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).

Monday

I think I'm going to try to do one post for each day again, otherwise it would get too long with too many pictures. But there's just so much to show! I'll try to do a few today to catch up. Also, these next few entries will probably be longer since I broke out the bluetooth keyboard for my iPad so I can put my thoughts down a lot faster.

Monday was a travel day. For breakfast we had a Korean fusion stew (picture 1) cooked by our wonderful hosts. It had bulgogi and mushrooms and the broath was earthy and slightly sweet (likely from the bulgogi marinade). Hearty for breakfast, but good. Also accompanying breakfast was some local Jeju fruit - grapes and tangerines. My wife says the proper way to eat these grapes is to suck out the insides (which remarkably come out completely intact and entirely separate from the skin) and then spit out the seeds. I, however, just ate the whole grape and spit out the seeds. I think the skin has a lot of flavor anyway. My wife thought the hosts would see my empty bowl with only seeds left and wonder where the grape skins went =]. As we checked out of this airbnb, the hosts wanted to take a picture with us and took a few of us with their house as well. They were super super nice and we told them if they came to Boston they should definitely let us know. I would highly recommend this place to anyone traveling to Jeju. I took a panorama of their house when you're inside the gate (picture 3) - our separate apartment-type thing was behind me (you can kind of see the door on the left side) and their house is on the right side. They have a fridge and table and stuff in the little glass room in the middle - that's where we had our breakfast on Monday morning.

After checking out we drove towards the airport, stopping at this one church that was built in the past few years (2009 maybe?) and is built to resemble Noah's ark (picture 4). Very interesting feel to the church, I liked how the water surrounds it - there's even a kind of infinity pool effect at the front so when you're sitting in the sanctuary you could see out like there's water all around.

We stopped at a gas station right near the rental place, but the attendant kept saying no, LPG, and crossing her fingers like an 'X' when we pulled up, so my wife had to ask for further explanation and apparently the Sonata we were driving around in runs on liquid propane (which explains the gas tank that you can access from the trunk) so we had to find a special gas station that had this "LPG" stuff. Fortunately there was one only a few blocks away, so we filled up and took the rental car back. After we returned the rental car I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders =]. Although it was nice to be able to go where we wanted and not have to worry about how we were going to take our luggage on a bus, the stress of driving and worrying about someone else hitting the car and the hassle of dealing with insurance, etc, etc if that happened outweighed the pro's, so I was glad to be done with that. Although the international driver's license is valid for a whole year, so I guess I should travel to another country where we would need a car within the next year to get maximum value =].

We ate lunch at the airport at a Lotteria (picture 5), which seems kind of like a Burger King except Korean (although I don't know what the actual Burger Kings around here serve, so maybe that's a bad comparison - but it's definitely fast food). We got three burgers to try and some cheese sticks (picture 6, cheese sticks not shown). The bulgogi burger (with beef from Korea), while sounding like a really good idea, was the worst one in my opinion. My wife didn't seem to mind it. The pattie of bulgogi just seemed too sweet - I guess I like my burgers more on the savory side. The Lotz burger looked like a normal Big Mac except with only one pattie and too much lettuce. It had beef from Australia apparently (side note: my wife and I were discussing the fact just today that where ingredients for products come from is very important to people here - maybe more on that later). That burger tasted the closest to home and was pretty decent, except it was lukewarm. I'd imagine that it'd be pretty good if it were hot. The wild shrimp burger (picture 7) had actual whole little shrimp in the pattie and was the best of the three (it was also hot).

We then got on a domestic flight and flew to Busan (picture 8), which is a port city on the south-eastern edge of Korea. After checking in to our hotel we walked to the nearby beach and enjoyed walking in the surf for a while (picture 9).

We then went to the world's largest department store (picture 10), the Shinsegae in Busan. We marveled at the large number of floors housing a full spa, ice skating rink, restaurants, a grocery store, not to mention all the luxury goods and brands. At the ice skating rink there were a few young girls who looked like they were training with coaches in the center of the rink while a child in the outer area of the rink attempted to walk/skate around with an ingenious invention - it looked like an elderly person's walker except no wheels and the bottom was connected in an upside down U shape, like the top. This allows the person to have something that slides and stabilizes them while they try to skate. I wonder why we don't have anything like that in the States?

We thought the department store closed at 9 but apparently on Mondays they close at 8, so when we went to get food everything was closing or already closed, so we quickly bought some stuff that was being sold at a discount and ate dinner (picture 11 - ddukbokki and pan seared buns) and dessert (picture 12 - peach and melon bars, made from real fruit).

Picture 13 - also present in the basement of the department store was a Johnny Rockets! Who knew that brand had made it across the ocean?! And it looked like people even went there!