Final Day

Well...my final day in Korea has arrived. Whew -- I'm tired! This has been a long two weeks with a LOT of work packed in!

I haven't been good at all about blogging this week, partly because of the work schedule and partly because of the ban on picture-taking devices inside the customer facility. That means I don't carry a camera at all, so I don't catch the to-and-from-work pictures. And since we don't do much else...

Jeff and I did have an interesting dinner on Wednesday evening. We made it to "Western Bar" while it was open, and the menu was enticing! It had a "Fried" section and a "Smoked" section and a "Quick" section, and not much else. It's notable that there was no "Salad" section. This should probably have been called "Western Man's Bar"...or perhaps, based on the beer-and-cowboys decor, "Western Frat House Bar".

The beer was cold and plentiful, and we ordered three dishes: mixed sausages with potatoes, rib sausages with potatoes, and mixed potatoes. See a theme here?

What we got was hilarious, and I so wish I'd had my camera. The mixed potatoes was a literal mountain -- about 5 inches high -- of a mixture of different types of french fries. There were scalloped ones, and mini-spiced ones. There were steak fries and tater tots. And there were even these sort of hush puppy potato things that that were kind of like a spoonful of mashed potatoes, fried. Delicious!

The mixed sausages was as expected, a plate of different kinds of sausages. The "rib sausages" turned out to be sausages...with little rib bones stuck into the ends! Awesome!


My hosts were having a work outing this afternoon, with a team lunch, an outing to the movies, and then a team dinner. I joined them for the team lunch at a "traditional Korean" restaurant. As far as I can tell, "traditional Korean" means you sit on the floor and nibble from a dozen or so mini-plates of side dishes. The food wasn't bad -- there was a pretty good dish of beef and mushrooms that I called "Korean Stroganoff". My hosts kept looking up an online dictionary in response to my queries about "what is this?", and the dictionary answers didn't help much. As often as not the foods were things I also had never eaten in English.

I must have looked kind of silly with my legs crossed under the table, because the waitress took pity on me -- she said I looked "very uncomfortable" -- and she brought me a mini-chair with no legs. MUCH better with a supportive back!


And finally...for dinner this evening I wanted something quick and easy, and I sure wouldn't have turned down a burger and fries. :-) With no McDonald's in sight, I turned to the next-best thing -- Papa John's Pizza. The take-out box was tied up with a handsome green ribbon...



...and the pizza was just what I'd expect in Lenexa, complete with the garlic butter sauce and the little packets of Tabasco. Only the package of "sweet green pickles" gave it away that I'm in Korea. That and the Cass Red beer...



I really have enjoyed the time in Korea, but I'm also super-eager to get back home and to see my family. Better have the barbecue sauce waiting!!

Motivational Work Environment

Jeff is at a different site three hours away today, so I'm on my own this evening. I have work to do but I can't stand to hole up in the hotel room all evening, so I had the taxi drop me off a little before our hotel at a place called "Western Bar". Very evocative. Unfortunately, Western Bar appears to be closed on Tuesdays(?).

I wandered down the street just a little bit and found what I'll call "Korean Bar". Although I can't read the sign over the door, there is a 6-foot blow up beer mug overflowing with foam tied down in front, so I got the idea. Now I'm sitting at a wooden table with a Hite draft and a bowl of lightly-sweetened popcorn, which seems to be a universal appetizer. I've ordered from the picture-menu a plate of things that look like meat skewers, and we'll see how that goes.

I'd take pictures, but any type of photo-taking apparatus is banned from the complex of the manufacturer we visited today so I'm camera-less. In any case, I'll take mental pictures, and I wish you were here, Dear Reader, to share a mug or three of liquid motivation!

UPDATE one hour later: The meat skewers were quite good. Some sort of chewy, well-cooked meat with a tongue-burning Korean barbecue sauce scattered with sesame seeds. Next up is a plate of sausages, almost like I'm in Germany. Oh yeah, and another beer, almost like I'm in Germany.

Random Observations

I have an extra few minutes while I wait for some work this morning, so I thought I'd post a collection of things I've noticed about Korea. More pictures are coming...but just not this morning.

• The price of gasoline here is about $6 per gallon. The price of a cup of Starbucks drip coffee is about $3.50. I think the ratio of the cost of coffee-to-gas is about the same as in the US.

• From observation, about 95% of Korean women routinely wear heels at least 1.5 inches high. You can see their ankles wobble as they walk, particularly on brick or cobblestone sidewalks, but we haven't observed any broken ankles yet.

