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Home safe, more to come

Sorry, now that we got home all we want to do is sleep and rest. I'll try to post the rest soon-ish!

Saturday

Sorry I didn't catch up at all! I think yesterday we mostly just had to relax and recover from the busy weekend.

Saturday morning we headed into Seoul and met up with my wife's great uncle, whose family owns a couple shops, one in a hotel and one in a market. He wanted to take us to a couple of the markets since he knows his way around them and knows what things are worth.

First we went to this flea market type thing that had many traditional items as well as a lot of old junk (picture 1 - is that an A track stereo?). At one of the markets we had fresh ginger drinks, kind of like a milkshake but no ice cream (picture 2). We also saw a traditional dance (picture 3) and had a bowl of makkeolli (picture 4), which seemed homemade since it was just in this huge jar and was pretty tasty.

For lunch we went to a small restaurant that was just on the corner of the street and only had like 10-15 seats total. They served cow intestine cooked up with a spicy sauce and some noodles and then they put it on your table in foil on top of a small gas hot plate that keeps it steaming hot (picture 5). You can eat it as is or put it in a lettuce wrap with some sauce and garlic. It was alright; didn't taste like too much to me, but it was really chewy.

After lunch we went to Insadong area, where there are a lot of souvenir type places and a lot of foreigners and (according to her great uncle, who has all the same stuff in their shops and knows the real prices) everything is expensive. We saw some people dressed as the king's entourage walking around (picture 6), drank coconut water straight from the coconut (picture 7), and ate some street food (picture 8). The street food was pretty good! The egg toast (picture 9) was tasty except interestingly the toast was kind of sweet flavored and the egg was a little overcooked. The little fish pastry filled with red bean (picture 10) looked really good but was not super fresh so it wasn't crispy on the outside or very hot.

After that we met up with her aunt and family and hung out for a while with them before dinner. Dinner was at a really nice restaurant and our room was in this little separate place that had water and stones leading to the entrance (picture 11)! Dinner was a multi-course affair, including sushi, japchae, jellyfish, salad (picture 12), duck, pork belly, a flat meatball kind of thing (picture 13), and finally some rice came out in a little stone pot with some side dishes (picture 14). You take the rice out and eat it with the other stuff and pour hot water in the pot with the leftover rice to make nurunggi with a kind of broth (picture 15) almost like rice porridge. Dessert was frozen blueberries that were delicious and refreshing (picture 16).

After all that we stayed in a nearby hotel for the night since we were going to church in the city the next day.

Friday

Friday we just hung around the house and didn't do much, although we did get jjajangmyun and udon delivered, which was a fun experience because it was just like in dramas where the delivery driver brings the little box (picture 1), drops off your plates of food (picture 2), and the comes back later after you finished to pick up the empty dishes (which you put outside your door in a provided plastic bag). Yum! (Picture 3)

For dinner we went to a nearby restaurant and got samgyetang (picture 4), which is a stew where they put a small whole chicken. Very tasty!

Thursday

Sorry, we just vegged out for most of Thursday and Friday so I didn't post anything, but then today was really busy. Still trying to catch up 100%!

Thursday morning we met my wife's aunt and cousin and ate this huge multi-course meal:
Pumpkin porridge, beef carpaccio (picture 1), salad and mung bean jelly (picture 2), seafood nurungji (burned rice? It was cool because they put baked/hardened rice in a hot pot and poured seafood stuff on top - picture 3 is the whole thing, picture 4 is one serving), mung bean pancake and shrimp tempura (picture 5), dumplings (picture 6), sushi and pork belly (picture 7), bibimbap and seaweed soup (picture 8), and rounding it out was some shaved ice (picture 9). We were sooo full afterwards! It was a really fun and enjoyable meal, especially because of her aunt. At one point, her aunt was on the phone and when the dish came out she put her arm out in front of her daughter, stopping her from doing anything before she and I had taken a picture. Then she proceeded to frame and take the picture on her phone, and then immediately went back to talking! Apparently she hadn't even paused the conversation to take the picture. So funny.

Then my wife and I were dropped off at a place called Aqua planet or something, which was like an aquarium and zoo. There were many elementary school aged children, I guess they were on a field trip. We saw jellyfish (picture 10), a short show with synchronized swimmers in a fish tank with a scuba diver, penguins, seals, a very big and funny walrus, some otters, whose cage area had a place where you could shake hands with them (picture 11), jaguars (picture 12 - with an odd Korean girl who happened to have a jaguar patterned cardigan and was bothering them), among other animals.

Apparently owned by the same large corporation is a water and snow park right next door. One of the water slides starts from outside high up and spirals around before going inside (picture 13).

