next-korea

[next-korea]

Seoul (Sunday, 6/23)

Chapter Z: The 5-second goodbye.

It’s our last day in Seoul! Our flight is at 4PM. Our Airbnb checkout is at 11AM, and we grab brunch at Seoul Station.

Then we head into Seoul Station to buy 5 tickets to the next Airport Express train departing at 12:30. After we select “English” on the ticket machine, the screen shows the following:

Uh oh, we realize. It’s 12:20PM. There are 5 of us, and our flight is at 4PM on the dot. Arriving at 2:21PM is cutting it a bit too close for our liking.

We wander to the nearby subway station. It’s now 12:43PM. We look at the subway schedule.

“Are you serious!” I yell. “The sign doesn’t say when the 12:46 subway will arrive at the airport???”

“Yeah...” mutters some of the others.

“Okay... so we have two minutes to decide whether we should get on this next subway or not. Do you think it’ll be faster than taking the Airport Express?” The clock shows 12:44PM.

Tommy saves the day. “This site says it takes 66 minutes,” he says, looking at his phone. “That means we’ll get there at 1:52PM, a much more comfortable destination time.”

But... we already paid for our $30/person Airport Express tickets, and if we refund them then we miss the subway. “I’ll refund them,” Michael says. “Your flights are all at 4PM, but my flight isn’t until 7PM. I’ll just get on the next subway.”

Well, we’re a group so we should be sticking together. “NO THERE’S NO TIME IT’S ALREADY 12:45!”

We yell bye and hug in a time span of about 5 seconds. Then, the four of us (everyone other than Michael) make a dash into the subway station. We take out our metro cards and RUN inside. It’s still 12:45... we’re going to make it...

Chapter Z2: The Escalator.

It turns out we’re not at the train doors yet. Instead, there’s an escalator down to the station. This isn’t a short escalator - from the top, we can’t even see to the bottom. And the escalator is PACKED with people.

So we get on the escalator.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

We made it.

At the airport, I again listen to the beautiful live marimba performance.

It was already a long day. Since the beginning of June 23rd we had: finished up playing at the Samsung PC cafe; slept; woken up and cleaned up our AirBnb; eaten at Seoul Station; abandoned Michael in Korea; and dashed frantically to get to the airport on time.

We still had many hours ahead of us on the plane, and we arrive in San Francisco at 10:40AM, so we have an entire day to not fall asleep for. Now we go back to our normal life.

It was a good time in Seoul. Until next time.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Saturday, 6/22)

We only went to a PC cafe twice during our trip. That’s not enough. We went there again.

We didn’t go to the same cafe that we went to the first two times, though - that would be boring. Instead, we searched Google Maps and found a place called Samsung Cafe. It was about a 20 minute walk away.

This PC cafe was much more sketchy. While the Hongdae cafe had 50MB download speed, this one only had about 25MB.

We played until midnight, when Michael suggested that we play LoL.* Unfortunately, I don’t care too much for LoL, so Becky and I took a taxi home. The rest of the crew played for a few more hours.

Our taxi driver didn’t speak English.

*Stay tuned for the next-korea sequel.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Saturday, 6/22)

One bulgogi burger wasn’t enough for Tommy. So we went back to the Starfield Mall, and Tommy, Michael, and Eva ate somewhere (I don’t know where). Becky and I headed for the Gongcha again (so that they could get the boba that they had wanted before the GSL finals started).

Becky and I weren’t very good at navigating, so it took us about the same amount of time to walk to the Gongcha as it took the rest of the crew to eat second dinner and walk to the Gongcha.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Saturday, 6/22)

Game 5. Map: New Repugnancy.

We’re back for the final stretch of the GSL Finals. It’s game 5, and a lengthy technical battle ensues. Trap unleashes the full potential of his race, starting with dark templars, units that are permanently invisible. As if that’s not overpowered already, Trap warps the dark templars around Dark’s base, attacking one spot and then immediately teleporting to another location. Dark seems in a tough spot.

Then suddenly, Dark reveals the Zerg’s secret weapon - the Nydus network! The Nydus a large worm that burrows underneath the ground. The Zerg bugs can use this worm to transport themselves instantaneously across the map, just like how the Protoss can teleport units. Using this crude but effective version of the Protoss’s teleportation technology, Dark brings the fight to Trap’s base and kills him!