• Our hosts tell us around 50% of Korean men smoke, and around 40% of Korean women. We don't see many cigarette ads (at least we don't see ads with pictures of cigarettes) but the penetration is still very high.
  
• If you scratch the facade of Americanism on many of the stores here, you find Korea inside. For example, I found a Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast and went looking for my usual cake donut. Instead, I found a "Sticky Rice Dough Honey Stick" and a "Mocha Coffee Roll". The Honey Stick is chewy dough, kind of like a very sweet bagel, that's made from rice. The Mocha thing is just a sweet roll with mocha flavoring mixed in. Of course, the veneer still holds -- both were liberally covered with donut icing.

• Having solved the problem of being unable to order beer, our next linguistic challenge is coffee. All the coffee bar servers assume we want a "Coffee Americano", which is an espresso shot blended that's diluted with hot water. And it tastes like it sounds -- like watered-down espresso. What I want is a normal "drip" coffee, but I just don't know the word for it. I point and pantomime, and I keep getting Americano. Grrr...

• There are two kinds of taxis. The black ones have leather seats and nice air conditioners and hang out around hotels. The white or light-colored ones are for the masses, and they patrol the streets looking for fares. They can actually pick up multiple fares at a time, so you might detour a little on the way to your destination. The black ones are about twice as expensive as the light ones. Both are clean and neat, however. I got in a cheap one this morning with my Dunkin' Donuts coffee and the taxi driver gave me a lecture about not drinking coffee in his cab. At least I think that's what he said.

• At Korean restaurants, the servers don't come around contsantly to see how you're doing and whether you need anything else. Instead, there's a button bolted to the table that you press when you need something. When you press it, the server literally jogs over to your table to find out what you need. Not a bad idea....

• There's no tipping in Korea. A standard 10% "service charge" is added to the bill. And there's still darned good service.

More as they come...

Tourist Saturday - Part One

Saturdays are for playing tourist -- and somehow they always seem to be rainy...

We visited the beautiful Gyeongbokgung Palace for our Saturday tourist outing. It's a beautiful example of traditional Korean architecture -- built in the 1400's when Seoul was founded, destroyed by the Japanese in 1590, rebuilt in the 1860's and then destroyed again by the Japanese in the early 20th century. It's now being restored yet again -- and hopefully it will stay restored this time!

This was the palace entertainment center. Sort of like our back deck! Sort of...

The palace is actually a complex of smaller buildings, all surrounded by a wall with sand courtyards between.

The outer walls are actually pillar-supported promenades.

This is the formal throne room where the king was crowned, and where he received state visitors.

The painting in the eaves and the interior is intricate, and the colors are striking.

This is the king's tea table...

...and this is his bed. Looks uncomfortable!!

Korean Fashion

Came across these examples of traditional Korean dress in a shop window. The only poeple we see wearing these are tour guides and the mother at a wedding.

More Milk!

I've continued the Milk Research Project and found bunches of the stuff!





There's also a fair amount of little coffees, mostly cold. We don't see as much of this as we did in Japan, but it's still a much bigger deal here than in the US.

Fried Chicken Friday

Friday evening we headed back to the 'Born To Be Chicken & Hof". We know they have beer, and fried chicken, and what can be better than that to end the week?

Here's how Jeff's plate of fried chicken looked.



I had the "smoked chicken". Other than it being scrawny, it tasted just like what we get at Hen House.



We also had the usual sides. They sure must throw away a lot of food with all those side dishes!



This time we also splurged on French Fries!



"Splurged??" you ask? Yep -- they're pretty proud of the Korean potatoes. That little plate o' fries was $11!

Little Touches of Home

Every now and then on a long trip you need a little injection of American to boost flagging energy. Those injections are NOT hard to find in Seoul -- American chains seem to be everywhere. For example, recognize this sign?



No? Here's a hint:



Ahhhh...breakfast!!



Of course, most of the signs are less translated -- and less subtle!

We broke down on Thursday evening and gave the local Outback a try. Jeff had chicken:



And I had beef. Korean beef. With kimchee...



I'm generally a huge fan of "local" cuisine, but I have to say I'm about full up on the "fermented cabbage" thing.

The Subway

We ride the subway to get around in Seoul. We seem to get a lot of "street cred" for doing it -- apparently most visitors just use taxis -- but we find that it's faster and a lot less expensive to get around. (Plus, all the walking to-and-from stations helps maintain our girlish figure.)