After spending time walking around some nearby shops we stopped for coffee and a smoothie (picture 14), and then her aunt took us to a place that she said had the best tangsuyeok she's ever had (sweet and sour pork, picture 15). I think it may just have lived up to its name. The batter was super light and since it was rice flour, parts of the inside, after you took a bite past the crispy exterior, were kind of like mochi! After that we had a nice hour on the bus back to her grandparents, and went to sleep soon after.

Wednesday

Wednesday was just a travel day. At our hotel we went down for the breakfast buffet (picture 1). I was excited for it because it also had American/Western style breakfast items, like scrambled eggs (picture 2)!

After eating breakfast, we checked out of the hotel and walked with our luggage to the bus stop. When we tried to get on the first bus, after my wife had paid for her fare, the bus driver saw the rolling luggage and said we couldn't get on and promptly refunded our money via coins. But after we got off we counted the coins and realized he had refunded us a discounted fare or something! Sigh. 40 cents poorer but none the wiser, we asked the second bus driver if we could get on with our luggage and he said no as well so we promptly flagged down a cab and took that to the KTX terminal. Maybe it's a Busan thing or that particular bus route, because when we were taking our luggage from my wife's grandparent's house to the Gimpo airport the drivers had no issue with our luggage.

The KTX train is a really nice train that goes super fast (190 mph). It took us just over 2 hours to get to Seoul and the landscape flew by! I have a timelapse of it, maybe I'll try to post it up later. I really enjoyed riding in the train because:

1. It was like taking a plane but with more space and less hassle. You don't need to go through security and be there over an hour before it leaves and check your luggage, etc. You just walk into the terminal and buy tickets from a machine and walk down to the train when it's boarding, find your assigned seat, put your luggage in the rack above your seat, and you're ready to go!

2. We had wifi from our mobile router so I could play Hearthstone while we rode the train. We also checked email and instant messaged with some family members.

3. My wife had found some great food for us to eat while we were on the train - hardboiiled eggs, some rice triangles that have seaweed on the outside and filling (I forget what those are called). My filling was bulgogi, my wife's was kimchi and tuna. We also drank a delicious and well-named yogurt drink (picture 3). =]

4. They have little carts that go by every once in a while with food on them (sorry I didn't get a picture of those). One was a cheaper, every-man's kind of food cart with banana milk and bags of chips and sausages and things. The other cart was a more expensive, name-brand kind of food cart with muffins and fancy cookies and nice wrappers.

When we got into Seoul we spent some time trying to coordinate with relatives whether we were going to go back to her grandparent's house that night or stay with some other relatives near Seoul, but we ended up just feeling like we were pretty tired from traveling for a good portion of the day, so we took a subway and bus ride to get back to her grandparents.

It really did feel like coming home after a vacation, like a trip within a trip. Although I'm definitely glad we took this trip to go to Jeju and Busan on our own, because it felt much more like vacation with us traveling alone and enjoying ourselves.

For dinner we had a nice home cooked meal that my wife's grandmother made, including bean paste stew (denjang jigae).

Tuesday

Tuesday was our full day of Busan wanderings. We mostly hung around the general area that had marketplaces. We also walked down this one street that is supposedly lined with nice shops, similar to Newbury Street in Boston. Mostly it just seemed like another set of retail stores with all the same brands and wares that we had seen in the department stores. Generally we're not super into the shopping scene and on top of that all the name brands that have presence in the US are usually 10-20% more expensive in Korea, so we don't really see a point buying name brand items while we're here. The most fun time shopping I've had so far was at the E-mart in Jeju, where it was really interesting to me to see the quality and variety of items that are in a reasonably large Korean "Walmart-like" store. And the non-name brand items there were reasonably cheap. But alas, I digress.

So for lunch, my wife found this place that serves neng myun (cold soba noodle soup) that had really good reviews and the lines are really long on the weekends. Fortunately for us since it was a random Tuesday, there was no wait. Picture 1 shows the food - my wife got the normal cold noodle soup and I got the "bi-bim-neng myun", which is kinda like a cross between bi-bim-bap and neng myun. You have the cold noodles from the neng myun and the veggies and sauce from the bi-bim-bap and you just mix them up similar to bi-bim-bap. On the side, the server delivered a steaming pot of what we thought was tea, until we poured and tasted it. It's actually broth! It was really interesting to drink hot broth with the cold noodles. Like an oddly good inversion of what you normally do (hot food, cold drink).

