My 'Hawaiian' Birthday

Continuing my posts about Jeju.... I don't care if you're sick of them! My birthday fell smack bang in the middle of our Jeju trip and I spent the day being badass (like every other day.) It started with cake in bed. 

Korea does AWESOME cakes and they're usually less than $20 NZ, just pop into one of the many 'French'-named bakeries and take your pick. This little number is from Paris Baguette.

Hidden in that stack of fruit is TOMATOES. 

Between the four of us we managed to polish off most of the cake before taking a bus to take a ferry to U-do, or Cow Island. Udo is on the east coast of Jeju, and the bus to there from Seogwipo takes years. It's only 40 or so kilometres, but as we stopped at every. single. town. on the way, it took an hour and a half to get there. Korea has rad public transport so I was surprised at how much the transport on Jeju sucked. Get on to it, Jeju!

Anyway, we caught the ferry to the island which was a 4,500 won round trip - cheap as chips! Somewhere online it says the trip to Udo is an hour by boat, but that somewhere is a dirty lie, it took 15 minutes max. It did however take about 30 minutes for the local bus to leave and take us to the nearest swimming beach. The wait was worth it though - the beach was the prettiest I've seen in Korea.

We spent an hour or so there swimming and watching the large group of people in white shirts do various team-building exercises. You can see them crowding around the boat in the picture above.

It was a bit of a mission getting the bus back to the port from the beach - I think there's only one bus and it does a full circuit around Udo and then stops for 30 minutes at a time to let the driver have a smoke and chat with the fishermen at the port. Fortunately the island is only 17 kilometres in diameter so the circuit doesn't take long.

When we got to the port we checked the only thing off our to-do list for the day - hiring motorised vehicles! For 60,000 won ($67) we got a quad bike and a golf cart and two hours to hoon around! It was amazeballs.

Bangin' rides

After very reluctantly returning our awesome rides we headed back to the mainland and got some dinner. Amazing food, fantastic company, wonderful birthday.

Aaaand.... matching couples!

Korean Things I Have Eaten

It's been a while since I wrote one of these, so here goes. Tried two new things this week. Both were gross.

Item number one:

It's a corn flavoured ice block. CORN.

What are those little flecks of yellow? CORN.

This tastes of sweetened milk and corn. I took enough bites to take this picture and then threw it out the window of my bus. CORN.

Item number two:

I don't know why I thought this would be good. It's 'Breakfast Tofu' with blueberry. I know that some people use silken tofu in smoothies, and one of my favourite foods at school is soondubu (soft tofu) with a soy dressing. This tofu is not soft.

This is a chunky, grainy tofu with a soft, blueberry centre of grossness. The only thing I enjoyed about this tofu was faking that I liked it and then feeding it to Tom who made the best face ever.

Also comes in Kiwifruit.

맛있는 없습니다!

Nom nom nom nom nom nom nom.

Forget paying $22 at the supermarket, I got this baby for $5 on my walk home. Perfect snack during a hot summer, a hot hot summer!

I could have bought a watermelon twice the size for about $12 but the thought of lugging 15kgs of fruit home was off-putting. This thing barely fits in our fridge as it is.

Pro tip: say hi to the fruit guy as you walk to school, and he'll give you a discount. Being nice pays, kids!

Photo post!

Haeundae Beach awash with foreigners.

A patient taking a cigarette break in Haeundae. Patients in full medical kit
(sometimes with drips attached) are a common sight outside hospitals in Korea.

Two men enjoying a beer outside in Haeundae, Busan. It was 9am.

Red Velvet cupcake from Red Velvet in Busan.
To get to one yourself, you go down the alleyway in the picture below.

The Red Velvet cupcake shop in Nampo-dong, Busan.
We've visited twice and although the cupcakes are delicious, the opening hours are a pain in the ass.
It's open from 1pm - 9pm, but usually doesn't actually open til 1:30.
Just bear that in mind before you turn up there, hungover, impatient and craving cream cheese icing.  

Benefits of being ginger in Asia? Hairdressers everywhere!
I had 8 kids attached to my head at this point.

Sunset over the flooded rice paddies between Buan and Gimje.

Say Chee-juh!

My new favourite Korean snack is cheesy ramyeon. This is two minute noodles (ramyeon in Korean) with processed cheese. I resisted their charms for months because, well, they just sounded gross. How wrong I was.

The Korean language doesn't have a "z" sound, so most Koreans have trouble pronouncing it. In Konglish, the name given to Korean words borrowed from English, Z's are written as ᄎ. This letter is pronounced somewhere between "ch" and "j", so pizza becomes "pee-cha", zombie becomes "jom-bee" and "I saw a zebra at the zoo" becomes "I saw a jeebra at the jew."