In summary, at first everyone thought the winner was (Michael’s sign and Tommy’s idea!):

but then the game tended toward...

Dark!

Artosis’s comment: “Whoa! It’s a Dan Brown book on a poster!”

Score: Dark 3, Trap 2.

Game 6. Map: Cyber Forest.

It’s match point! Will Trap be able to make a comeback?

Spoiler: he doesn’t. Now armed with the effectiveness of Nydus teleportation technology, Dark quickly unleashes an army of Zerg bugs that immediately spills into and destroys Trap’s base. The game ends quickly. Score: Dark 4, Trap 2. Dark wins!

More importantly, we got a picture with the famous English casters (which we weren’t able to listen to because we didn’t get the English headsets, but we listened to them later on the stream) Artosis (left) and Tasteless (right).

[next-korea]

Seoul (Saturday, 6/22)

We got back to the GSL tournament studio, and hit some bad news: they ran out of headsets to listen to the English casters. So we had to listen to only the Korean casters.

But we knew what the format of the finals would be. Trap and Dark would play a best of 7 games.

We were given some blank sheets of poster paper to make signs cheering for our favorite player. We got to work decorating them. I’ll show you some of our signs as I go through the games. Here we go!

Game 1. Map: Thunderbird.

This game is relatively standard as Starcraft games go. Trap, the Protoss player, aggressively marches an army of four immortals and many other units protected by a flying teleporter (warp prism). Dark has a few bugs (roaches and ravagers) on the ground which stood no chance against a flying teleportation device. However, he had also secretly hatched a few expensive flying lizards (mutalisks) that were able to sneakily snipe the teleporter out of the sky. This turned the tide of the battle, and Dark was able to overrun the Protoss army with his swarm of bugs. Score: Dark 1, Trap 0.

Game 2. Map: Turbo Cruise.

This game ramped up much more quickly. Dark tried to infest the enemy base at the beginning of the game. Unfortunately for him, Trap chose to build a army quickly in the beginning of the game, and was able to defeat Dark. Score: Dark 1, Trap 1.

Michael made a sign that got featured on the stream:

Game 3. Map: King’s Cove.

This time, Trap tried to get a bit cheeky. He tried to build some cannons and immortals in Zerg’s base at the beginning of the game. Unfortunately, he accidentally Trap-ped his immortal, and it got killed off easily. Score: Dark 2, Trap 1.

Becky and I kind of got in the camera... a little bit... but we did bring our friend, Baneling! Baneling is a type of unit in the Zerg race that can explode and spill caustic acid over its enemies. Our Baneling is a lot friendlier, though.

Game 4. Map: GSL Cobalt.

This time neither player makes any high-risk moves at the beginning of the game. Instead, Dark invests in creating swarm hosts, which are little mushroom-like thingies that can generate smaller little bugs. The smaller bugs automatically die after 18 seconds, but the swarm hosts can’t regenerate more bugs until after 43 seconds. Unfortunately for Dark, Trap decides to attack him during those 43 - 18 = 25 seconds, and Dark isn’t able to do anything. Score: Dark 2, Trap 2.

It’s dinner time! Everyone in the studio got a bulgogi beef burger. It was really good.

At a score of 2-2, the finals could be anyone’s match. So far Trap, who controls the technologically advanced Protoss race with teleportation and immortal members, has dropped two games, one from losing his teleportation device and one from trapping his own immortal unit. Will Trap be able to learn from his mistakes and defeat Dark’s bugs? Or will Dark find a way to fight against the teleportation technology of the Protoss?

Stay tuned to find out. But here’s a hint: Nydus.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Saturday, 6/22)

Since we still have 30 minutes left, and not being ones to waste time, we quickly walk a block to the nearby Starfield Mall. They are most well known for a huge library, the Starfield Library, with two-story high walls lined with books.

The reason why we came to the Starfield Mall was actually because the others wanted boba tea from Gongcha. But they didn’t get any because the line was too long.

By the way, I was able to reach some of the high-up books and I realized they were all fake; the “book” was just a plastic box with a random title pasted to the front. So I’m not impressed by this tourist trap.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Saturday, 6/22)

It is 4:30PM. Only 30 minutes left until the beginning of the Starcraft, GSL, Season 2, Mountain Dew, CodeS (in some order) finals!

