Our Seoul and Tokyo Adventure: Day Twelve

The last day of 2007? Already? Well, around my parents' house, the last day of the year is a busy day, but we started out like any other day, with a breakfast of toast, cereal, and a plate of fresh fruit (apples, mandarin oranges, and persimmons). Ever since I can remember, my dad's liked to put two different toppings on his toast, side-by-side, and today he graced his slice with blueberry jam on one half and pineapple cream cheese on the other:

Although my parents aren't Buddhist, my father's parents and all of his sisters were/are Buddhists, and as the eldest (and only) son, it's my father's responsibility to uphold the Buddhist tradition of performing jaesa (Buddhist memorial rites) to honour the family ancestors. While he is technically supposed to observe these five times a year (once on new year's day for all ancestors, and then on each anniversary of his parents' and their parents' deaths), the amount of work involved means that my parents have condensed these observations to three times a year (new year's day for everyone, the date of my grandmother's death for both her and my grandfather, and the date of my great-grandfather's death for both him and my great-grandmother). For one of these jaesa (my grandparents'), the entire family comes to my parents' house to pay their respects, but on new year's day, it's usually just my parents. This year, the new year's jaesa would include me and Bob, and although we kept offering our help with the substantial food preparations, my parents seemed to have their own rhythm of tasks that didn't allow us much opportunity to contribute. To begin with, the house got a good cleaning. (As you can tell, my subjects have gotten used to me taking photos of most everything . . . .)

Since there was so much cooking to do, we got our lunch delivered--jajangmyeun (Chinese noodles in black bean sauce) is the most common food that Koreans get delivered, and as with all such deliveries, ours included plastic plates that we rinsed and left outside the front door to be picked up by the restaurant later that day. The plate of mandu (dumplings) was a freebie from the restaurant.

When my parents were in Vancouver last year, they wanted to have jajangmyeun one day, and since Bob and I lived close to several Korean restaurants, my dad insisted on calling to see if they delivered, even though I said that I didn't think Vancouver Korean restaurants did that. Sure enough, I was right, and my parents were thoroughly perplexed--a restaurant that serves jajangmyeun but doesn't deliver? For them, that was as bizarre as a pizza place that didn't deliver. On a sidenote, the black colour of jajangmyeun is even associated with a special day in Korea. Koreans celebrate Valentine's Day on February 14th, but only men receive chocolates on this day. Before all you female readers voice your concern about this state of affairs, Koreans also celebrate "White Day" on March 14th, when only women receive chocolates. Ah, but another month later, there's "Black Day" when all the single people who didn't get chocolates on Valentine's Day or White Day meet up in jajangmyeun restaurants to drown their chocolate sorrows in giant bowls of the black noodle dish.

After lunch, I decided to see if my dad had played a turn in our email scrabble game, and since he had, I looked at my tiles to take my turn. While I was thinking about what word to make, my dad wandered in to see if I was taking my turn. "Hey! No peeking at my letters!" I said, and my dad laughed at being caught, and left me to take my turn.

Bob, my dad, and I went to do some errands around town, picking up some last-minute jaesa necessities. It was another really cold day, and my dad was very happy to see this small stall set up near the centre of Suji:

Once we peered into the tent and saw what they were selling, I was very happy too! The steaming hot fish-shaped pastries with sweet red-bean filling

are delicious, especially on a cold day.

When we got home, the house was full of cooking smells, but not for tonight's dinner--everything was for the jaesa, and I told my dad that he should give the tired chef a massage!

We would eat a lot tomorrow, so tonight we just had a simple dinner of beef-based soup, rice, and ban chan.

Although he's definitely not the executive chef of the house, my dad had his assignments when it came to cooking for the jaesa, including making the batter

and frying the zucchini slices.

While my parents were cooking and I was keeping them company in the kitchen, I realised that I hadn't yet taken a photo of my favourite new addition to their house:

Bob and I quickly got used to their filtered water dispenser, which has buttons for cold water, room-temperature water, hot water, and extra-hot water for tea. It was going to be hard to leave such convenience for our simple Brita back in London! Anyway, the cooking was finally done for the night, and since it was new year's eve, the bartender got down to work.

