Manisan HIke, Jan. 05

The Sunset Beach. Yellow Sea in the background with sporadic patches of ice covering it.

Tangun's Visitors

Manisan on island Kangwha. This mountain is one of the two mountains in Korea on which Koreans built a shrine to honour the mythical ancestor Tangun.

Gwanaksan Hike, January '05

A buddhist temple on top of a cliff, Mt. Gwanak, southern Seoul. I am about to celebrate the second anniversary of my love affair with the SHC, The Seoul Hiking Club (for more info and photos visit www.hikingkorea.com ). Korea is about 70% mountainous country and certainly a good place for people who like hiking. No doubt about it: one of the best aspects of my Korean sojourn is belonging to this club. We hike every Saturday, huffing and puffing on our way up the mountain and later relaxing during a very informal dinner downed with lakes of dong-dong-ju (rice wine that looks and tastes a lot like buttermilk). Good times!

On the terrace of the miniature buddhist temple

Ladies Night

One of my best friends is leaving Korea. After three years she's decided to go back to that out in the boonies place called New York. With the date of her departure approaching, she's been trying to relive all of the things that she's been doing for the past three years. If I happen not to be in the mood to accompany her, she "blackmails" me by whining: "hey, I am leaving soon." Hmmmph, those New Yorkers, they know how to get what they want. One of the things on her list is "the ladies night" at Itaewon, officially called Seoul's "special tourist zone." Yep, there are some tourists, but mostly this is the place where English teachers and G.I.'s gather for a fun night out. The main street is lined with stalls that sell everything: clothes and accessories(brand-name rip offs); tacky souvenirs; instant coffee; Korean 'fast food' i.e. topkeoki [rice cakes in gooey red-hot-pepper paste], chicken kebobs, roasted potatos, mandu [pasta filled with kimchi or meat]; kimbop [California rolls]; odaeng [something like a fish hot-dog], etc. There are also numerous stores, fast food restaurants [KFC, Burger King, MacDonalds, Dunkin Donuts]; a hotel; bars; strip joints; "gentlemen's entertainment parlours" [you know what I mean]. Itaewon has a very bad reputation among Koreans but they love to come here and mingle with 'nasty' foreigners. The attraction of the unknown, eh? With my girls, Jiwon, Clare, Andrea, I come here more or less regularly on a Thursday night 'cause a bar called Helios has a ladies night. We can drink for free from 9 to 11 pm (used to be till 12, but they changed it, cheapos!). We drink and dance and drink and dance and then we move to another place called The Loft for more free drinks -a generous German owner lets ladies booze till 2:00 am- Gott bless him. Riight in front of the entrance to the building where the Loft is situated our is favorite "pojang macha" [food tent] with a beautiful smiley ajumma [an older married woman] who's always happy to see us. A night of drinking and dancing simply cannot end in any other way than with shivering on the street while stuffing down our throats topkeoki, kamja [potatos], chicken kebobs, kimbop and the like. Last night we were trying to find a Western boyfriend for a Korean friend of a Korean friend. Although she's as pretty as they come, her search was unsuccessful, and she was a bit disappointed. I guess she has this misconception that "all Western men are sexual predators." Well, they [the predators] were not in a much of a hunting mood which means we have to take her to Itaewon again. It could be worse. After the food, it's off to finding a taxi and feeling sick on the way home, not for drinking too much but for Seoul taxi drivers being lunatics who don't believe in drivng safely and speed limits. It's a miracle that during my time in Seoul a car hit me only once, and that I was involved in only 2 car accidents. I should have been dead or at least seriously injured. Someone's watching over me. Thank you.

Playing on Ice and Otherwise

Korean Winter Wonderland Tobias from California, delighted to see a frozen creek, suggested that we should play a bit on its smooth shiny surface - and played we did, especially me, sliding down the creek on my bottom.