Here’s a brief introduction. Starcraft is an online multiplayer computer game. Every season, Korean professional players enter a bracket tournament called the GSL in a series of 1v1 games in order to see who is the best. Audience members can spectate these games. Mountain Dew is the sponsor, so that’s why they’re in the name.

The 1v1 matches have been in progress for the past several weeks, and now everyone has been eliminated except for the two finalists. The finalists are known by their online usernames, Trap and Dark.

The interesting thing about this match is that it is not symmetric. Trap is an inexperienced but determined player. He often relies on cheeses and cheap tricks in order to snatch a win. His play style is the very definition of “stability” on opposite day - cluttered with awkward strategies and execution blunders. Dark, on the other hand, is a master of strategy, execution, attack, defense, macro-management, micro-management, calculation, intuition, patience, aggression, speed, deduction, consistency, power, quick reaction, stability, charisma, invention of new techniques, improvements on existing techniques, coming up with effective plans, hiding his own plan, reading his opponent’s mind, intimidating the opponent, keeping his cool in tense situations, and playing the game.

The match itself is also not symmetric. In Starcraft there are three different races that you can play, and the mechanics for each race are very different. Dark plays the Zerg, a race of little bugs that can bite their opponents and excrete a dark goo that they need to stay on in order to be mobile. Trap plays the Protoss, a race with highly advanced technology, including the ability to teleport throughout the map, cloak themselves to be invisible, and change the flow of time. The Protoss have highly powerful units as well, including the immortal, which from its name can never die because when nearing death it can just disappear (warp) and reappear later with regenerated health (and is considered by everyone to be the strongest unit in the game), and the carrier, which is a capital ship that is basically invincible against Zerg, because a ship cannot be bitten by bugs.

^ The Protoss ships (left) against the Zerg bugs (right)

However, the asymmetries in the players’ skill level and in the races’ innate abilities cancel each other out, so that the outcome of the match is completely open to call! We have no idea who will win! Let the match begin!

[next-korea]

Seoul (Saturday, 6/22)

It was around 2PM and the GSL finals starts at 5PM. So we took a train stop north from Gangnam to 221b cafe. In case you didn’t know, 221b stands for 221 Baker Street, which is none other than the address of famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

It turns out that Sherlock Holmes cafes are popular all over the world, but the 221b cafe in Seoul is one of the most famous. From the outside it’s not too noticeable:

The cafe was pretty nice - the food was normal. I don’t drink non-H2O beverages, so I got some blueberry yogurt. Good news - it turned out to have real blueberries inside! But bad news - the blueberries seemed like they were just taken out of the freezer. So I’m eating this nice, chilled blueberry yogurt, and every once in a while I bite into a SUPER COLD BLUEBERRY.

The well known actor Benedict Cumberbatch plays Sherlock Holmes in the popular TV show, so the interior of the cafe is filled with various pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch. It looked basically like this:

So Benedict Cumberbatch, Benedict Cumberbatch, Benedict Cumberbatch. Apart from Benedict Cumberbatch, there really wasn’t anything too interesting going on with this cafe. There was a magic mirror, but that’s not too interesting.

So let’s talk about something else instead of the magic mirror. I want to talk about discrete and continuous belts.

This is what I call a discrete belt. It’s not a real term; I made it up. It’s called a discrete belt because there are several small holes along the strap that the prong can go into. The prong has to go in one hole or the next; it can’t go in between two holes. The set of places where the prong can go through is a discrete set of holes.

If I were talking to Becky right now, she would tell me that she gets it already and that I should move on. However, she’s not here, so I can keep going as I please.

Have you ever gotten annoyed because if you put the prong in one hole, your pants are too loose, but if you put the prong in the next hole, the pants are too tight? Well, I have this problem all the time. And that’s why I much prefer the continuous belt.

That prong can go in between any of those threads. The set of places that it can go is the continuous spectrum all along the strap! (Some people in the real world use the more mundane term “belt without holes”.)

Some of you may comment that since the prong has to go between two threads, the set is still technically discrete. To which I reply: go away and find some other blog to criticize.

Some more of you may comment that this doesn’t seem related to Korea. That’s a more sensible criticism, so I explain: I forgot my belt in the United States, so I had to buy a belt here. And since I had to get a new belt, I made sure to get the significantly more convenient, significantly more fashionable, and significantly more robust one - the continuous belt.

Here is a picture of my belt in the 221b cafe.

