Wednesday

Today we slept in a bit, ate breakfast at home and then headed into Seoul. First stop was Seoul station, where we went into the Lotte outlets and did some shopping. There were a bunch of name brands that we recognized and were more expensive than in the states, so we didn't get anything there.

Next we headed up to the Samcheongdong area, where we had seen Running Man (a Korean variety show) go once. We saw one of the restaurants that they had eaten at that had a big sign out front letting everyone know. We are at a cool little place that was in a very traditional looking house. They served some kimchi in this bowl with a very old style spoon (picture 1). We got the pork spare rib stew with udon noodles. There was a spiciness meter on the menu, so we got the 1, the lowest spiciness level, out of 4 levels. When it comes in the pot, they light this small thing underneath the pot to keep it hot (you can kind of see it in the center of the pot stand in picture 1). It looked really good (picture 2)!

Unfortunately, apparently this restaurant SHOULD be famous for its spiciness level (but there wasn't a warning anywhere) because level 1 spice was sooo hot. I couldn't believe it. I thought for sure they had mixed up ours with someone else's or had heard us wrong. Or maybe even that the spiciness levels went from 1 as the hottest to 4 as the mildest. But no, that's apparently just the way it is. It was probably one of the spiciest things I've eaten in months, if not years. I could only manage 2-3 bites and then I had to just stop and drink water while my lips burned. It was comforting to hear that the table of four Korean girls next to us, who had gotten two stews, spiciness levels 1 and 2, were also talking about how spicy it was and that even level 1 was really spicy. In order to finish, I had a bowl with some water and I would rinse each piece of meat and even them I could still taste some of the spiciness. There was a couple who came in after us and sat down and my wife said the girl was contemplating ordering level 4, so she warned her that level 1 was super spicy and the couple got one with less than a level 1 spiciness and was satisfied with it.

After lunch we walked around for a while, even down in a traditional folk village area.

Next we went to the biggest underground shopping place I've ever seen. It took us at least a half hour to walk from one end to the other, not including the extra time to make our way through the masses of people. We bought some slippers for inside the house and some other small things while we were here. I'd say a good 70% of the stores in that whole place were women's clothes or accessories. Towards the end of our shopping time I was getting a bit fed up with the way personal space is not as respected here; people will just push you or bump into you and not care since they were walking, you just happened to be in the way. But I guess that's the way things are when there are so many people in such a small space (just like at Costco).

Finally, tired from everything we did that day, we found a nice quiet small restaurant near the bus stop to eat some selungtang (oxtail soup). So yummy!