South Korea

We had planned to go to South Korea from Japan via ferry but the added cost and time of traveling from Osaka to Fukuoka, plus a two-day layover in Fukuoka until there were seats on the ferry made that option less appealing. Jeju Air meanwhile offered a direct flight from Osaka to Busan for less than $50. So we flew to Busan, a busy port town at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula and the second largest city in South Korea, spent a few days there then took the train to Seoul before flying off to Taipei.

In short, South Korea is busy, bustling, modern and polluted. So polluted, in fact, that some days we felt short of breath and unable to do much. By the end of each day I could feel a thin layer of smog blanketing my skin; my fingers felt cruddy from all the fine dust. It really made being outside for more than an hour really unpleasant. They’re blaming China for the pollution, but really, the frenetic pace of industrialization of the country (and the resulting energy consumption from the domestic coal power plants) probably bears a good proportion of the blame. 

But besides the pollution here are a few memorable things about our time in South Korea:

“Better BBQ than Texas…”

If you’re Texan, stop reading, lest I offend thee. But the biggest revelation I have about South Korea is their grilled meat restaurant – which is not quite the same as the ones I’ve been to in the US.

We ate Korean BBQ every other day that towards the end of our time in Korea, we became somewhat of an expert at judging the quality of the BBQ restaurant simply by observing the operation for a few minutes. 

First off, the meat. Good restaurants don’t marinate the meat but only season the thick slab of pink, juicy cut of pork or beef or lamb with sea salt. So simple yet so delicious!

Also, in most places the server is the de-facto cook, so he/she will be the one who checks on the meat, turning it and cutting it into bite-sized pieces until it’s ready. In the good restaurants, the servers are extra attentive, making sure that the meat is off the grill once it’s medium rare, more on the rare side. In the not-so-good restaurants, they just let the meat sit and sit and sit on the grill until it’s well done – perhaps to cover up the fact that the meat is not as fresh?

Secondly, we are now banchan (side dish) snobs! If you’ve been to a Korean restaurant, you know they bring out these small plates of side dishes before you even start ordering. Cabbage kimchi, radish kimchi, fish cake, shaved green onions, peanuts and anchovies, etc. We think that the number of side dishes that the restaurant provides corresponds to how good the restaurant is. The more variety and the tastier the side dishes, the better the restaurant. So far this rule of thumb has been quite accurate. We went to a lamb bbq in Seoul that is highly rated on Google, but as soon as the server brought out only kimchi and fishcake and salad, I knew immediately that it wasn’t going to be a good one. True enough: the meat was thin and not that fresh, the server overcooked them, the side dishes not that tasty. So next time we paid attention to the number of side dishes that were on other people’s tables when we entered a restaurant, but before we sat down! 

Lastly, good restaurants provide fresh and good varieties of leaves for the customers to make ssam (wrap). Our favorite way of eating at the BBQ is to make ssam using lettuce or perilla leaves (shiso) as the wrapper, then add a small mound of rice, the grilled meat, a dollop of fermented bean paste, whole roasted garlic, and shaved green onions. Wrap everything up and you have a mouthful of fresh yummy goodness. Most places only provide lettuce and perilla leaves, so when we found a hole-in-the-wall neighborhood BBQ place in Seoul that served up ten different varieties of leaves, we knew at once that the place was good. True enough! The pork belly was fresh and tasty, seasoned with nothing but a sprinkle of sea salt. The tofu soup that was served free with the meal was light and filled with little clams that tasted so fresh. After we finished the meat, we had some leftover rice and side dishes and the owner helped us make fried rice on the grill with gochujang paste and bean sprouts. That was probably my favorite meal in South Korea.

My second favorite food after Korean BBQ is hotteok. I’ve never had this anywhere else and I’m positively loving this new-found dessert / snack! It’s a handheld pancake made of glutinous rice flour that is filled with brown sugar (and sometimes, cheese), deep-fried until golden brown, and then cut up and filled with sunflower seeds (or a crunchy mix of sunflower seeds, walnuts and raisins). It’s chewy with a crunchy crust, a combination of sweet and salty. And it is deep fried, what more can you ask for? I’m surprised no one has taken this to the US yet. It’s a great deep fried snack and it’s naturally gluten free!

We also discovered a new food called hobong, aka Korean breakfast toast. We found it by accident when we were walking around in the morning and saw a stall owned by an old lady at the corner of the street. She had stacks of sliced white bread and a hot grill pan in her cart, so we naturally assumed that she had some sort of toast. We pointed to the bread and she asked how many “toast” we wanted. The rest of the episode was quite comical as we watched her make our toast – which should not be called a “toast” in the first place.