We never did get that magic mirror working, did we?

FAQ

Q: What on earth were you thinking when you wrote this post?

A: Well, I had a single image of the magic mirror in the cafe. But upon looking more closely at the picture, I realized my shirt had lifted up a bit, resulting in a rather ugly pose with my belt exposed. So that’s why this entire post is about a belt.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Saturday, 6/22)

Today is Starcraft GSL day! The finals starts at 5PM. Our plan is to visit the Sherlock Holmes 221b cafe, which is near the AfreecaTV building where the finals is hosted. Our modified plan is to first visit Gangnam, which is close to the 221b cafe. Let’s see how well we stick to the plan...

Our story today starts as soon as we walk out of our AirBnb. Tommy is the first out the door, and as soon as he steps out, a little Korean boy walks past him.

This Korean boy looks exactly the same as the boy who Michael was playing peekaboo with on the bus a few days ago.

We all look at each other with astonished glances. That had to be the same one.

Or, is it just that all young Korean boys look the same? Surely, that can’t be the case.

The boy disappears around a corner before we can process what happened. Shrugging, we continue to Seoul Station, where we have lunch.

I got normal beef bibimbap this time. Note that the food in my bowl (bottom right) is red. That’s because they had already added the spicy gochujang, and it was the spiciest bibimbap I’ve ever had. All throughout the meal, the voice of Jihwaja restaurant CEO Yong-kyu Han played in my head: “Korean food everywhere nowadays is all too salty and spicy. Here at Jihwaja, we only use natural ingredients with no added spices, additives, or preservatives.” I longed for more Jihwaja food.

From Seoul station we took the metro to Gangnam. I had some trouble figuring out where the main streets of Gangnam actually were, but we did find this sign:

We should have walked east from this sign, but instead we walked north. The stores slowly thinned, and more generic buildings appeared. Things started to look less interesting. We were far from both Gangnam, and the 221b cafe that we were planning to head to next.

All of a sudden, we saw this sign:

Apparently, there are lots of Sherlock Holmes cafes in Gangnam, and we had accidentally ran into one. We weren’t planning on going to any Sherlock Holmes cafe though - we wanted to go to the one and only 221b cafe. So we kept walking, until we found an archery range.

We paid about $7 per person and waited for half an hour. Then we shot some arrows.

Immediately, the lady managing the range told us “Finish” in broken English. After only a few minutes, we were done and had to make way for the next customers. Overall, pretty pathetic experience. The targets were also only about a dozen meters away.

But we had killed an hour or so, and it was now time to head to the 221b cafe.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Friday, 6/21)

The DMZ tour bus dropped us off at City Hall at around 1PM. It is possible to book the DMZ tour with lunch included, but Michael had recommended booking without lunch and just getting lunch by ourselves.

The city hall is a few blocks away from LoL park (LoL stands for League of Legends, I think, which is a multiplayer computer game). We thought we’d go check it out, so first we went to a nearby mall and got lunch at 본 우리반상 (Bon Korean Food). In retrospect I think someone looked up the place, but I wasn’t paying attention at that time. Many of us were busy playing Wordament, an iPhone game that we used to play four years ago back in college.

I wanted to get bibimbap, so that’s what I ordered. But the server brought me this huge bowl of clams and green onions:

Turns out this is their special clam bibimbap. It was extremely salty, but otherwise tasted great. I want one again.

Here’s a picture of all of us with our food:

By the way, you can see a Gongcha boba tea through the window. It turns out that there are Gongchas on every block in Seoul - it’s like Dunkin Donuts in the northeast. I’m not a fan of boba tea, but the rest of the crew got several boba breaks during our trip.

The LoL park itself was really boring; I don’t remember anything about it. We tried to enter the LoL PC cafe. Recall that we had also went to a PC cafe yesterday in Hongdae, but due to an unfortunate combination of today being Friday and this PC cafe being a particularly famous one, the cafe was entirely full.

Any reasonable tourist group would probably take this as a sign that they should continue exploring the city, or visiting some other tourist attractions in Seoul, or basically anything other than take a 45-minute bus ride back to Hongdae, to the exact same PC cafe that they went to yesterday, and play again. But that’s what we did.

This time, Eva joined us in the PC bang, and she played Diablo.