On a hike  

Learning Korean

I am at it again: trying to learn Korean to get it to the level beyond the ability to say to a taxi driver where I want to go, beyond asking "how much are the apples", and "I come from Canada."
It's a linguistic challenge unlike any other I encountered so far. I speak 3 languages fluently, stutter 2 if need be, and had 4 years of Latin in prep-school. All of these languages are Indo-European, while Korean is - according to Korean linguists - Altaic, having similarities with Hungarian, Mongolian, Turkish; according to Western linguists it's a langauge isolate, so profoundly different that cannot be included within any major langauge group.In my attempts to learn Korean I did the following: attended a Korean class at a church; found a language exchange club; found a one-on-one language partner; bought 8 (read EIGHT) expensive Learning Korean text books complete with tapes and workbooks, made heaps of Korean friends.... It'd be only natural that that by now I could speak Korean better than Kim Jung-il - alas, that's not the case. Korean is, simply put, sooooo different that studying it usually gives me a major headache and makes me feel so stooooooopid. It is different, trust me: I don't say this in lieu of excuse for not speaking it better. According to Dr. Alexander Arguelles and Dr. Jong Rok Kim, the guys who wrote a book called A historical, LIterary and Cultural Approach to Learning Korean , "Korean is one of the most difficult langauges in the world for a Westerner to learn" because its fonetic system is totally different, its vocabulary is totally different, not allowing to make any parallels or analogies, the grammar is built on a totally different structural and cultural principles. To put it simply: if you're a Bulgarian studying French, you will need two years to become fluent in French; however, if you're the same Bulgarian studying Korean you'd need 6 years - triple the time - to be at the same level of fluency. My primary problem is the acquisition and retention of vocabulary. Korean os a syllabic language; it recyles and combines a certain number of fixed syllables and creates words with new meanings; at the same time one word (or one syllable) can have numerous meanings. Illustration: wallet in Korean is jee-gap; job is jee-gob; now is jee-geum. Ahhh! It all sounds so similar. Then: ocean is dae-yang, but yang is sheep, dae is big, so, "logically" the Korean word for ocean is 'big sheep' - yes? naah! It is to me - I see "dae yang" and I say ' yep, this means a big sheep" and I look foolish. BTW yang appears in so many words like koh-yang-ee (cat); koh itself means nose and many, many other things. If I confused you, good - that was my plan 'cause I wanted to show you some of the difficulties. Why bother, then? It's not like you can really use your Korean once you leave Korea unless you go to the Korea town in L.A. or Toronto. I bother because I've lived here long enough and I am intending to stay longer. I also bother because it's a challenge and I think I can wake up my somewhat sleepy brain from the post graduate school slumber it fell in. I bother because I have so many Korean friends and I choose to live in this country. The least I can do to reciprocate the kindness of my host country and its people is to try and learn their langauge. So, wish me luck. Anyongheekyesaeyo (all of this translates to one single simple syllable: bye. Aeeeeeeeehgoooo! (means OOOOOOUUUUUUCH!)

