I'm on a train

And it has wifi!

Whipping across the snow covered countryside of Korea travelling in qthe KTX bullet train, I've been enjoying the entire trip from Busan to Seoul with, free internet access. Even in tunnels. Puts the fact that Melbourne don't even have mobile phone coverage in it's underground city loop train stations in it's place.

This is my first post on this blog in just under three years, partly because that's how long since I've been in Korea. Jiran and I have been visiting for her brothers wedding and to see her parents. A couple of people have enquired whether I'd be writing again, so here we go.

We are just reaching the outskirts of Seoul as I type this. We've got 2 days here until we fly home. I'll try and write up a recap of some of the happenings and put up some photos later tonight.

Conclusion

That brings my blog recap of our trip to Korea to an end. It was an amazing place to visit and it was a wonderful way for me to spend my first time overseas. Its taken me a while to finish writing up our travels and sorting through the 700 odd pictures, so these last half dozen posts were done since I got back to Melbourne.

Some general musings about Korea before I finish up. It is very different from Australia, yet quite similar in a some ways. Both countries share a strong affection for cars and alcohol.

They have both been strongly influenced by a 'mother nation', England to Australia and China to Korea. But where as Korea was seen as a little brother to China, Australia might be considered England's dodgey criminal cousin.

Since then, both have been strongly influenced by the USA. Since the end of WW2 and apparently even more so since they hosted the Football World Cup, Korea has become very western-ised. This is most evident in the younger generation, where as many of the older generations are quite fixed in their traditions. I think it will be fascinating to see how Korea changes as a country in the next decade or two.

Korean Cuisine

Korean food seems to come in a lot of different versions, the staple seems to chili and kimchi. For the uneducated, kimchi is fermented cabbage with chili. In a traditional Korean diet, it is commonly served with every meal. I had intended to write a bunch of posts about each of these types of meals. But lack of time means that I've been forced to distill it down to one big post with lots of pictures and some commentary. Koreans tend to share almost all of the foods that they eat, so many of the pictures you see below were the food was communally eaten. Either directly with chopsticks or taken off the grill and put in a small bowl.

Korean BBQ

All sorts of meats, but most commonly pork and beef. The Koreans generally have much thinner cuts of meat that we normally eat. It comes with a large range of side dishes which can vary widely from restuarant to restuarant. The Beef ribs pictured on the right, we're the tastiest BBQ we had while in Korea.






Some BBQ restaurants have hot coals that sit in a bay embedded in the table. You can see in the picture on the right, them replacing one of the coal trays when it had started to cool down.

Traditional Food

Traditional food can vary widely but some common things are roasted fish, soups with tofu and various veges, dried fish and once again many side dishes. Often they are served with rice and/or noodles. There seem to be a never ending array of different types of kimchi. Rice seems to serve a very important role in Korean society and it is considered quite rude not to finish your bowl of rice. Where as westerners seem to have a large mound of it on their plates when they eat, Koreans tend to have 1 smaller bowl of slightly sticky rice, but it gets totally eaten up.

Shabo Shabo

The Korean version of hot pot, that is popular in many parts of asia. We had this meal with Jiran's parents a couple of times. It was delicious but extremely large meal. Beef, prawns, tofu, a large variety of mushrooms, assorted vegetables are put into a boiling stock and sit there for a couple of minutes to cook before they are taken out and eaten and more ingredients are added to the put.

Due to the hardships that Koreans of Jiran's parents generation went through during and after the Korean war, some of the language seems to have relationship to eating. One saying that has a equivalence to 'How are you?', is translated literally into 'Have you eaten?'. Whilst we were eating Shabo Shabo I was often told to 'Enjoy the meal', which directly translated into 'Eat a lot'. As the stack of ingredients eventually got eaten up and I was feeling rather quite full, I was told that once the last of the ingredients are in the pot, the remaining broth has some noodles added to it. I was almost ready to burst at this stage, but had been told by one of Jiran's friends that the best way to impress Korean parents is to eat everything on your plate.

Seafood

In Busan because it is right on the coast, there is an amazing amount of seafood available to eat. We went out for crab at one lunch. We did order about 5 crabs between the 4 of us, but we also got provided a huge amount of side dishes on the house. Once the entrees were completed, 2 women came in with a tray of crabs and proceeded to break them up for us, so we could easily extract the flesh with these modified stainless chopsticks with spiky parts on each end for prising out the good bits of the crab from the legs and such.

Street food

Almost every corner in a city seems to have street vendors on it selling just about anything you can imagine for jewelery to puppies. There is a very wide range of street food available in Korea. When Koreans go to the movies they often get squid legs fried in butter as a snack to munch on. They come in a small paper bag and are sort of like really chewy popcorn that tastes a bit like squid.