After walking around the marketplace some more we decided that it was time for some street food. There is a large street that's pretty well known in Busan area for having really good street food - many variety shows come and eat at the different stalls. Picture 2 shows a few of the stalls selling various foods. Picture 3 shows the particular stall where one variety show called "1 Night, 2 Days" came to eat hodduk (a type of fried pastry where it's flat like a pancake with a sweet mixture inside). We got 2 for ourselves to try out (picture 4) and apparently the way it's done here is to fry it with the sweet mixture (seemed like brown sugar and maybe some cinammon) inside and then cut it open and put a nut mixture (pumpkin seeds, chopped peanuts, and sunflower seeds) inside. I'm not sure if adding the nuts is a local thing or a recent thing or what; originally I had only heard of hodduk with the sweet mixture like cinnamon and brown sugar inside, but some of the food stalls claimed 50 years of making it like this so ... yeah.

This hodduk was so amazing, I cannot describe it (but I will try). Texture: the crispy outside of the pastry give you a nice mouth feel when you first bite in, then the chewiness of the inner dough comes into play as well as the crunch from the seeds inside. Taste: the flavor of the sweet mixture balances nicely with the dough and the nut mixture - there wasn't too many nuts either and the sweet mixture was spread fairly evenly throughout the pastry. Delivery: they hand it to you in a paper cup, making it easy to take bites out of as you walk around and not get your hands dirty. The only tricky part is to not let the pastry fall completely inside the cup once you've eaten it down a ways - you have to squeeze the cup tight enough so it doesn't fall in but not so tight that you squeeze out all the filling. I recommend eating almost halfway down from the top and then rotating it 90 degrees such that you have a good portion above the cup to eat and also since it can easily fit in your mouth horizontally if it's halfway down and then rotated, you can pull it up bit by bit as you eat it. I need to do a diagram or something; the word explanation is too hard to visualize.

I guess it also had something to do with this particular stall, as after we had come back from the fish market I got another one from a different stall to try it out while my wife got some fish cakes on a stick and some soup. That one was pretty good, but not as good as the first one. I think it had something to do with the ratio of the nut mixture to the sweet mixture, the density of the sweet mixture, and the crispiness of the outer portion of the pastry. Those three things were slightly off, so the end result was that my reaction to the second hodduk was not as favorable as to the first one. Still tasty though.

Speaking of the fish market, there is a really famous one in Busan. Unfortunately for us, this particular Tuesday they were closed. Why, I don't know. But apparently there are plenty of people who are still selling fish in random markets right next to the famous one, so we walked down that area for a little while (picture 5). Tons of seafood everywhere - fresh, dried, whole, filleted, squid, octopus, you name it. It also smelled very fishy. I tried to ensure that fish guts didn't get splattered on my shoes as we walked through. My wife found a good deal on some nice socks in one of the stalls near the fish market, so she bought those.

After all that walking around and stuff, we were tired, so we relaxed at a nearby cafe and had some more pat-bing-su (shaved ice, picture 6). We had green tea (could you tell?) and this shaved ice is actually made from milk!! Oh man, sooo good. Even just the ice itself was tasty. And the green tea flavor was there but not overpowering and the powder wasn't too dry such that when you took a bite with some of the filling and mochi and ice, your mouth was still refreshed by the ice rather than getting dried out by the powder.

After that we went to the nearby Lotte mall and department store (Lotte is another huge brand/company and is in direct competition with Shinsegae). Every hour on the hour they had a cool water/light/music show (picture 7). Hard to see in the picture but the water comes down from the ceiling as well as shoots up from the ground. They played different classical music pieces and the water show was timed to that. At the very end the water coming down from the top spelled something like "Thank you for watching, welcome to Lotte". Also, on the roof there was a zoo and an observatory!

Dinner was at a restaurant near our hotel (picture 8). We picked it because it had good reviews and you could grill your own meat on the thing in the center. Unfortunately after we sat down and tried to order they informed us that you had to order at least 3 servings of meat for them to setup the grill, so we said forget that and just ordered two kalbi-tang (beef rib stew). I was trying to get the meat off one of the bones and my spoon slipped and sloshed broth all over my shirt and some on my pants too. I was really embarrassed and so I ate slowly hoping it would dry by the time we had to leave. It mostly dried, but there were some (I guess oil?) stains, so I tried to wash it off at the hotel last night but this morning they were still a little noticeable, so once we got home to her grandparent's house (today, Wednesday night) I put them in a real washer. As for the soup, it was actually really good =]. But I was still a little bitter about not getting my grilled meat!

It's Wednesday night late right now and we're back at her grandparent's house for the next few days, so things should be fairly slow and I should be able to catch up to the present tomorrow. That and the fact that not much happened today (Wednesday).