Royal Table D'hote "lunch" at Ji-hwa-cha

Recently, a colleague, Prof. Lee, asked me to help her edit a paper that she will present at Harvard in February (wow! good for her!). Her presentation is about an obscure North Korean author by the name of Kim, Saryang. He was born in Pyong-yang at the beginning of the 20th century, studied and lived in Japan and wrote most of his works in Japanese. No one ever heard about him because the label "pro-Japanese" was glued to his name, and of course, it didn't help that he was from North Korea. In 2002, the nasty label was peeled off of hime because he wrote with sympathy about the mysery Koreans experienced during the Japanese colonial period. Anyhow, I don't want to bother any longer with him. Instead, I will bother you with a little restaurant review and a description of the lunch I was invited to by the paper writer in lieu of thanks for helping her out. After a pleasant ride in a big car expertly driven by Prof. Lee, we arrived to the restaurant that just recently opened. It's in Sunbuk-gu catering to the richest of the rich, the old money of Korea, the residents of the huge houses dispersed on surrounding hills and hiding behind high walls. A vallet parked the car, another person walked us to the restaurant door and handed us over to the care of about 4 or 5 wait staff who greetes us with deep bows and showed us to our table. The entrance boasts quite an exhibiton of ridiculously expensive items: Korean royal cookies - precisely cut fantasies in pale green, orange, white, black and brown colours, tastefully packed in multi-cornered boxes. A stairwell covered in rich burgundy carpet leads upstairs to the dining room, an elegant fusion of the East and West - spacious, bright ( thanks to the wall of glass on one side), luxuriously shiny lacquered dark brown floors, and - surprise- beautiful polished dark wooden tables and minimalistic leather chairs of a very simple but comfortable design. Walls are pale yellow decorated with only a couple of big posters depiciting scenes from everyday Korean life of centuries ago. Waitresses seemed to be hand-picked for prettiness and they look like gisaeng in subtle makeup and silk hanboks of dusty rose tops and royal blue bottoms.
As soon as our bottoms touch the comfortable seats, we are served steaming hot bori cha (barley tea) and given menus bound in chocolate brown leather AND translated into translated into Japanese and English. A nice touch, appreciated by anyone who's Korean is not much better than the 101 level.
We choose Nat Kot Sang or "Royal Table D-hote 'Lunch'" (verbatim from the many) . For 25,000 won/person one gets four kinds of appetizers (3-colored Korean springrolls, Pumpkin soup, white kimchi, and a salad); 3 kinds of mains dishes (assorted pan-fried dishes [a piece of tempura zucchini,1/2 shitaki mushroom and a patti made of soy been flower and vegetables, stir-fried beef with mushrooms, GInseng and vegetable salad, bibimbap); dessert: fresh season's fruit - according to the menu - that, disappointingly, turns out to be one single yet delicious straberry, slit in half, proudly standing upright supported by two parsley leaves; traditional Korean cookie and ricecake - the first the size of a sugar cube, the second the size of a baby's baby finger, and Korean punch (made from citron fruit and sugar). Now, while the dessert could have been bigger - two or even three straberries would have been quite nice, I enjoyed the food and the atmosphere of the restaurant. I especially enjoyed beef and mushrooms - the beef was tender, simply melting on my tongue and seducing my taste buds with wonderful flavors. Persimmon salad dressing and bright red pomegranate seeds were quite a solid salad surprise - delicious, too. Gentle traditiional music seems to be seeping through the walls and complementing nicely the rustling of hanboks and clinking of silver chopsticks and spoons. The serving dishes are simple, white, with a detail or two (a leaf or a flower) in the palest of blue. My companions were very pleasant, explaining the background of different dishes or listing ingredients. The restaurant manages to create the atmosphere of well-being and well-off. One gets a truly royal treatment there. It's not for everyday lunching, most certainly you should go there on some special occasion. BTW, the owner is Mrs. Hwang, Hye Sang, "The human cultural asset for Royal Cuisine of Choson Dynasty, The Chairman of the Institute for Royal Cuisine, The Chairman of Cultural Family for Preserving the Korean Taste" ) Wow! I just wonder: was Boston lettuce really a part of the kingly diet; same goes for pomegranates and mustard sauces? Also, bringing dishes in sequence, as opposed to having them all at once on the table seems to be a very un-Korean thing to do. Lacquered tables and chairs? Italian wine at the entrance? Obviously, this place combines elements of the East and West - I am not complaining about the combination, though. The food is good and fresh, but the real value of the restaurant is in the way they present the food. Everything looks so perfectly cut, chopped, twisted, turned... As one leaves the restaurant a few beautiful smiley faces are at your service in case you want to buy some of the of the traditional tasty morsels - like less than 1 kg beef jerky (is that really Korean?!) for about 299,000 won per box ; candied ginseng for about 200,000; exorbitantly expensive rice cakes, and so on. If you want to experience something unusual and special, if you have a friend visiting from the West and you want to show him/her how much pride Koreans take in their food and their royal past, then take them to this place. Visit www.jihwajafood.co.kr - Masheesoyo and moshisoyo! (Tasty and beautiful).

Why am I doing this?

Hey, everyone seems to be blogging lately, and I don't want to fall behind the times. Besides, my family is dispersed all over the world. I want them to be able to take a peek into my life here in Korea. I've been here for more than two years! Wow! Who would have thought. I still have to figure out how all of this works.