My favourite type of Korean street food was known as Ho-dduk. A shallow fried ball of dough with dark sugar, fruits and veges inside it. The sugar goes all gooey and the whole thing tastes delicious. We were recommended a Hoetduk shop near Insadong in Seoul. When we got these on a fairly busy Sunday afternoon, the line to get a $1 Hoetduk was about 20minutes long and stretched all the way around the vendors tent.

When we came back later to get another one the line had become even longer. It was worth it.

Dukboki

Another dish that is very commonly sold as street food. It is generally composed of rice cake, fish cake and quite hot, fairly think, chili sauce. We went to Dukboki town to eat the real thing once, I was amazed at how tasty this dish was. It was soo much better than the street food verison, it was one of my favourite meals in the whole time we were in Korea. The restaurant we went to, the owner had been making Dukboki there for over 50 years. What ever magical ingredient she puts into the chili sauce was amazingly good.

We walked into the restaurant, sat down, ordered (they only sell Dukboki at this restaurant) and our dish came out to us within about 2 minutes. It was placed on the burner between us at the

table and proceeded to bubble away. The extra ingredients that were in the good version were, thin noodles, dumplings, boiled eggs and spring onion.



Pizza

Korean pizza is quite different to the pizza we commonly get in Australia. It has a lot of very strong flavours, where as western pizza tends to be a bit more minimalist.

The pizza we got with when we out with some of Jiran's friends had a topping of sweet potato, bacon, sweet corn, cheese, some sort of mayonnaise sauce. Very little tomato pizza sauce was evident.

It makes for quite a mouthful, but is very tasty. There are salad and fresh fruit bars available. The people that seem to go out for pizza seem to be almost always couples or groups of girls. You almost never see a group of guys eating dinner together in Korea. Jiran told me that they tend to go straight to the bar.

Drinking snacks

The reason that men tend to go straight to the bar instead of out for dinner is the amazing range of drinking snacks that are provided in just about every bar in Korea. We went out for a beer with one of Jiran's friends. We ordered our drinks and a small plate of snacks. What arrived was our plate of assorted snacks and about 5 other platters of free snacks, ranging from pork cutlets, fruit salad, dried squid, nuts.

Another time we were out drinking we had a fried fish, that had quite a few bones. But some dexterous surgery by Jiran and her friends the tasty fish was a truly excellent complement to the Soju we were drinking.

When we were having a drink of the Ginseng liquor that I posted about earlier, we had sea slug and seaweed as the drinking snacks. Both of these are considered health food/drink and often consumed in combination with the other.

Koreans like to drink, but will almost never drink without eating something at the same time. After all these descriptions of immense meals you might be wondering why the populace of Korea isn't vastly overweight. Almost all traditional Korean food is almost entirely without carbohydrates and sugar. In my almost 3 weeks traveling around Korea I would be able to count the number of Koreans that I saw who were obese on one hand.

Advertising

Koreans have really taken embraced capitalism. Neon signs and billboards adorn just about every business and advertising is just about every where in Korea, places that you dont really expect in western countries.

Some quick trends in Korean advertising :

Ubiquitous - They have advertising for mobile phones on escalator hand rails.

Cute - Cartoon characters advertise everything from soju to the airforce. Below right is a picture of superman hocking some soju.








Attention grabbing - A department store got these groups of kids to do choreographed dances on a stage outside the store to entertain the crowds.



A bank that was opening a new store had about 100 new employees out the front chanting and singing to attract customers.



When we went to see a movie one day, there was only 1 preview and no ads. Jiran told me that not all cinemas are like that in Korea, but I was astonished at this advertising opportunity which gets so blatantly exploited in Australia, going partially unused in Korea.

Vending Machines

There are so many weird and wonderful vending machines in Korea, most often found in train stations. Here are a few of the
interesting ones that I found :

Toiletries vending machine - Had tooth paste, mouth wash and chewing gum.










Poorly secured vending machine - This one was outside a shop, selling drinks and the like. But it was propped up on some cinder blocks and weighed down with some loose stuff at the top.









Popcorn vending machine - As you'd expect, this one sells popcorn. In a train station.









Book vending machine - Had a quite bizarre range of Korean language books.












The Lotte vending machine - Lotte is a Japanese company that sells just about everything. This Lotte brand vending machine had fairly normal stuff along with some cracker biscuits and was quite huge.

Not quite a vending machine, but a gas mask cupboard in a train station.

Koreans and their cars : Part 2

This post is a bit of an addendum to all the stuff that happened after my first cars post, various things I forgot and random bits of information that I didn't know where to put elsewhere.

First off, before I left, Jow asked me to photograph any drift cars I saw in Korea. I mentioned previously that foreign cars, let alone Japanese cars where quite few and far between in Korea. As such I only saw 1 Japanese car the entire time I was there and probably less than 10 makes of foreign cars total.