After the PC cafe, we continued exploring Hongdae a bit longer. Tommy’s coworker had sent him a candidate interview question, and several of us were discussing it throughout the day. Since this is a public blog site, I won’t post the question here, but here is a related question that we also chatted about:

Suppose there are N vectors v_1, v_2, ... v_n. Find the coefficients c_i, where c_i = ±1, such that the vector (c_1 v_1) + (c_2 v_2) + ... + (c_n v_n) has maximal magnitude.

We believe the optimal algorithm runs in time O(N log N). Can you find it?

For dinner we ate the last thing remaining on our food checklist - Korean fried chicken. We went to Kyochon, a chain with more variety than Bonchon in the United States. We ordered (1) rice chicken, fried chicken covered in rice flour with no initial flavor; (2) soy garlic chicken, and (3) sal sal (sweet and sour).

While munching on fried chicken, we played the trivia game. Players take turns posing a question about a particular topic, and everyone else answers the question simultaneously. If everyone gets the question right or everyone gets the question wrong, then the question asker loses (to discourage questions that are too easy or too difficult). Otherwise, everyone who answers incorrectly loses.

For example, when did King Sejong the Great invent the Hangul alphabet?

We heard this fact about 1000 times during the trip, including from our DMZ tour guide. The answer is 1446 (though some sources say that the project was completed a few years before it was published, in 1443 or 1444).

At dinner we also got a bottle of soju (you can see the clear bottle in the picture above). Most of us drank responsibly, but Eva chugged down the soju, got super drunk, and ended up getting pregnant.* Here she is in the seat reserved for pregnant women on the subway home.

*Disclaimer: this is not true.** **Disclaimer: Other things on this blog might also not be true, despite not having an appropriate disclaimer.

[next-korea]

DMZ (Friday, 6/21)

Today we booked a DMZ tour. DMZ stands for de-militarized zone, and refers to the ~2 kilometer buffer region between North and South Korea. The bus was to pick us up from Seoul Station the ungodly hour of 8AM, which is why we decided to stay up until 1:30AM the previous night.

The bus ride to the DMZ zone took 1.5 hours. The first stop was the Freedom Bridge. Our tour guide was named Youn, and she gave us great commentary about all the places on our tour. For example, to prevent transportation between North and South Korea, the governments ordered the destruction of all ~12,000 train locomotives along the border. However, one locomotive was later discovered to still be intact. It was covered will bullet holes and intertwined with a young mulberry tree, which became an important symbol for the future unification of Korea.

The sign says “This is a precious culture heritage. Do NOT step up.” in Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese, which is why there are only Chinese tourists standing on the train.

The Freedom Bridge was constructed after the governments also ordered the destruction of all bridges between the two halves of Korea. In order to bring several prisoners back to South Korea, the Freedom Bridge was built.

The second stop of the DMZ tour was the observatory. There we watched an English video about several landmarks in North Korean territory that were visible from the observatory. Then we walked upstairs and could look at those landmarks through binoculars.

We could see a few North Koreans walking on dirt paths. Also in sight is a village inside the DMZ zone. To incentivize people to live there, villagers don’t need to pay any taxes. However, they have a strict curfew of 7PM on weekdays, and 8PM on weekends.

The highest building in sight is the GPS signal jamming tower. At times of high tension between North and South Korea, the tower would send signals interfering with the navigation systems on phones, planes, and fishing ships.

The third stop is the third tunnel. After the post-Korean war armistice was signed, a North Korean defector gave intelligence to South Korea that North Korea was digging tunnels to South Korea. There were many tunnels, all leading to Seoul, in preparation for a coordinated surprise attack.

South Korea found the tunnels, but North Korea tried to pretend that they were coal mines by lining the tunnel walls with coal. The tunnels were also dug at a slightly raising incline, so that water would drain back to North Korea, which would make South Korean discovery of the tunnel less likely.

No pictures were allowed in the tunnel. We walked down about 150 meters (but at a gradual incline) and then walked a few more hundred meters until the middle of the tunnel, which was blocked (because the other side was North Korea). The entire tunnel was very low, which was fine for Eva but I’m not sure how Tommy got through without cramping his neck.

The fourth and final stop was Dorasan train station, where we took the train to Pyeongyang, North Korea.