We've even bought "T-money" cards -- stored value cards with RFID tags that we use to pay for rides. The system was explained to us by a young Korean-American man doing his compulsory Korean military service by working for the subway company.

The subways are wonderfully clean and efficient, and the signage is all in both Korean characters and "English" characters so it's easy to get around. Most platforms are open to the trains like we're familiar with in America (okay, not in Kansas...) but the more crowded ones have glass walls with doors that open only once the train is stopped in place.

The advertising is interesting. It almost always contains some English text, and probably 20% of the people pictured in the ads are not Korean.

One of the most striking things about riding the subway is that positively EVERYONE is using a mobile device of some kind. Korea has a parallel system of transmitters that send a TV signal to their cell phones using a different radio than the cellular one, so you see lots of devices with long antennas, and it seems that catching up on the latest sitcom or soccer game is the pass-the-time activity of choice.

Wednesday Dinner

Seems like all we do is work and eat, and sleep occasionally, so if these posts seem to focus mostly around food -- there's a reason for that!

We were completely exhausted by the time we approached the hotel, but we decided to give traditional Korean food a try. (In reality, we were most interested in Korean beer.)

We ended up with this very delicious spicy pork dish, kept hot by a big burner in the middle of the table.



We also had a dish of rice and beef cooked in sesame oil



Both of these were served with a variety of mushrooms and cabbage in the bowl. There were also several other sides, including pickled radish-type things, dried seaweed and some dried anchovy-like fish -- whole.



But our quest for beer completely failed! Not having had time to study, we just couldn't produce the Korean word for beer so we had to make do with the jug of water served with the meal. I even mimed bottle motions -- so the waitress offered some bottled water!

We did get to drink out water from shot glasses, however.



Gan-bei!! (Bottoms-up!!)



(Saturday Note: We have since discovered that the "water" the waitress offered us was actually Soju, the Korean rice liquor. It's clear and it's served in a green bottle that says "fresh" on the front, with a picture of a droplet of water on a leaf. Who knew?!? If only we'd opened it... And by the way, our research has also revealed the Korean word for beer is "mehkju". Learn and remember!)

Morning in Seoul

Seems like this is when we do most of our work... With the 14 hour time difference we spend an awful lot of the wee hours on the phone with folks back in the US. But hey -- we get to see the sun rise!

Breakfast -- Yummy!

For breakfast this morning we just popped around the corner to the local Patisserie. Heck, we might as well be in France!



The bottom ones there are a "ham strip pastry" and a little pizza kind of thing.

I went with a traditional croissant and a hotdog pastry.




Dad asked me to do a little research into Korean milk, and I'm always happy to oblige when it involves culinary favors! I'm happy to report that the milk tastes delicious. I grabbed some Korean whole milk and a carton of strawberry-flavored drinkable yogurt (which might have come from Denmark -- not sure). There were also a bunch of cartons of flavored milk -- the usual strawberry, but also some things that looked like caramel and hazelnut. In any case, plenty of milk on the shelf!

We did stop at a local convenience store for some essentials (e.g. Diet Coke). Parthena, want me to bring home this epicurean delight as your gift?

It comes with Extra Virgin Olive Oil...

Time to get serious and head off to work now. We're being adventurous and taking the subway. And the security restrictions at the client are so severe that we aren't allowed to bring in any cameras or camera phones, so this will be a photo-less day.

More as it happens...

Day One Dinner

Since a room-service Cheeseburger at the Ritz-Carlton is $22, I decided to look outside the hotel for a quick evening meal. There's are quite a few eateries on our block, including a Patisserie, a coffee shop, a couple of convenience stores and several Korean Barbecue places that come with a firepit in the middle of the table.

I went the easy route and ended up at a Korean chicken joint.

The menu was in Korean and English, so I ordered "Garlick Chicken" and a draft beer. Seemed pretty tame.

First, I was served a familiar-looking appetizer.



Yep, plain ol' popcorn with my beer. Next came something a little more exotic -- a picked vegetable of some sort (turnip?) with a mix of salt and pepper for dipping. Oh, and a fork.



And then the chicken and coleslaw.


The chicken parts were a little on the scrawny side, but still too big for frog's legs. I had no trouble devouring the entire platter -- and I did! The "coleslaw" was really just strips of cabbage with a sweet, creamy dressing of some sort.

All in all, pretty moderate adventure, but just what the doctor ordered for a dazed traveler!