First she scooped a glob of margarine and plopped it on the hot grill, then instead of toasting the bread on the pan, she grabbed a handful of shredded cabbage and dumped it into a plastic cup.

Is that for us? We looked at each other. I guess?

Then she found two eggs from under the cart and cracked them into the plastic cup.

Omelette? We looked at each other. I guess?

Then she added a spoonful of sugar into the egg batter. (We knew it was sugar because we had seen her used it to make coffee for the previous customer).

Sugar? And no salt? What the hell is she making? We looked at each other. I guess we’ll find out soon.

Then she fried the omelette mixture until it’s cooked, flipped it, and cracked two more eggs directly on the pan. Are the eggs also for us? We looked at each other. No clue. She added a slice of ham and another handful of shredded cabbage, waited a few minutes, then flipped the omelette cabbage ham mixture again before adding the fried egg on top of the cabbage omelette. She scooped an unhealthy amount of margarine into the pan to fry the slices of bread, which quickly soaked up all the melted oil. Then she stacked the omelette + fried egg on top of the bread, squirted copious amount of ketchup and mustard, carefully balanced another slice of oil-soaked toasted bread on top, and voila, we have our toast. This was much more entertaining than hibachi; you never knew what she was going to do next!

Even though we saw seafood restaurants everywhere, we didn’t find them that appealing. Now, I am quite accustomed to Asian seafood restaurants with their fish tanks of live fish, crab, lobster, etc. You point to the unfortunate soul, they catch it, kill it, cook it and you have your dinner. But Korean seafood restaurant is another thing altogether.

In various parts of town they have what they call raw fish alley. It’s a street filled with seafood restaurants on both sides, though you would be forgiven for mistaking it for pet shops specializing in marine animals. The storefronts are filled with aquariums (or buckets) of fish, octopuses, lobsters, crabs one-meter long, sea cucumbers and other sea creatures I have never seen in my entire life. And true to its name, in raw fish alley, you eat the seafood raw, sashimi-style. You tell the shop owner what you want to eat and they’ll clean and serve them to you raw. One that was particularly traumatizing to me is called spoonworm, a.k.a. penis fish a.k.a. innkeeper worm. Imagine a slimy tubular worm about an inch in diameter. It’s reddish brown and slimy; it moves like worm does, contracting and elongating its round muscular body to move forward and backward in a peristalsis.

Even though I’m known to eat weird food, this is one I dare not touch with a ten-foot pole! As soon as I saw them cleaned it, all bets were off. I’m running for the hills! Their insides are filled with other smaller sea creatures covered in slime and a substance that is brownish red in color, like blood and rust combined. Or watery diarrhea. No matter how well they cleaned it, I couldn’t imagine having to eat it raw, especially when you could see the edges of some of the pieces still moving about after being cut into slices. There’s no way I’m going to eat that thing! Click here to see how they cleaned the worms. And click here if you want to see someone catching these worms… 

“I guess they don’t like Japan that much, huh?”

We quickly learned that South Korea and neighboring Japan aren’t exactly friends. There’s a lot of open hostilities toward Japan, in particular towards Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910-1945. In every other historical places we went to there would be a few mentions of how Japan destroyed their historical artifacts, or how awful Japan was for assassinating their queen in the late 1800s. Even on the subway, there are these propaganda videos (I don’t know what else to call them) in English that make the case for Dokdo islands as South Korean territory, and not Japanese. I wonder who these videos are targeted towards? They are in English, so Western tourists? Japanese? 

We asked our hostel mate, a sophomore from Tokyo, what he thought of the relationship between the two countries. He said that the two countries need to figure out how to bury the hatchet and forge a better relationship since there’s a lot of economic gains to be had on both sides. He also mentioned that K-pops and K beauty products are very popular in Japan (We saw evidence of this K-craze in Japan!), and he thought Korean girls are prettier than Japanese girls (No comment).

“How come we never learned about the Korean War in school?”

I didn’t know much about the Korean War (1950-53) except that it was between the North and the South. But  after spending two weeks in South Korea, it was so clear to me that the war had left an indelible mark on the country’s psyche. It’s not exactly front and center and they often refer to it as “the war” or “the civil war” without explicating the players, but you could feel its impact, perhaps because the war is often used as a time chasm: there are things that happened before the war and things that happened after the war. 

