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).