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Dongdaemun Pet Market in Seoul

One of the interesting things about Seoul is that there are many areas of town where vendors who sell similar types of items gather in close proximity. As an American, the idea of setting up shop right next door to fifty competitors seems counterintuitive, but it seems to work well for vendors here in Seoul. There is a large pet market in Seoul near the site of the city’s old east gate, Dongdaemun, where many different types of vendors set up shop. One of the most colorful and interesting to me is the Dongdaemun pet market area. In the space of about one city block there are 20 or more vendors selling pets of all kinds. They have many of the same kinds of fish, birds, dogs, cats and other small animals that you would find in any U.S. pet store. They also have pets that I haven’t often seen in the U.S. This weekend I saw chickens, roosters, pea fowl (peacocks and pea hens), hedgehogs, snapping turtles and the most rare and exotic pet of them all… chipmunks.

Korenglish, Part 2

Check out the name of this shoe store I saw recently in Seoul. I’m assuming they do a brisk business in bathroom slippers.

The best Japanese-style ramen I’ve found in Seoul

A few weeks ago our family tried a fairly new “Chinese” restaurant near where we live in the Ichon-dong neighborhood of Seoul. They have the best Japanese-style ramen I have found in Seoul so far.

Most American’s think of ramen as those freeze-dried instant noodles, but in Japan ramen is actually a great meal that is often made with freshly made noodles and a complex variety of different broths and other fresh ingredients. Ramen is a noodle soup that was supposedly originally imported to Japan from China, but I see it as very uniquely Japanese cuisine. Ramen is a very common meal all over Japan with an immense number of regional variations. Sapporo in Hokkaido, Japan is known for its tasty ramen. There is also a Ramen Museum in Yokohama.

Anyway, as I was saying; the restaurant, called Ruo China Dining, has the best Japanese style ramen I’ve found outside of Japan so far. They also have great Japanese-style gyoza (gyoza are little meat-and-vegetable-filled potsticker dumplings that are often also served with ramen at ramen shops in Japan). They even have amazing deep fried harumaki ( which literally translates to “spring roll” in Japanese). I’ve managed to get the family to this place at least once each week since we found it. It really reminds me of Japan.

Instant Coffee – Korea Style

I just wanted to share something I’ve learned to really like in Korea: 1/2 Calorie Maxim Instant Coffee. Basically, it is a little packet of instant coffee with creamer and sweetener with 25 calories per cup. It tastes pretty good. Coffee purists will hate this, but it works for me and it replaces my morning Chai Tea Latte from Starbucks, which was something like 300 calories.

Korenglish, Part 1

I figured this would be a good place to post some interesting korenglish (korean+english) items that I have seen in Korea. This isn’t the best one I have ever seen, I just happened to snap a (bad quality) photo of it with my mobile phone while riding (not driving, riding) down the street recently.

The on-car advertisement reads, “ALL COMPUTER COME ON”. I wonder what that means? Is it a computer-based dating service for pushy people? Maybe it is a command for a voice activated system.

Scissors are an eating utensil in Korea

Case in point, I went to a place that serves a traditional Korean steamed/boiled chicken dish. The bowl is for the bones. The metal Korean chopsticks and long Korean spoon and scissors are the utensils.

The food was actually pretty good. It had a sauce that tasted like it had soy sauce and something sweet. The vegetables were potato, cucumber, carrot and onions. The only thing I didn’t like were the spicy red peppers that were cut up and mixed in. However, this is Korean food so those spicy red peppers are in pretty much everything.

Eating out in Seoul

Last night I ate dinner with my wife at a pub in Yongsan-gu near the Seoul Electronics Market. Eating out in a foreign country when you don’t have good native language skills can be an adventure.

It can be hard to pick a place to eat out in Seoul when you can’t really read Korean. Restaurants sometimes have pictures of each item so you can point and smile. Often they have good English translations of the items. However, some places have no pictures and no English translations. So, we generally ask to see a menu before we go in.

We briefly checked the menu of the place we ate last night. It looked like it had good English translations, so we went in. This is the adventure part: we quickly realized that the English translations were a little bit off. Just enough to make it impossible to figure out what we would get (don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect people in Korea to speak English and I don’t expect them to cater to English speakers who won’t take the time to learn their language. I’m just explaining the difficulties of being an ignorant outsider).