Nope! That’s not possible, of course - it is currently only possible to leave South Korea by plane or by ship. However, the South Korean government built this entire train station to prepare for the day that Korea would be reunited. The train tracks were laid, the entire station readied - it is very sad indeed to realize that the only things blocking Korean civilians from meeting each other were the arbitrary disagreements between foreign capitalist and socialist superpowers.

^ I tried to mitigate the sadness by buying some blackbean chocolates. The soybeans were grown directly in the DMZ zone.

Youn, our tour guide, said that her dream was for the Dorasan train station to open, so that she could take a train from South Korea all the way to Italy. I hope her dream comes true one day.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Thursday, 6/20)

Remember how I mentioned Hongdae is known for nightlife? Well, none of us are particularly interested in nightclubs, so we do the next best things in Hongdae that are correlated with nightlife - karaoke, and PC bang.

We go to a PC bang first. A PC bang is also known as a PC cafe, but you don’t need to order food. At an insanely cheap price of about 1 US dollar per hour, you get access to a high-quality gaming mouse and keyboard, headphones, and a computer equipped with the ~50MB/s ultra-fast internet that South Korea is known for. (For the record, this is the AfreecaTV PC bang in Hongdae.)

Remember those Starcraft finals tickets that we bought on the train from Busan on Monday? Well, the finals are on Saturday and we’re pretty hyped, so we play a few games!

We thought Eva had a bit too much fun with her sheep, so we kicked her out of the cafe and didn’t let her play. She had to go shopping for gifts instead.*

At around 7PM, we decide that we better stop and eat dinner. A quick look at our Korea checklist shows that we still haven’t had good Korean BBQ. Good news, that’s easy to fix in Seoul. We go to a place called Doma, and order quality Wagyu steak on a self-cook charcoal grill. 

My main takeaway here is that charcoal grills are really hot. Becky had the misfortune of sitting directly in front of the grill, and her face did not enjoy the meal as much as her stomach.

After dinner, we went to sing karaoke! In Korean, this is called Norebang, and you can see many signs for “Norebang” in a place such as Hongdae. We sang several of our classics as well as a few new additions, most notably Ddu-du Ddu-du and Kill this Love by our favorite K-pop group Blackpink.** We also ended with Dragostea Din Tei, which reminded Becky and Tommy of good memories at their CTY summer camp and reminded myself of good memories hula-hoop dancing at a school performance back when I actually had the courage to do things like that.

Becky and Tommy talked about CTY for the entire bus ride back. My main takeaway from that was: CTY is a cult. They write down their traditions, so later generations of CTY actually preserve them. They have weird chants that they have to learn word-for-word.

“We also do some normal things, you know, like take classes and stuff.” Tommy

Addendums/clarifications:

*Actually, Eva just doesn’t like playing Starcraft.

**This might be the favorite group of only Becky and me, not all 5 of us. Becky and I had been listening to many Blackpink songs prior to our trip to Korea.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Thursday, 6/20)

In the afternoon, we head to Hongdae, a region in West Seoul. Hongdae, not to be confused with Haeundae (the region in east Busan) or Hyundai (the car company also advertised heavily in Seoul), is known for nightlife. But it’s not yet night yet - we find a little cafe called “Nature Cafe”, named because they keep two sheep for their customers to play with.

We got some food at the cafe:

Eva (screenname countsheep) may have gotten a bit distracted:

But then we got to pet the real sheep, which are kept in a small pen outside the cafe!

The two sheep were named Ara and Rio. They were pooping the small black pellets you see on the ground the entire time. They had a lot of wool. I hope they’re not hot, today it was over 80 degrees in Seoul!

Later, we realized that Eva was so excited about the sheep, that her heart pumped frantically and her blood raced furiously. Her iPhone’s health app assumed that she walked up and down 50 flights of stairs. (At least, that clearly would make more sense than the fact that she went shopping later that day on flat ground.)

Lastly, here’s a picture of Becky with Ara. How do I know that it’s Ara, not Rio? Because Ara is bigger than Rio.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Thursday, 6/20)

Brunch today is another specialty Korean dish on our wish list - Gomtang, or traiditonal Korean beef and rice soup. The best known restaurant for Gomtang in Seoul is Hadongkwan (河東館), which is also in Myeongdong, the shopping district we already explored yesterday.

The dish is very simple - beef, rice, and soup. But it was delicious. Only problem I had is that normally it’s easy to swallow the rice in the soup, but my grandpa always told me to chew rice well (and ideally never put rice in soup). So the Gomtang took me a very long time to finish compared to the others, and in the end I still had a lot of rice left. I just gave up and didn’t finish it.

