Korea
After an epic overnight climbing Mt. Agung and a boneshaking scooter ride back to Ubud and a bleary-eyed visit to the Ubud Palace for Barong dancing, it was time to leave Indonesia behind. Roxane and I loved it, and we’re planning to come back before we finish our travels.
Our overnight flight stopped in Hong Kong, where we reveled in the modernity and Western food and, most of all, free fast WiFi. We spent the midnight hours eating pizza and uploading photos before our ongoing flight to Korea.
Our primary mission in Korea was to visit Roxane’s mother, who would be on a business trip to Seoul. So we stayed nearby in the university district, at Lee & No’s Guesthouse. We were thrilled when we arrived to find a lovely house with a compact patio and koi pond and, most of all, free fast WiFi (watch, this will turn out to be a theme). The owner was helpful to the point of obsequiousness. It was wonderful at first – in a country where we knew nothing of the language and little of the customs, he was an invaluable help in figuring out how to do things we wanted to do. When Roxane went to the airport to meet her mother, he told her exactly what bus to take. When we wanted to mail some packages, he told us how to get to the Post Office and even wrote a note for us in Korean saying “I would like to mail a package to the USA.”
However as our two-week stay at the same guesthouse wore on, Mr. Lee proved to be ever-present and overhelpful. Once, when I was walking around with a packet of ramen I was about to prepare, he told me “Oh no, you don’t eat that raw! You have to cook it.” Yes, Mr. Lee, thank you. When I turned on the immersion heater and boiled water to pour over the contents in a bowl: “Oh no, you need to boil this one! Can’t pour hot water on it.” It’s OK, Mr. Lee, we have this same brand of ramen at home. “No, must be different, this one you boil.” Later I prepared another bowl for Roxane, leaving the spice packet out so she could season it to her own taste for spiciness. When Mr. Lee walked by he laughed “Ha ha, you can try like that but it won’t taste good!”
He woke the guests for breakfast every morning with the same classical music playlist. It was charming at first, but try going around for two weeks with Pachelbel’s Canon in D stuck in your head and you’ll see why this began to grate on our nerves. And he was constantly offering to clean our room, which we felt was perfectly fine, thank you very much. He became more and more insistent that “Any time you want your room clean, you tell me, I do it!” Finally after a week we let the poor guy clean. It wouldn’t have been a big deal except that it meant we had to tidy up the explosion of belongings that had poured out of our rucksacks during our time there.
We spent most of our time in Seoul, a remarkable modern, bustling city. In many ways it was a relief, a literal breath of fresh air after Indonesia. There is no risk in Seoul of stepping off the sidewalk into an open sewer, and the air does not swell with dioxins every day at five when people burn their trash. It is a proper city, and we understand cities just fine. Their metro system was fast and convenient, and by contrast with everywhere Indonesia, actually existed. But at the same time we understood Indonesia better than Korea. After five weeks there, I’d picked up almost five hundred words of Indonesian, and we were familiar with the customs and the cuisine (which was friendly to our needs as vegetarians). And we were frequently in tourist centers, where most merchants speak some English.
In Korea we often felt completely lost. We spoke none of the language, and signs were mostly in Hangul, the Korean script. So seeing a word or name written and hearing it spoken were two experiences completely divorced from each other for us. Korean cuisine is undergoing a mania for meat, triggered by Korea’s rapid transition from a poor country to a rich country. Further, Koreans actually seem to speak less English than Indonesians, despite the fact that English proficiency (and education in general) is very highly valued. This is mostly due to a shortage of teachers who are native English speakers.
These factors converged to create our most frustrating experiences in Korea. We would go to a restaurant and order food, either by using a picture menu or by saying a set phrase from our guidebook “We are vegetarian.” Then our dish would arrive piled high with ham or fish or dried squid strips. When the meat wasn’t piled high, it was cunningly hidden, as in the case of the fish cakes I mistook for yuba (tofu skin). It’s a good thing I love kimchi and bibimbap. The redeeming feature of Korean food, in my mind, was the profusion of side dishes. As soon as you sit down to eat, a number of small plates arrive. These are always vegetarian and mostly pickled. Kimchi is de rigeur- Koreans literally do eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Also common: burdock, water spinach, radish, mung bean sprouts, and cucumbers. These are typically refilled as you finish them, so it’s literally impossible to finish all your food. I also became quite fond of a very common street food called tteok bokki: rice cakes in a very spicy red sauce. These are not the dry, cracker-like frisbees that Americans buy in the health food isle. These are more like a glutinous rice gnocchi, in cylinders approximately one centimeter wide by three centimeters long. Vendors have trays full of them on display, and will serve them on a plate to eat there, or in a plastic bag with a toothpick to eat as you walk.