We ordered a few things. One was called “scorched rice with seafood”. I’ve eaten at many places in Seoul with very good chinese-style seafood fried rice. I took a leap and figured they picked a bad translation for the work “fried” and we would get seafood fried rice. Nope. What came out was a strange soup with whole baby octopi, cut up cuttle fish, mussels, clams, whole shrimp (head and all) and strange square pressed rice patties. I actually enjoy squid, octopus and cuttle fish after living in Japan for two years and Korea for one year, so the seafood options didn’t bother me. I was simply amazed at how badly I misunderstood the menu.

We also ordered a “cheese egg roll” as an appetizer. I was assuming it would be something like string cheese wrapped in egg roll wrappers and deep fried. Kind of an asian themed fried cheese. Boy was I wrong. What came out was a huge vegetable filled omelet with cheese inside, smothered in ketchup and mayonnaise. It actually didn’t taste too bad.

We also ordered smoked chicken. This was what we expected it to be. However, asians don’t generally section poultry the way western cultures to. There aren’t really wings, thighs, legs and breasts. There are 10-12 small sections, bones and all, that result from forcibly hacking the chicken apart with a cleaver. Unless you get the wing or leg, It is fairly difficult to guess which part you are eating exactly. It tasted really good, though.

Finally, a mobile phone camera I can use

I FINALLY got a mobile phone capable of taking photographs that I can email myself. I know, this is not a big deal.

However, living in Korea, the Land of the Morning Calm and the land of the NO FRAKKING iPHONE, I was mobile phone challenged for a year with a lousy phone that could not send a simple camera snap to the “real” internet. The phone could play elaborate video games, watch live Korean TV over the air, listen to the radio, listen to MP3s, record video, take photos and send multimedia messages to anyone on my mobile phone carrier’s private network BUT, it couldn’t send an email to the real internet with a photo as an attachment. This greatly limited my ability to snap quick photos of some of the more culturally interesting aspects of living in Korea as a foreigner.

Here’s my first riveting photo, full of cultural insight:

It’s my grande, low-fat, iced chai tea latte from Starbucks. Hey! I paid for it with Korean Won at least.

See, Korea has probably the highest penetration of mobile phone use of anywhere in the world. If you speak Korean you are good to go because Korea is a mecca for mobile phone enthusiasts (as long as you don’t want an iPhone). Unfortunately for Hangul (korean language) challenged folks like myself, cool mobile phone technology is largely out of your grasp. So, you get stuck with one of the lame models that has, at best, marginal English language support.

When it came time to upgrade my phone, I only had one requirement. The phone must be able to take a photo and email it to my regular Internet email account. Now, I finally have it. I can send really interesting photos straight to my blog so that nobody will ever see them. Yippie!

What to do this weekend? I know, I’ll reenact a key asian naval battle!

Okay, I’m not actually going to be doing the reenacting but the subject of this post seemed boring otherwise. It’s gotcha journalism. Don’t hate the player.

Anyway, there is a big festival down in the southwestern part of the Republic of Korea called the 2009 Great Battle of Myeongryang Festival. Part of the festival includes a giant naval reenactment, a parade and more. It sounds like it might be fun. Here’s what the promotional material says:

“Co-hosted by the province of Jeollanam-do and the counties of Haenam-
gun and Jindo-gun, the 2009 Great Battle of Myeongryang Festival (Oct 9-11) celebrates the miraculous triumph at the Battle of Myeongryang, when war hero Admiral Yi Sun-sin led 13 Korean ships to victory over an enemy Japanese fleet of 333 ships. The four-day festival, to be held from Oct. 8 to 11 in the area around the Myeongryang Strait (also known as the Uldol Strait), is highlighted by a spectacular recreation of the battle — the massive reenactment features about 100 boats owned by local fishermen, with a total crew of 3,000 men. While you’re in town, you can take in the wonders of the so-called Namdo region, which encompasses the far southwestern corner of the Korean Peninsula. Sites include the beautiful Buddhist temples of Daeheung-sa and Mihwang-sa and the scenic island of Jindo. Throw into the mix some of the finest food in Korea, and you’re set for an outstanding weekend. More Information: (061) 286-5251 or www.mrdc.kr. Getting There: Most of the festival activities take place along the Myeongryang Strait, near the Jindo Bridge. To get there from Seoul, take the KTX from Seoul’s Yongsan Station to Mokpo (travel time: 3hr 30min). There are shuttle buses to the venue from Mokpo Station.”