenient that it's the default method for making payments for most bills. It's how I pay my rent to Herren Haus. What I was doing when I took the above photos was paying the bimonthly milk bill (about US $20) to the boy's daycare.

Still more gifts

The New Year gifts keep arriving. We are clearly in a gift-giving culture.

These apples claim to be of such high quality that they don't have to be peeled before being eaten.

More beef, and giant Mandarin oranges from Jeju Island.

Dried croaker (gulbi 굴비) (these are really delicious)

The box comes with a handy ruler so you can see how large (and thus how deservedly expensive) your fish are.

More gifts

Another New Year's gift came to the house. Dried anchovies, large and small.

They are delicious with soju as anju 안주 按酒 'food to accompany alcohol'.

We hear tell another gift is due to arrive tomorrow ...

Lunar New Year Gifts

Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year) is coming up later this month. Here are a few advertisements for New Year's gifts from the newspaper we subscribe to. (Click through for larger images).

A lot of the gift packs contain raw meat. Apparently the way this works is that the store will hand-deliver directly to the gift recipient, after ascertaining that they are home to receive it.

(L) Korean beef gift set #1; (M) Korean beef gift set #2; (R) Korean beef health set #1

Here from E-Mart we've got more raw meat, some fruit, some dried whole fish, and ginseng.

Top: (L) Beef kalbi ($250); (R) apples and Asian pears ($88)
Bottom: dried yellow croaker ($220), ginseng ($218), Asian pairs ($68), nut & fruit set ($92)

And, of course, the fancy Spam gift set.

Top: (L) Richam ($45); (R) hair loss prevention lotions ($39)
Bottom: apples ($34), dried anchovies ($27), canola oil ($8), toiletry set ($16)

UPDATE (10:49pm): About an hour after I first posted this blog entry, a delivery guy came to the door (at 9:30pm) with this package from E-Mart.

It's the exact same beef kalbi set seen in the newspaper ad above!

"Traditional Kalbi Flavoring: 'The Gift' "

 Since I'm here anyway updating the blog entry, here's another ad for a wider array of raw meat gifts, from the store Cheonnyeon Hanu 천년한우 "A Thousand Years of Korean Beef" here in Gyeongu.

Update: I've learned that cheonnyeon "thousand years" is a nickname for Gyeongju, which was an ancient capital city for about 1000 years, and thus is referred to as cheonnyeon godo 천년고도(千年古都) "the thousand-year ancient capital". So perhaps the name of this local beef store is better translated as "Thousand-Year Ancient Capital Beef" or, less poetically, "Gyeongju Beef".

Korea is a small country

Korea is so small that when the government decided a few years ago to switch over from the old postal addressing system to the new postal addressing system, they were able not only to do so quite quickly, but to manufacture an address plaque and affix it to every single building in the entire nation.

They look like this:

An address plaque on a building in Gyeongju. Just as with the system I'm familiar with in Taiwan, small streets don't have their own names, but are numbered as if they were buildings on a larger street. As a hypothetical example: the alley that leads off of Main Street between houses 102 Main Street and 106 Main Street is named "Main Street 104 Alley", and if your house is on that alley, its address might be "57 Main Street 104 Alley".

The new postal addressing system is much like America's: numbered buildings on named streets. For information on how the old system worked, see my post from 2007. (And check out the second comment from cookhie.)

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Korea is such a small country that the GPS navigation systems in cars know the location of every singly speed bump, falling rock zone, speed limit enforcement camera in the country, not to mention the speed limit on every road. Even if you are not using your GPS for directions to your destination, it's a good idea to just leave it on to monitor your current location. You get a constant stream of verbal warnings: "Speed bump 30 meters ahead", "Watch out for falling rocks", "Slow down, camera ahead, you are 10 km/hr over the speed limit", etc.

Korea is so small that even the speed bumps INSIDE our apartment complex parking lot are in the GPS system.

This speed bump would be next to Building 104, if Building 104 existed.

Fear of (words that sound like) death

In keeping with its historical position within the Chinese culturo-linguistic sphere, Korea has a taboo against the number 'four', which in its Sino-Korean manifestation is pronounced the same as the Sino-Korean morpheme meaning 'death'.