The three drinkers had black Russians and I had a lychee and apple juice

at the ready for a midnight toast. We watched the ceremonial ringing of the Bosingak bell

and thought it was funny that all the new year's celebrations were taking place at the base of the giant skyscraper Christmas tree that we had passed many times during this trip.

Actually, our Suji bus usually stops right in this camera shot, but I guess there weren't any buses running there tonight!

Our Seoul and Tokyo Adventure: Day Eleven

Bob was feeling quite a bit better today, but still didn't have enough energy to leave the house, so we left him there while we went to the Shinsegae Department Store to pick up some groceries. Unfortunately, what sounded like a relatively straightforward errand turned out to be a rather frustrating experience, filled with labyrinthine parking lots, elevators that never arrived, and a long walk to get into the department store--only to discover that we still had thirty minutes to wait until the store actually opened! This would have been fine, except that the parking garage was really freezing and after finally locating the store entrance, we were reluctant to walk away from our hard-won find. After finding a store employee, who explained the situation (apparently every single Shinsegae Department Store in greater Seoul keeps the same hours, except for the Suji store, which opens an hour later on Sundays), we were escorted through the still-closed store (which was filled with people getting ready for the busy day) and shown a warm place where we could wait.

We weren't the only people who were here early, and over the half hour, about twenty other people joined us. I was shocked to see that an employee cleaned every step of the escalator during our wait, using a brush and cloth to wipe down all the grooves in the steps. Does this happen everywhere and I've just never witnessed it, or does this fit as firmly into the way-beyond-the-call-of-duty category as I think it does?

The store finally opened and since we were amongst the first handful of people to enter, we experienced something that I first experienced on a visit to Seoul a long time ago, which still makes me quite uncomfortable: when a department store opens, all the employees (of which there are easily ten times more than in a Canadian or UK store) line up along the central aisle and bow to the first group of customers to enter the store. So, as we walked down the very long aisle toward the grocery section, all the employees bowed to us in a surreal domino effect. Needless to say, I didn't have the nerve to get a photo! We had come to Shinsegae today instead of going to the E-Mart because we had some special ingredients to buy for New Year's Day, including fish (gum tae),

vegetables (this is one of my favourites, gosari, or young fern shoots),

and that rarity of my parents' diet, beef. Beef isn't cheap in Korea, with the most expensive varieties costing up to 11,500 Won per 100 grams--that's CAD$63 or GBP£31 per pound! We didn't buy the most expensive cuts, but still, the price was definitely of the special-occasion variety.

This booth made fresh tofu on-site, and after sampling some of the delicious black-sesame tofu, we bought a (still warm from the preparation) package of it.

When we arrived home, we were happy to see that Bob was having a more vertical day than yesterday, and I took this photo in my dad's study because I thought it looked funny that Bob had taken over my dad's computer and had seemingly relegated my dad to the floor!

(Actually, my dad was connecting something to the computer's USB port, and the computer was on the floor, so Bob isn't quite as pushy as he looks.) Depending on where you looked, after lunch (Chinese steamed buns and a lox salad for three of us, and Campbell's chicken noodle soup and dry toast for you-know-who) the afternoon was spent over another game of scrabble

or a bit of solitary i-podding.

Even though it was a really cold day, my dad and I decided to go for a rambly walk over to the E-Mart to pick up some things. We walked through some of the main streets of town, including what my parents call "Suji Myeongdong" because it's the busiest part of Suji. Every building in this area is crammed full of businesses, many of them tiny, and very few of them at street level--hence the flurry of advertising that makes for a rather overwhelming variety of signs!

We were freezing by the time we arrived at the E-Mart, and I practically ran across the street to get into the warm store,

which was super-busy this close to the new year.

Back home, the outdoor wanderers warmed up,

while the shut-in remained with earplugs firmly attached.