Following brunch we went to another district in Seoul, Itaewon. Itaewon is the Foreigner’s District, and it is filled with restaurants of many international cuisines.

We started from the metro station in the center (near 1), walked a little south, then headed west along the Fashion Street to (2), where we found this sign. Along this way, we saw a board game cafe! But the cafe opens at 2PM and it was only 1:30PM when we arrived there, so we decided to move on.

The sign showed us that we had missed the food street north of where we started, so we backtracked along the main street and explored the food street. We saw the fork and spaghetti sculpture. Becky has a fascination for spaghetti.

[next-korea]

Seoul (Wednesday, 6/19)

On the bus ride back from Jihwaja, a really cute little Korean boy and his mother sat in front of Michael. Michael started playing peekaboo with him, and the boy was very entertained. The boy started contorting his face into different shapes with his hands, and Michael would copy him.

Interestingly, his mother didn’t look back once. When they got to their stop, the mother told the boy to say bye, but she didn’t even turn around to acknowledge her son’s new (but temporary) playmate. The little boy was super cute and waved super enthusiastically though.

They got off and we didn’t think about it any more. We got off a few stops later. 

[next-korea]

Seoul (Wednesday, 6/19)

This is a continuation of the dinner course at Jihwaja. We’ve just finished appetizers, and it has already been about an hour. We now get to the next section of our meal, the “Special Delights”. Ordinarily this sounds like some cheesy dish from Panda Express, but that was not at all true.

Course IV: Special Delight 1. Fresh Ginseng and Meat Skewer.

If I had read the menu and realized the white part of the skewer was ginseng, I would not have eaten it. That’s because just yesterday I had tried ginseng for the first time at Baeknyunjong Samgyetang, and it was reeeeeeaaaaaally bad with a very bitter aftertaste. Ginseng was not for me, I thought.

Fortunately, I didn’t read the menu, and I bit into the white root happily. This was how I found out that only the ginseng I had yesterday was bad, and not all ginseng was so bitter.

The skewer meat of the day was beef, but I think they use different meats on different days.

The orange strands next to the skewer is bellflower.

Course V: Special Delight 2. Cold boiled beef with fruits salad.

During the special delights, our chatty restaurant CEO Yong-kyu Han came around and told us about his disklike for the current South Korean president Jae-in Moon. When Michael asked him why, he mentioned that in his recent Korean memorial day speech on June 6, he had honored Kim Won-bong, a defector to North Korea.

Course VI: Seafood Side Dishes 1. Grilled Codfish with Citron and Soy Sauce.

After the “Special Delights”, we move on to heartier foods. But it’s still a long ways until the main course.

Course VII: Seafood Side Dishes 2. Wrapped Kimchi.

The kimchi (left) was brought out at the same time as the next dish (right).

Why is this in the “Seafood Side Dishes” section? I have no idea. But this was the first item on the menu that was spicy. It was far less spicy than any other red kimchi I’ve tasted at normal restaurants, but still overpowered anything else so far at Jihwaja.

Course VIII: Chicken Soup with Abalone and Vegetable Casserole.

Shown on the right in the above picture, this dish came out on a flame. You can see the orange tint at the top where the flame is burning.

Course IX: Special Iced Fruit Sherbet.

Now we’re finally almost at our main courses. But before we start them, we’re supposed to cleanse our palate with some tomato sherbet. Yes, tomato! It was fancy, but I personally didn’t like it because since tomato is not very sweet by itself, they had to add a lot of sugar.

Yong-kyu Han (the restaurant CEO, even though I feel as if I’ve said this many times) stopped by again, and Michael asked him what he did before working at the restaurant. Initially he was shocked (I’m not sure if it is in Korean culture to ask personal questions), but then he happily talked about how he had previously founded his own company.

A bit of history - in 1971, the last cook of the Joseon Dynasty started this restaurant, Jihwaja. She was known as the “first master”, and was proceeded by the second master, Hye-sung Hwang. Hye-sung was Yong-kyu Han’s mother, and she asked him to take over the restaurant. So Yong-kyu sold his company and became CEO of Jihwaja.

