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.