I did happen to see 1 rice car, which is displayed above. It seems to be a Hyundai Excel that someone has kitted up. New rear lights, skirting, spoiler, exhaust. Given that this was the most ostentatious car that I saw in my almost 3 weeks in Korea, I think its safe to say that the Koreans tend towards the simpler side of car aesthetics. Or maybe because I saw almost every sort of Mercedes styling 'borrowed' in the styling of Kia and Hyundai car makes, they just really like the look of the Merc.

Some other amusing experiences I had in Korean taxis were, the driver smoking a ciggie and talking on his phone while he drove.

In this picture here, you can sort of make out a taxi dashboard. The screens sitting in the center, the big one is the sat nav. The smaller one is the driver's mobile phone, upon which he was watching a Korean soap opera, whilst driving. He didn't crash so he must have watching TV and driving down to a fine art.

One thing I really liked about Korean roads were the fact that other than the major roads, every road in Korea was roughly like Bourke st mall in Melbourne. People walking here there and everywhere. You get the occasional car, but generally they are driving pretty slowly trying to avoid the pedestrians that are walking wherever they damn well please. This system seems to work pretty well and I never felt that I was in danger from being run down by a car. However, motorbikes don't seem to follow the car method and like pedestrians, go wherever they want, no matter how smaller the opening or how many people are walking in a street. I'm guessing there are a large number of minor accidents from motorbikes mowing down pedestrians in Korea because these guys, mostly delivery drivers, really seem to be focused on delivering their package in record time. I got almost run over a couple of times and tooted multiple times by motorbike riders.

I guess this is the downside of being able to get almost anything delivered to a residence in Korea at almost any time, night or day.

One more car thing, when we were staying in Seoul, the guesthouse we were staying at had a free dropoff service.  We took advantage of this to go to the museum.  On the way there, the car got pulled over by the cops with a number of other cars.  The driver spoke to a policeman for a fair while, handed over his license, more talking and eventually we drove off.  I asked Jiran what had happened and she said they were checking for seatbelts, which our driver hadn't been wearing at the time.  He was supposed to get a 30000 won (~$40) fine for not wearing the seatbelt, but had managed to talk himself down a 20000 won (~$30) fine for chaning lanes illegally.  I thought this was amusing that you could barter for the fine you were to recieve.

Learning Korean

Before we came to Korea, I got some beginners Korean language tapes and read a number of blogs by foreigners living in Korea to get a feel for the language and culture. It provided me with a decent base of knowledge upon which to build.

After making my way through the tapes, I had told myself that I should learn how to read the alphabet. The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, is widely regarded as one of the most intelligent linguistic inventions in history. It was created by the King Sejong in 1446 as a means of improving literacy in his country. It is a phonetic language, meaning that every character is directly associated to a sound. It must have worked because literacy in Korea these days is roughly 99%.

Learning the characters is apparently quite easy to get to the point where you can sound out individual words. Unfortunately, due to a lack of time, I didn't have a chance to learn it before we left. So I was constantly trying to find time to sit down and learn it. This proved difficult as I had an interpreter on hand and more interesting things to fill in my time. Despite this set back, In the time we were there, I was able to develop a moderate collection of functional language, which helped out with things like meal times, greetings, basic requests.

Koreans as a people are generally very polite and this is reflected strongly in their language. Even something as simple as pouring alcohol has its own hierarchical influence. During a meal, the junior must be alert to the state of their elders glass and be ready to refill it should it near emptiness. When pouring or getting your glass filled by an elder, you must grasp the bottle or glass with two hands. Having your hands in your pockets when bowing or saying thank you is seen as a big no-no. One I was guilty of a couple of times.

When speaking to people older than you, it is essential to use a more polite tone than if you were speaking to your peers or those younger than you. This is more than just adding the equivalent of please and thank you to your speech. Formal language is often entirely different to its more casual equivalents. It is seen as quite rude to use informal language to your elders, and elders would get quite irate at you for doing so.

Before we left, Jiran had predicted that if she were to tell her parents that she was teaching me Korean, they would blame her for every mistake I made. So she decided to stress to them that I had been learning the language by myself and she wasn't to blame for my lack of knowledge. Hence they were quite forgiving whenever I made a mistake or couldn't remember something. However, this didn't extend to Korean customs and somewhat amusingly (to me) Jiran's dad blamed her for not teaching me the customs better.

But the Korean language while not being tonal like Chinese, is still a very difficult language to learn. The necessary politeness expands the required vocabulary considerably but because of the structure of the language there are many words that sound very similar to one another, where only one syllable varies but would have an entirely different meaning. That combined with an entirely foreign grammar structure makes learning Korean quite a difficult task. I bought myself a Korean language book while I was over there, so hopefully I will have the alphabet down soon so I can carry on with my study.