And even though the war is more than 60 years ago, it didn’t feel like the distant past. It felt more recent. People are still talking and referring to “the war”, and everyone seems to know the history of “the war” very well. Upon finding out that Gabriel is from Colombia, our bus driver in Busan – a thirty something year old man – said, “Oh, Colombia! I love Colombia. Do you know why? It’s because you helped us in the war.” Colombia had sent 5,100 soldiers as part of the UN forces during the Korean War. Either this guy is a history buff or this is the kind of war facts that Korean schoolchildren memorize. I suspect it’s the latter.

I was also somewhat perplexed by the level of animosity against Japan when there was very little against China, who supported the North during the civil war. China in fact sent more than a million soldiers, 10x the size of the North Korean army. I often thought of the war as the byproduct of the Cold War with the North being supported by the Soviet but it was China that supplied much of the ground troops and arguably the reason why the South Korean + US + UN troops were beaten back to the 38th parallel in 1953.

“Is she being nice or nosy?”

The first difference that we quickly noticed as we traveled from Japan to South Korea was how people treat strangers / tourists. In Japan, we were pretty invisible, whereas in South Korea, people have no qualms about staring at us, and holding that stare for longer than what is polite. Or they would walk past us and stopped to turn around and stare at Gabriel, or me, or both. As if the stare wasn’t intrusive enough, they also seemed quite comfortable involving themselves in our business whenever they thought we needed help.

Before we even got to Busan, as we were lining up to check in at the airport, a Korean man traveling with his family who were in front of us in the queue was insistently trying to tell us that we were in the wrong line and that we had to go get our boarding pass from one of the self check in machine first. He was wrong, but it was interesting to note his aggressiveness in advice-giving.

The same day in Busan, we walked into a restaurant that looked pretty busy in a market near our BnB and soon found that this noodle shop had no English menu. So we pointed at random items on the Korean menu without really knowing what we ordered. Thankfully we recognized what the wait staff brought to our table: bibimbap (rice with sauteed vegetables and fried egg) and a bowl of steaming hot soup with rice noodles. The lady sitting next to us spent no time before she appointed herself as our unofficial chaperone. She peered over our bowls and pushed a small stainless steel container and a plastic bottle that were in the middle of the table towards us, indicating which condiments we should add to our respective bowl. She was also very invested in making sure that Gabriel mix his bibimbab thoroughly; at some point I thought she was about to stand up, snatch his utensils away from him and do it herself. 

These interventions can be either comical or annoying, depending on our mood that day, though occasionally they’re downright helpful. Once I was stuck behind the subway turnstile that kept spitting out my ticket even though it had the correct fare and I was already resigned to having to pay for a new ticket. But the gentleman in front of me quickly noticed that I was stuck, turned around and showed me an exit door that required no tickets. That was nice.

I find the stark difference between South Korea and Japan – from how their cities are organized to how people treat us – fascinating, considering the proximity between the two. Perhaps there’s something about being an island country, separated from the continent, that set Japan apart from others? South Korea reminds me of China in terms of how people are dressed, how their food markets are organized, how people act on the subway, etc. I think the only similarities between Japan and Korea that I immediately noticed are the popularity of K-pop and the style of make-up for women: really pale skin, bright lipstick, and thin lines of bright peach/pink eyeshadow right above their eyelashes. I was amazed to see many women apply their make-up on the subway in Busan and Seoul, presumably on their way to work in the morning. How these women are able to apply mascara with the swaying of the subway car is beyond my comprehension. Make up level: Expert.

By chance, we watched a BBC documentary about South Korean highly competitive education system when we were there. Apparently it’s entirely normal for middle school and high school students to be in school from 8 to 3-4pm, then go to their after-school tuition until 9-10pm. Every day. And the pain doesn’t end after they graduate. The job market is so competitive that most people end up spending years studying to get extra certifications that will make them more appealing to employers. We didn’t really see any direct evidence of this extreme competitiveness but did notice many people being exhausted all over the place: on the subway, in buses, at coffee shops. One man was speaking to the person next to him at the bus stop and suddenly he was silent. He had fallen asleep mid sentence. At the coffee shop, the lady next to me was working on her laptop. One minute she was busy typing, and the next minute her cheek was planted on the keyboard. On the subway we saw a young man helplessly falling asleep, his head lolling from side to side. The girl sitting next to him jumped up when she felt his head resting on her shoulder, accidentally, but her movement caused him to lose balance and fall forward. He woke up and sat back up, but within seconds, he immediately went back to his narcotic state, his eyelids weighed down, his head on a precarious hinge. This is a new level of exhaustion I have not seen anywhere else.

I wondered if part of the exhaustion is also environmental, in addition to the long studying/working hours. Both Gabriel and I were quite tired after a week and very much ready to head somewhere else, where we could breathe a little easier. Luckily, there is Taiwan…

Photo credit: wrongsyntax.com