The highlight of our Korean food experience was a visit to Sanchon, a vegetarian restaurant in the Insadong tourist neighborhood. This is not just vegetarian food but temple food, and the founder is a former Buddhist monk who left his order to start the restaurant. A visit to Sanchon is as much an experience as it is a meal, but it is plenty of both. The only option is a set menu of twenty dishes, starting and ending with tea. We didn’t know this when we walked in, so we just looked at each other in happy bewilderment as a waitress kept piling our table with one small bowl after another of delicious, vegetarian food.
The food eaten at Korean Buddhist temples is heavily influenced by the rise of Confucianism centuries ago. The Confucians pushed the Buddhists out of the prime arable lands and up into the mountains. To cope, the monks had to turn from farming to gathering foods they could find in the wilderness. So our meal, inspired by this food, was heavy on mushrooms and ferns and burdocks. But there was plenty of variety and a great number of foods I could not identify.
The next surprise was at eight o’clock, just as we were finishing our meal. The lights dimmed and a woman in elaborate Korean dress appeared on the stage, a barely-elevated section of wooden floor centered among the tatami mats. She had long white sleeves extending far past her hands. She danced an eerie, off-tempo beat for a few minutes before tossing back her sleeves to reveal a pair of drumsticks. There was a drum set up in the corner, and she pounded out a vigorous solo. She was then replaced by another woman in different traditional dress who performed a different dance, and then another. There were three women in all, and they rotated onto stage between quick costume changes to perform a large number of unique short dances. The costumes were the best part of the show, though. They were largely simple shapes, but in bright colors and outlandish proportions. The performance was made all the better by the fact that we completely didn’t expect it.
The other surprisingly excellent experience we had in Seoul was meeting up with a couple of friends-of-friends, Erik and Seon-Hwa. As always when meeting a second-order friend, we didn’t know what to expect, but we got along wonderfully, and Rox and I wound up spending a lot of our time hanging out with them. They took us to a Korean baseball game, where an enthusiastic cheerleader led the fans in synchronized cheers. We went with them to a multilevel Korean spa — called a jimjaebong — that featured saunas inspired by nearly every sauna-using culture, from the Finns to the Native Americans to(questionably) the Egyptians.
Erik taught us a popular Korean card game called Go Stop. It’s played with hwatoo, or Japanese flower cards. These are a beautifully decorated workaround developed during a period when Japan banned traditional playing cards. Instead of four suits of thirteen cards, hwatoo have twelve suits of four cards, with each suit representing a month of the year and displaying a flower typical of that month. There are a number of games to be played with them, but Go Stop, usually played for money, is by far the most popular in Korea. In return, I taught Eric to play Tantrix, a fun tile game Rox and I picked up in New Zealand.
Most of all, Erik and Seon-Wha taught us about Korean drinking culture, which is very over-the-top. Rounds are not counted in drinks, but by the number of different drinking establishments you visit. And the choice is not “Beer or soju?” but “Would you like to pour your soju into your beer or drink them out of different glasses?” Businessmen will often go straight from work to dinner and drinks with their buddies, then drink till the wee hours, finally visiting a jimjaebong to fall asleep in a sauna and sweat out the alcohol before showering and returning to work. It’s rude to fill your own glass, so your friends will keep it filled, preventing you from counting how many you’ve had. Unless someone shouts “One shot,” in which case you’re supposed to finish the remainder of your drink in one go.
The redeeming feature in all this madness is that Koreans always get food with their drinks. Not just pretzels and beer nuts either, but really tasty stuff like giant fruit plates or fried, sweet & salty spaghetti sticks. Eating slows down the booze and allows drinkers to stay out all night without getting plastered (usually). Of course, as mad as the drinking culture seemed, we had a tremendous amount of fun going out on the town with Erik and Seon-Hwa.
The other big highlight of the trip for me was visiting Bukhansan National Park. This mountain park is an hour’s ride on the metro from downtown Seoul, and is enormously popular, to the point where trails are opened and closed in a rotation system to allow certain areas to recover. I went on a Sunday, with David, a colleague of Roxane’s mother also visiting from the States. The trails were absolutely packed, sometimes feeling more like a shopping mall than an outdoor experience. There were big social groups on outings, all with matching shirts. There were couples and families going for picnics, and elderly folks decked out in all the latest, most fashionable hiking gear. Everyone was very fashionable in their gear, for that matter, and it was all very new. Normally I don’t like crowds, especially when hiking, but this was such a bizarrely over-the-top crowd to find on top of a mountain that I actually rather enjoyed it. David and I planned originally to summit Mt. Baekundae, but we made a wrong turn early on and wound up atop a ridge lined with an ancient wall, part of the long-ago fortifications of Seoul. A trail proceeded along the wall and got us back on track to Baekundae Peak, but after the third set of steel cables we had to pull ourselves along, we turned a corner and saw that the real climbing was still ahead. This was when we realized that we wouldn’t be able to get to the peak and back down in time. It was a good, strenuous hike, though, and I had a great time even though we missed our goal.