Day 2 in Korea

My second day in Korea started with an expensive hotel breakfast and a taxi ride to Changdeok gung, a big palace in the old centre of Seoul. The day was bright and sunny. There was snow lying about all over the place inside the palace compound although most had already disappeared from the concreted city streets. Icicles hung from the eaves of the buildings. It was all very picturesque indeed.

You can only enter Changdeok gung with a tour, and the tour that was leaving when we got there was a Korean language tour. I didn't mind because I was there primarily to take pictures. There were only a few people on the tour, so it was very easy for me to take pictures without people in them. Later on our tour caught up to a huge gaggle of Japanese tourists. Miwa wanted to join up with that tour so she could understand the guide. Since she can understand enough Korean to realise that the Korean guide and the Japanese one were saying different things, I could not quite follow her logic, but oh well. After we joined the Japanese tour it was very difficult for me to take pictures.

Miwa and I did not find the weather particularly cold. It was sunny and there was no wind, after all. We did not even bother with gloves or hats or anything. But a lot of the other Japanese tourists seemed to be freezing their asses off. We saw one woman who had gloves, scarf and hat on buy a can of hot coffee from a vending machine and then hold it against her face because she was that cold. Miwa and I looked at each other and laughed. "Where do you think she's from?" "Kyushu? Okinawa, maybe?" (Two places down the south of Japan). Miwa has lived her whole life in Akita Prefecture, but I have only been here for a few years. It seems as if I have acclimatised, though. I wonder what this years NZ winter is going to feel like to me?

After we had finished the tour of Changdeok gung we walked to the subway station. We found an underground bookshop on the way. I bought some postcards and a 3D jigsaw puzzle of the world (as in, make your own globe). The map itself is all written in English, but on the box it says "For sale in Korea only." Mostly the map looks just like any other, but there are a few differences in Asia. Such as, South Korea and North Korea are not separated, but instead labeled together simply as 'Korea.' Also the Sea of Japan is labelled as the 'East Sea.' Interesting.

We went back to Meongdong to do some more shopping. The evening before, Miwa had her picture taken at a portrait place, and had ordered 100 business cards with her face on them made up for her, so we had to go back to the same area we had been shopping in the evening before. After that we had lunch in a restaurant in the basement of Migliore, a big cheap department store. Then Miwa wanted to go have an 'estee,' which seems to be a facial massage and application of creams and stuff like that, in order to make one more beautiful. People are always talking about estees to me as if I know the word. In Japan it is written in katakana, so everyone assumes it is an English word, but it sounds to me as if it is actually French, wouldn't you agree? Anyway, I didn't want one, so I sat in the waiting room for an hour. I took the opportunity to write out lots of postcards.

We browsed around in Migliore until 5pm, and then headed back to the hotel. We were very tired, but Miwa had already organised to meet some of her Korean friends for dinner at 6pm. A little after 6, we were picked up from the hotel by someone (I can't remember any names by the way. I should get Miwa to write them down for me sometime, because I can never remember anything unless I have seen it written down). The someone used to be an employee of the hotel we were staying at. Anyway, he drove us to the area of Seoul in which he lives, which is near a big university. We drove up and over a mountain, through these very winding steep streets. The man spoke quite a bit of Japanese, about as much as me. When we got to the area, we wandered down a street looking for another of Miwa's friends, who was arriving on foot. There were all these baskets full of goods lined up in rows along the footpath. It turns out that they were the Korean equivalent of a $2 shop. People come out of the University and have to walk between the rows of merchanside. Sometimes they get tempted and buy something. People can't avoid the shop because it is the footpath.

We ended up walking back the way we had come, finding Miwa's other friend (a really nice woman about my age whose Japanese was very good, much better than mine) and then entering an establishment. I would hesitate to call it a restaurant. It was much more casual and laid-back than that. It was the kind of place that only locals, never tourists, go to eat. There were lots of wooden benches and iron-frame stools in a small, dimly-lit brick building. The menu was written on a saucepan lid. Ecclectic music was on in the background and the front window was a plastic sheet that was, get this, zipped into place. I really liked it, although it was a bit chilly.

The first dish to come to the table was a big bowl of mussels (still in the shell) in a garlic soup. Everyone had a spoon and a set of chopsticks each. There were no little personal dishes to transfer the food to like there are in Japan. Everyone just spooned the soup straight from the big bowl to their mouths, or picked the mussels out with the chopsticks and left their shells behind. The soup was really delicious. Then a big plate of cheese-filled egg was brought out. It was kind of like a giant omelette cut up into lots of small pieces, but the egg did not appear to have been fried in oil. It was just nice and yellow and moist. However it was cooked, it had been done expertly. The guy who had come to pick us up randomly disappeared and came back later with two huge bags of puffy crackers, kind of like giant prawn crackers. I don't know what grain they were made out of. The next dish to appear was a large plate of seafood and rice stick stew. (Btw by rice stick, what I mean is sticky rice pounded until it resembles playdoh and then rolled into little sticks. There are similar things available in Japan, called mochi.) The sauce was bright red. Miwa would not touch the stew; she said it was too spicy for her. I dived right in (making sure to avoid the squid). The two Koreans were looking at me expectantly, waiting for the 'OMG! Hot hot!' but actually I had no trouble eating it at all. It was really delicious. The red chili pepper sauce gave it quite a kick, sure, but no more so than Tabasco. At first I was using a cracker as a dish, but then everyone laughed at me and so small plates were brought out. I thought it was much more fun using the cracker, but oh well.

A fifth person joined our little party, a student who had just finished his last class of the day at the University. He spoke no Japanese, and only a little English, but we were talking anyway. He is 24 like me, but has not yet finished University. Anyway, the five of us had quite a good time, although the guy who drove us at the beginning of the evening (who had seemed so boring and normal at first but who turned out to be a very strange and shameless person indeed) kept disappearing to give people drunken calls from his cellphone, and Miwa was not touching the alcohol at all. Speaking of alcohol, Koreans have a very interesting drinking culture. They don't just say cheers at the beginning of the evening, like their neighbours the Japanese do. They say cheers and clink their glasses together every single time they drink. They all sit there for 5, 10 minutes without drinking, then they clink their glasses together and all chug down everything that's in them. Then they fill each others glasses up again and spen another 10 minutes or so looking at their full glasses until enough time has passed that it is polite to call for another 'cheers.' I got told off for sipping at my drink over time.

Another strange thing about the restaurant that I have just remembered; the location of the toilet. It was outside on the main road. The door to the toilet opened right out onto the footpath. I don't mean a room of separate cubicles or anything like that. There was only one toilet, and only one door, so essentially it was a toilet cubicle that opened straight out onto an 8 lane road.

After we had finished at the restaurant we went to a karaoke establishment. It was the type of place that has separate booths. There was not a very good selection of either Japanese or English music, although the English selection was better than the Japanese one. All Japanese music was between four and ten years old, so there were no currently popular songs, and neither were there any classics. The English music at least contained some classics i.e. The Beatles. We did not stay there long because it was already very late. Miwa and I said goodbye and then caught a taxi back to the hotel, and by the time we got there it was already after midnight and we had to get up early the next day.