My favorite bathroom signs remain the ones that were at Donahue’s coffee shop on Disappointment Slough near Stockton. The doors were labelled “Inboards” and “Outboards”. For those of you who may be not boat literate, boats with engines inside are inboards and boats with engines mounted on the back are outboards. You go from there.
It’s hard to believe my last blog entry was almost a month ago. How time flies! It’s been pretty warm and rainy for the month. Usually the temps have been in the 80’s F (That’s high 20’s C) which isn’t too bad even given the humidity. Just in the last week, it’s been getting cooler in the evening. From Late July to about last weekend when there was a three day national holiday weekend is the tourist season. Several times we joined the throngs and went somewhere popular. One day it was estimated 6 million went to the beach somewhere. Now, Korea has a very long coastline, but that’s about 12% of the total population. We went a couple of times with friends or Myung’s sister’s family. We also went alone a couple of times. At no time was it your romantic, lonely stroll. Those are Myung’s friends, Geong Ja and Il Hwan, and me in the shade of a “pavillion” on the beach.
A couple of weekends ago it was her sister’s family we went with. Here they are inland from the beach at Seoraksan National Park, way up in the northeast.
And here is a spot near there.
Here are some pics of Seoraksan. It’s yet another beautiful place in this country.
Of course there are temples. Here are the obligatory temple pics. I still don’t tire of how they look from all the angles.
As long as I’m talking friends and family, here’s one of Myung’s childhood friend, Yung He and her husband, Geong Yoerl. They all went to grade school together.
This week we went on another little road trip, this time by ourselves, down to Hallyeo Maritime National Park on the south coast. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s beautiful, like a poor man’s Halong Bay in Vietnam. The other is a famous naval battle between Korea and Japan happened there in the 1590’s.
The main naval battle was fought here. It actually is interesting. The Korean admiral utilized the world’s first iron clad ships, called turtle ships because they had covers like turtles with spikes to deter anyone from jumping on. Secondly, he used the then new strategy of flanking the enemy ships and attacking at an angle. Before, they charged and passed, like the European navies still did a hundred years later, firing canons and trying to board. He engaged the front of the Japanese formation with his invinsible turtle ships while the smaller ships cut them up from the side. It all happened here.
After that we went up to Deogyusan National Park. Need I say it’s exquisitly beautiful?
Then we went to Maisan Provincial Park near there. It’s mostly famous for this temple built by a lay person over the course of 30 years. There is no mortar, not even on the little towers. Needless to say, there are many signs telling people not to touch. Someday somebody’s going to mess it up, no doubt.
Some of our travelling together is very nice. Sometimes….
The picture of the guy in the upper left sums up my feelings after a long day somewhere and the then the sometimes long subway ride to Yangsan after a long bus ride.
Let’s talk food. I’d say we eat fusion. Actually, I probably get more American food than when I’m travelling because I can have anything I can find the ingredients to and make it myself. That’s as long as I can cook it on the stove. Koreans don’t usually have ovens. They fry everything. Even Korean barbeque is essentially frying, as it’s on a hot plate over coals or gas. You just grease it up with pork fat or something and fry whatever you have. The outer part of the BBQ surface is a moat where you boil up soup the way you like it. The ingredients are all on the side. This is what we have whwen we are at Geong Joerl and Yung He’s restaurant. Anyway, at home we often have fusion or a little of this and a little of that. We do eat the Korean way, that is we have one or two main things and several side dishes which invariably include a couple of kinds of kimchi. We may also have an American salad with oil and vinegar type dressings or thousand island I make up out of mayo, ketchup and pickled cucumbers Myung makes. We even have balsamic vinegar. This is foreign food to Myung. Also, she is “the noodle queen”. I pronounced her that after watching her eat noodles maybe nine out of ten days we were travelling. She wasn’t that wild about Indian food and steadily enjoyed noodles. So we have spaghetti a lot. I’m not that busy, so I kind of like chopping up the excellent tomatoes they have here and adding the usual ingredients. I wish we had fresh Italian seasoning, but I was able to find dried McCormick’s in a store in Busan. It’s looking like I make breakfast, so we always start with filter coffee with beans ground at the store we get them. Sometimes I even drink my coffee with sweetened condensed milk, a habit I got into after eturning from SE Asia in ’99. Then I often make eggs. You don’t want to know how many eggs I eat. If I had a cardiologist I think he’d have a heart attack. I like the way I cook eggs, nice and soft over low heat. I’m afraid the Koreans like them flash fried hard over high heat. That’s why I’m the breakfast cook. I often make omelets and scramlets with various things I’m familiar with, like mushrooms, tomatoes, bell peppers, onions and ham. The ham here is like spam, but what the heck. I also like to make home fries. Myung likes this fine and lets me do my thing. Oh, we found Quaker’s Oatmeal in Busan. We went through that in no time. For a price you can get raisens. Also it was good with granny smith-type apples and cinnamon. Lunch may be sandwiches or Korean food. You can by whole wheat bread with too much conditioner, and that’s what we have around the house. We have ham a lot, usually with mustard, onions, tomatoes and lettuce. Sometimes we have american cheese. Real cheese is expensive and a little hard to find. I’m not going $8/pound for cheddar, thank you very much. One good thing is that Myung doesn’t have preconceived notions about foreign food, so what is old hat to me is fun for her. She even likes peanut butter, mayonaise and lettuce sandwiches with me. The folks back home laugh at that one. As for the Korean food, Myung is a fine cook. Sometimes it’s a little hot even for me, but it’s just the way we like it, ain’t it boys. I’ve eaten practically everything you can eat someplace or another, so nothing “funny” bothers me. Koreans generally use only a few spices, salt, black pepper, much red pepper, sesame, soy sauce, onion, garlic and ginger. Other seasoning is in gourmet cooking, but you don’t see much of it. Delicate spices don’t exist. Most of what she makes is fried or sauteed. What the Koreans lack in seasoning variety, they more than make up with food variety. We eat a million kinds of greens, tubors, beans, ferns, whatever. Our main meat is mackerel. We bought a hunk of pork last week. That was a first. Beef’s expensive, though it’s come down since Korea started allowing American beef after many years. That’s a long story involving mad cow fear, saving the domestic beef industry and competing political entities. The kimchi is of course not fried. We have a rice cooker. That’s handy. We also eat a lot of soups and stews. She really is a good cook.
Those are breakfast dishes we had a few days ago at a restaurant while we were travelling. I had the tripe soup and she had the congealled blood drop soup. I had blood soup before in Asia. I preferred the tripe, with three cups of coffee. Fusion.
The food is so hot here that I wear a headband to keep the sweat out of my eyes.
Y’know, I could really write endlessly about this time in my life. Maybe if I wrote more often, the entries would 1) be more digestible and 2) have more written content and fewer pictures, at least at a time. Well, I’ll try to get more in here. I’m not sure who reads this anyway. I get very little feedback. I think I’m doing it mostly for myself, like a diary. Someday it may be of interest to me. The pics I’ll have on CD’s and DVD’s.
I’ll close for now with a few more pictures I just like. The first is of one of the huge black butterflies here. The others are just pics of Myung and me. Be well, all of you.