Four: sa 사 四
Death: sa 사 死

As in Japanese, the two morphemes are completely homophonous. (This is actually not the case in Chinese, where there is a tone difference, cf. Mandarin sì 四 'four' vs. sǐ 死 'death').

The taboo seems to be taken to an architectural extreme in Korea. In many buildings, the "4" button in the elevator is replaced with the letter "F" (from English "Four"), which I suppose is somehow meant to suppress the Korean number from arising in the mind of the elevator user. (Oddly, in deference to Western superstition, many buildings also lack a thirteenth floor.) [Update: I have been alerted to the fact that this very same information was already posted by me over 4 years ago in a comment made on a fascinating post about similar superstitions in China at Mr.  & Mrs. SB's blog.]

Anyway, the avoidance of the number 4 is manifested in a way I've never seen before in the apartment complex where we live. The complex has nine large residential buildings. They are numbered from 101 to 110.

How's that again? Take a look:

Adjacent buildings 103 and 105

There is no 104! Nobody has to live in "Building One-Hundred-DEATH".

Not only that: every building has three entryways, each with a staircase and elevator. On each floor of each entryway are two apartments, one on the left and one on the right, making in all six vertical stacks of apartments in the building, numbered 1 through 7. That's right, again there is no 4.

So, for example, our building has the following apartment numbers on its second floor, grouped in pairs around the three entryways: 201, 202; 203, 205; 206, 207. Thus nobody has to live in an apartment whose number ends in DEATH.

But this may surprise you: The first digit in the apartment number indicates the floor. Each building has five floors. INCLUDING A FOURTH FLOOR. You might think the people living in the fifth vertical stack of apartments in the fifth building consider themselves lucky to have dodged not one but two bullets. Had the designers of the complex not, in their wisdom, skipped the number 4, these folks might have found themselves inside a DEATH apartment inside a DEATH building.

Don't you then feel sorry for the people living on the fourth floor? Some poor soul is in apartment 405. In fact, there are apartments numbered 401, 402, 403, 405, 406, 406 in each of the nine buildings. Ending up in one of these apartments must feel like living inside a Twilight Zone episode.

Dakteo Hu

From ecstasy to despair.

Ecstasy: I've discovered Doctor Who is on in Korea! KBS1, late Friday nights, 12:30am

Check out the cool Korean version of the logo!

Episode 3 of Season 8 was on the other night.

I've seen the first 8 episodes of the season. In five weeks I'll be able to start seeing the rest!

Despair: It's dubbed. Dubbed!

How close is close?

I've been wondering exactly how long it takes me to walk from Tek's school to my Herren House office in the morning after dropping him off. This short (and incredibly entertaining!) video on Vimeo reveals the answer. You'll need to enter the password "korea" to see it.

To view video on Vimeo, click me and enter password "korea".

Festival of Cuteness

Every year in January Tek's daycare puts on a show, an elaborate performance with sets, costumes, and choreography set to recorded music. They call it a Jaerong Janchi 재롱잔치, which I've translated here as "Festival of Cuteness".

On Tek's first day at the school, we saw his classmates practicing, but didn't really have a sense of what it would be like. There was no way Tek could have participated even if he wanted to, as there simply wasn't time for him to practice before the performance. We did go to the show and take him along with us.

What a shock we got. These are kids between the ages of 2 and 5. I can only try to imagine the amount of time, effort, and money that went into this thing. It was on the one hand impressive to see what these kids could do; at the same time distressing to know that this is where the school is expending its efforts. Most of the parents seemed to really be into it; many had brought fake bouquets with flashing lights in them, which they held in the audience during the performance.

The performance was scheduled for an hour and a half, but probably ran closer to 2 hours. We only stayed for the first half.

Here are a few still images from the show:

The set

The little ones

Three-year-olds

Four- and five-year olds (performing to "We will ... we will ... rock you!")

It appeared that the costumes were ordered as one-size-fits-all for each class; the taller children were showing a lot of belly.

I've prepared a 4-minute video of some of the highlights. It's too big for upload to blogger, you can view at Vimeo using password "korea" here . At 1:13, check out the prize-winning parental sign.

Anyone recognize the song at 0:51? It sounds so familiar to me, I wonder if it's a Korean-language version of something well known in America ...