For dinner, we had a rather light meal of fried rice and fish, which Bob also ate.

After dinner, and after much reluctance on his part ("Oh, I don't know, it sounds pretty complicated"), I showed my dad how we could play scrabble by email even after I was back in London. To get him comfortable with such a wild and crazy premise, we started an email game tonight, while we were in the same house. The big question is: will my dad take to this new, bizarre way of playing an old favourite?

Our Seoul and Tokyo Adventure: Day Ten

We had planned on heading into the country today to take in some sights and eat some yummy food, but cancelled our plans early this morning, partly because it was supposed to snow quite a bit in the part of Korea that we would be driving around, but mainly because poor Bob was having quite a terrible bout of stomach trouble, and neither of us got any sleep last night with all the "drama" that went on. With Bob in bed for most of the day, the rest of us stuck close to home, puttering around and taking care of the patient. Since the only thing that Bob and I ate differently yesterday was our lunch, my dad figured that there must have been some bad mayo or something in those California rolls, and we all hoped that Bob would be feeling better soon. While Bob tried to get some sleep, my dad roped me into helping him edit some abstracts for a while:

Although the living-room plants looked very happy in the morning sunshine,

when we out to the Saturday market, we realised how cold it had gotten overnight!

Bob held down the fort while we were gone.

We ended up buying a lot of fish, fruit, and vegetables from the vendors,

and I just stood by while my parents decided what to get.

There was even an oden stall in the market, and my dad suggested we warm up with some steamy treats and a cup of hot broth.

My parents hadn't brought down enough cash for all their purchases, so while I carried the fish upstairs, they arranged for the produce seller to bring their heavy purchases up to their apartment--and, in a moment of no-one-would-ever-go-for-that-in-Canada-or-the-UK, my dad collected 3,000 Won in change from the seller before he even paid for his purchases! When the man came upstairs shortly after we left, my dad paid him and tipped a small amount for the delivery, but I still couldn't stop thinking about this strange transaction that involved my dad leaving with extra cash in his pocket without having paid. The cold weather was perfect for another scrabble game in the comfort of home, and you'd think that my dad's big smile was because of a particularly good play or something, but in fact, this was his face after I won!

"It's my pleasure to lose," he said, adding that should always be a teacher's reaction to being surpassed by his or her student! For dinner, we had leftovers, which had the added benefit of not creating too many new cooking smells to set off Bob's super-sensitive stomach.

And what did poor Bob have today? One piece of dry toast, one spoon of rice, one strawberry, four bottles of Chilsung Cider (a Korean pop which is like 7-Up), and one bottle of Gatorade. Since I hadn't slept all night either, we both went to bed early and hoped that all would be better in the morning . . . .

Our Seoul and Tokyo Adventure: Day Nine

Although we'd been carrying them around for more than a week, it was only today that I noticed the cute message on one of my parents' housekeys (the only comparatively low-tech, non-electronic key of the bunch):

After having spent our other Seoul days wandering around the downtown area, we decided to head to an entirely different part of town today: Apgujeongdong. Lonely Planet Seoul describes the area as "a haughty haute couture shopping area . . . [where] young women wear Westwood and are as wafer thin as their mobile phones, which they use to ring their cosmetic surgeons while nibbling a tiny slice of green-tea cheesecake in an all-white well-being café." This pretty accurately describes the overall aesthetic of the area--although without being able to read Hangul, you may not realise the incredible number of plastic surgeons in the area (and I do mean incredible--my dad said that no doctors ever left his hospital for private practice, except for plastic surgeons, who would set up shop in Apgujeongdong and then quickly zoom beyond their previous salaries), and there are still nice places to walk on the side streets that aren't quite as upscale. In any case, Bob was curious about the neighbourhood and pointed out that we like wandering through Tokyo's ultra-upscale Ginza, and I hadn't been to Apgujeongdong in many, many years, so we decided to give it a try. We caught a different express bus from Suji, arriving a bit sleepy (the bus got stuck in some pretty bad traffic) and hungry--the perfect excuse for a snack! Since we were in Seoul last year, a new American chain has cropped up almost everywhere, and I must admit that it's a chain that I don't mind:

Although coffee is popular in Korea, most coffee consumed is of the instant variety. Cafés often serve up watery espresso-based drinks, and then of course there's the ubiquitous (bad) Starbucks coffee that has long taken over the city. I liked The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf when I was in Los Angeles (which is where I think the chain started) and today's coffees ended up being the best we had in Seoul during our entire visit--still miles and miles behind our beloved Monmouth, but after too many cups of instant, it was still nice to savour some proper coffee along with a creamy slice of tiramisu. After we finished our snacks, we wandered across the street to another branch of Kosney,

where I resisted buying anything after realising that everything I wanted was either large, heavy, breakable, or all three!

This Apgujeongdong building was very strange,

and we wandered through quite a few of the neighbourhood back streets before heading to the Hyundai Department Store in search of a late lunch.

Their basement food court was a little less user-friendly for Bob than the Lotte basement, with no English and very few photos of the various food choices, but we wandered from place to place and I read out the menu options and described some of the dishes that Bob hadn't yet tried. In the end, he grabbed a California roll and tonkatsu combo from a deli outside the food court while I queued to get my lunch. Thankfully, it was a bit past the usual lunchtime, so there were plenty of seats (something that's often a problem if you want to eat during peak periods).

I didn't end up taking a photo of Bob's lunch because I didn't think it looked so great (which would end up being closer to the truth that I realised), but here's my delicious kalguksu (handmade knife-cut noodles in a rich broth) lunch, which I was very happy to find out came with one of my favourite ban chan (at the upper left): seasoned perilla (also known as shiso) leaves, perfect for wrapping around mouthfuls of rice.

After we finished, we had a peek at the Hyundai grocery floor--known for its high level of service and even higher prices.

"How can they pay so many people to work here?" Bob wondered aloud, and there did seem to be one employee for every two customers!

In Korea, fruit is typically given as a special gift, all boxed up (the better the department store name on the box, the more special the gift) and even dressed up for the occasion. These melons probably cost 20-30,000 Won each, with several to a box.

Before we knew it, it was time to head back to Suji, since we said we'd be back in time for dinner, and after this morning's traffic, we didn't want to take any chances on the return journey. Before dinner, we were spectators at a Suji tae kwon do school's annual "promotion" night for the youngest students (including a family member who takes classes there), and it was quite the experience! Each belt level performed together, with a series of sparring matches and kicks.

I wouldn't want to meet this girl in a dark alley! (Even her sparring partner seems a bit hesitant, don't you think?)

Every student, regardless of level, broke a wooden board with her or his foot.

Just when I thought the evening was over, the instructor started calling all the moms up to the centre of the gym, where (to my complete disbelief) they all attempted to break stacks of five boards, set up on blocks. If they were successful, they were called back to attempt seven, and then nine boards. The whole thing looked super-intense!

Then it was the dads' turn--with eleven boards stacked up, some of the men really took a big swing at the task at hand!

After these displays, Bob and I felt like the weakest people in the room. This type of participation would never happen in Canada without waivers being signed and proper instruction given, but tonight's parents weren't given any help at all--they just walked up to the boards and off they went, without exception. After all the martial-art excitement, we headed back to (you guessed it) Suji Restaurant Town to try our third restaurant of the complex. The robust decor seemed to fit with the board-breaking theme of the evening,

although I'm not sure what it all had to do with the restaurant's specialty, roast duck.

With a rather light array of ban chan (the pink one is one of my favourites--a non-spicy gimchee made of giant radish, immersed in a tangy, refreshing broth) and a nice salad,

the final course of the meal was one of my favourites: dul gae su jae bi (perilla leaf and black sesame soup made from dough flakes).

A thick soup with nutty sesame overtones, the soup was a brilliant way to end this cold winter night.