This is where things get tricky. Korean has a very limited range of sounds which can end a syllable. "S", "ch" and "j" sounds in particular are out. If you put one of these letters at the end of a syllable it will be pronounced "t". Why? Because Korean is cray-jee. Ye-suh it i-suh. So  if we want to write cheese, we not only have to replace the "z" sound with a "ch" sound, we have to shove another syllable in there to get that sound pronounced. After all this mangling, "cheese" becomes 치즈 (chee-juh).

Once you've got your tongue around cheesy ramyeon the word, it's time for the dish itself. There are two ways to have cheesy ramen. The first is at a kimbap nara, a type of Korean diner. The ramyeon is just regular old packet instant noodles in a huge bowl of spicy broth, with a slice of processed cheese expertly plonked on top.

It's a good feed for 2,500 won (NZ $3), the cheese and the spiciness of the flavouring sachet making for a strange but delicious combination. Unfortunately the cheese tends to melt and get diluted by the excessive broth. Much better to make your own, using one of these: 

That's a pack of cheese ramyeon you can make at home. It comes with a noodle cake, a flavour sachet, a tiny and completely pointless sachet of dried vegetables, and a pack of cheese powder. For those of you cooking along at home, the red arrow points to the cheese powder. You cook the noodles with the flavouring and veges, then mix in the cheese at the end. The advantage here is that you can pour off most of the liquid before you add the cheese, making a kind of spicy Korean mac and cheese.

Okay, so it doesn't look so great in the photo, but trust me it's 맛있어요 ("mah-shee-suh-yo") - delicious.

Weekend In Daegu

First things first: if my co-teacher's reading this: you don't need to shout into the phone to make it work. The person on the other end will be able to hear you if you speak at a normal human volume, despite them being a long way away. That's what a phone does.

With that passive aggressive rant out of the way, I can tell you about our trip to Daegu. Daegu is one of the bigger cities in Korea and we've heard good things, but getting there takes five hours, two trains, and a bus, so we hadn't managed to get there until this weekend. Anna and Lauren had Friday off school so they went and checked out an amusement park. Anna might write about that, but it seemed like it caused more injuries than fun. I went after school, and after a couple hours being lost in Daejeon (I can't recommend the maps app on my iPod) and a superfast ride on the KTX, I got to Daegu in time for dinner.

Anna and Lauren have developed an insatiable appetite for dakgalbi, a dish of chicken, cabbage, carrots, and spicy sauce which is cooked at the table on a big round hotplate. When you finish this they cook rice or noodles in the pan with all the grease and sauce still in it. It's no bi bim bap or barbecue, but it's not bad. We looked around for one of these places near the Dongdaegu train station, but everywhere seemed to be fried chicken or dwaeji galbi (Korean barbecue pork).

After threats of tantrums if certain people didn't get fed (I'm not saying who, but only one of us was smart enough to go to Costco in Daejeon on the way for a slice of their incredible cheese pizza) we settled on a pork place. These places normally serve pork belly or rib meat which you cook on a tabletop grill and wrap in lettuce leaves. This was probably the best barbecue pork we've had in Korea, the meat was tender and really tasty. There were three different types of pork, none of which weve tried before. The owner tried to explain what they were but he didn't know the English names. He was really nice too, cooking the pork for us and chatting away. There were also some unusual side dishes, including some delicious preserved peanuts. 

Too delicious to photograph before most of them got eaten.

On the way back to our motel we wasted a few thousand won on one of those claw machines. Included in the prizes were a wide range of lighters and a miniature of Hennessey, and it says something about how long I've been here that I've only just realised how strange and dangerous (strangerous?) that is. The machine was rigged up to make a big jolt when the crane reached the top, leading to many dropped prizes and some angry faces. I eventually won a lighter, which I was stupidly happy about.

The next day we went to the Yangnyeongsi Market, a long pedestrian street in the middle of town lined with shops, clinics, and pharmacies selling various natural remedies. There was also some sort of festival going on, with big tents all along the streets selling all manner of strange foods (deep fried ginseng, anyone?) There were also police officers walking around on stilts and people volunteering to paint things on your nails, hands, or face. While I was waiting for Anna and Lauren to get their nails done (typical), a man pulled me over to the hand painting tent and insisted I let them paint a "snake" on my hand. 

You be the judge.

On our way out we realised that one of the gardens in the middle of the mall was full of tiny rabbits. I don't know the significance of this, but it was kind of amazing. There were heaps of them hiding under the plants, but I couldn't really get a good photo. I did get this video, however.

Insert your own "like rabbits" joke here.

Next we went to Suseong Lake and rented a pedal boat shaped like a duck. We pedaled around until we got tired, made friends with a Korean family, and crashed into a tree. Good times.     

You've Got to Get Down to Korean Barbecue

I LOVE Korean food, it's cheap and delicious and surprisingly available throughout Korea (the only other options in Buan are pizza, fried chicken and 'Italian' food.) By far my favourite Korean eating activity is Korean Barbecue.  

Korean Barbecue was actually one of the first things we ate in Korea. I remember freaking out about it as I wanted to make a good impression and I hadn't eaten meat for 12 years at that point. We've written before about the 'process' of eating Korean food - see Bibimbap and Dakgalbi - and barbecue has steps too. 

First, choose your meat. There's usually two types of meat on the menu - Galbi (marinated pork or beef short ribs) or Samgyeopsal (pork belly) and a variety of banchan (side dishes) including lettuce or sesame leaves. I prefer galbi as it's less fatty and more delicious. 

Normally you'd order your meat off the menu but this edition of Karori to Korea comes to you from King Kong Meat Town in Yeongtong, Suwon. Meat Town is a meat buffet where for 14,000 won ($16.50) you can eat your fill of galbi, samgyeopsal, beef and burgers. At a regular barbecue restaurant, galbi is about 9,000 won ($11) for one serve of meat and your banchan, and there are galbi restaurants all over Korea.

Here's the buffet :

MMEEEEAAAAATTT!

Once your meat arrives, load up the grill. There will be a chimney either suspended from the ceiling or attached to the table to funnel the smoke away. The ones in Meat Town can't handle all the grilling going on, and the restaurant is usually full of smoke by the time we leave. The grills are sometimes gas powered but usually the staff will bring in a metal bowl full of hot coals and change it about halfway through your meal.

In the spare bits of the grill, chuck on some kimchi, garlic and onions if they're available. Koreans usually eat galbi with raw garlic (good for your health!) but grilled garlic (and grilled kimchi) is too delicious to pass up.

Heather is modelling a giant piece of kimchi. You can see the banchan and sauces in the back.

The staff will supply you with some tongs and a pair of scissors - amazing bbq tools! Once your meat is cooked, simply snip it into bite-sized pieces and start making your own galbi parcels. 

Second step is choosing a leaf and some meat. Hold your lettuce in one hand and put some meat in the middle, like so:

Next, add your sauces and banchan. There's usually two sauces available - ssamjang, a spicy red sauce and gireumjang which is a mix of sesame oil and salt. Gireumjang is more of a dipping sauce and I like my food spicy so I usually eat the ssamjang. 

You can add anything you want from the banchan dishes. A little bit of onion, a few slices of garlic, some bean sprouts, some pickled turnip. It all depends on what's on the table and how big your lettuce leaf is. 

YUUUUUUMMMM

Finally, you need to wrap it all up into a ball, and shove the whole thing in your mouth. Masshiseyo! 

Washed down with some soju and beer, Korean Barbecue is definitely my favourite way to spend a Friday night in Korea. 

Korean House and Garden

With our various ailments and our quest to save money, we've had a quiet weekend. We bought some bathroom stickers a while ago but never got around to putting them up. For whatever reason Korean people love decorating their bathrooms with brightly coloured stickers. Flowers, animals, and inspirational English phrases are all popular. Anyway, now our bathroom looks like this:

Next, I'm going to show you how to make kimchi boegeumbap. This is a popular Korean dish, essentially stir-fried rice with kimchi, topped with a fried egg. I made it for the first time last night and it turned out pretty well. It's easy and the only hard to find item is the kimchi, which you might be able to get in an Asian supermarket.

To make it for two people you'll need:

• two cups of cooked rice, ideally cooked the day before. I'm using brown rice, but white rice is the normal Korean way
• 3/4 of a cup of chopped kimchi, plus about 1/3 cup of kimchi juice. 
• one medium sized grated carrot
• 3/4 cup bean sprouts 
• two eggs.

This will be the last of a huge container of kimchi that my co-teacher gave us when we arrived seven months ago. Fortunately a friend of ours gave us some that he was given and didn't want, so we're set for kimchi for the foreseeable future.

Heat a small amount of oil in a frying pan on medium-high heat and fry the kimchi for a couple of minutes. Throw in the grated carrot and bean sprouts and stir through. Cook for about one minute. Turn the heat down to medium and add the rice. Stir fry for a few minutes until the rice is lightly fried and the kimchi and carrot are mixed through. Serve with a fried or poached egg.

A fried egg is standard, I used poached eggs instead because our stove isn't wide enough for two frying pans.

We also got a few more plants. The rosemary and lavendar came from the friendly people at the plant shop next to our local grocery store. The blue pot is basil. It was a kit (pot, soil, seeds) from a cool Korean stationery store called Daiso. I really miss fresh basil so I can't wait for it to grow. We can get most of the herbs we need here but they are always dried. I miss having a herb garden.

Also, Anna made this delicious cake. . .

There's really only one way to finish this. . .