We felt a bit of sadness from Yong-kyu Han because it seemed like he had it made with his former company, but operating Jihwaja didn’t provide as much money. But in Korean culture, continuing the family business is important, often more so than individual goals.

Course X: Grilled and Marinated Beef with Ginseng and Vegetable Salad.

Finally, we got to our (first) main course! This beef was second only to the Kobe beef we had four years ago on our Asia trip.

Course XI: Chilled Buckwheat Noodles.

Finally, we have our actual main course. We were each able to choose one of two main courses, either a porridge or the cold noodles. Initially I was skeptical at how the restaurant could make cold noodles, which seemed to me like one of the most basic foods of Korea, particularly special. But alas, I was not disappointed. You cannot see the noodles in this picture, because they are covered by slices of pear, cut with a spoon to maintain rough edges that are more comfortable to eat. On the top is kimchi, wasabi, and vinegar, and I could choose how much of each to add depending on my preferences.

Are we done yet? Almost! This seems like a huge amount of food already, but there’s always room for dessert!

Course XII: Dessert.

The VP described these desserts for us. The English translations of these don’t sound very elegant, but from left to right they are:

1. Cookie

2. Rice Krispie (yes, he said “rice krispie”!)

3. Green bean cake

4. Watermelon

I ate them from left to right, in increasing order of sweetness. The Rice Krispie was disappointing - it was just a hard ball of rice. But everything else was yummy. And there wasn’t too much dessert, so we didn’t feel regretful of eating too many sweets afterwards. (Though I guess we did have the fruits and sherbet as well...)

And there you have it! Our three-hour meal at Jihwaja comes to a close, which is a good thing because I’m getting a bit tired of writing this blog post :) Michael pays the bill, and he writes 1,000,000₩ on the bill. It feels strange to write a 7-digit figure on a restaurant bill.

There’s one more interesting thing that happened. After our meal, both the restaurant CEO and VP thanked us and asked us if we wanted a taxi. Upon hearing us say that we would take the bus, they took the time to accompany us all the way to the bus station. Then, they waited with us for the bus, and once the bus arrived, they talked to the bus driver in Korean to make sure that the bus driver knew to stop where we needed to get off. This part impressed me the most, and we bid farewell happily. Overall, the evening was an amazing experience!

[next-korea]

Seoul (Wednesday, 6/19)

Ok, now we get to the exciting part. For dinner today we’ve made a reservation at Jihwaja, a high-class restaurant specializing in cuisine once served only to the royal family. The price is roughly $200 per person. The reservation is at 7PM for 5, and we arrive 15 minutes early. They are already prepared and welcome us in.

We are led upstairs and into a private room.

We had already chosen our set menus when we reserved our dinner one month in advance. I ordered the “Jineobyul Manchan”, or “royal degustation menu”, with 12 courses. “Degustation” means the appreciation of very high-quality foods.

The most impressive part of the restaurant for me was that the CEO, Yong-kyu Han, would personally visit our private room before each course to describe the food and ingredients in each dish. This greatly added to our dinner experience. At the beginning, he told us that all the dishes at Jihwaja are made with only natural ingredients, with no preservatives, additives, or MSG (yes I know MSG is an additive but I think he said it in a separate category). The quality of the restaurant comes from the advanced culinary techniques used on the natural ingredients.

Alright, prepare for a lot of pictures!

Course I: Appetizer 1. Deluxe dry snacks.

The CEO described each snack on the plate with much detail. “First,” he said, pointing to the three round yellow objects in the middle, “we have water chestnut, one for each of you” (Becky and Eva had a separate plate). “Next to them,” gesturing to the cylindrical red objects, “is persimmon with walnut inside.”

His English was understandable, but not proficient, which resulted in him speaking slowly and captivatingly. It was soothing to listen to him; we nodded.

Tommy took the honors of grabbing the first piece. We all watched in anticipation as he picked up the carefully prepared water chestnut. How would the first bite at this amazing restaurant taste?

The water chestnut slipped from Tommy’s chopsticks and dropped onto the ground. Oops.

Course II: Appetizer 2. Gluntinous Millet with Candied Fruits.

On the bottom left is porridge/millet. It has no flavor, but is complimented by the sweet candied fruits in the middle. On the bottom right is white kimchi, i.e. kimchi that is not spicy at all. This aligns with the restaurant’s declaration of not using any additives or preservatives.

Course III: Appetizer 3. Seasonal Vegetable Delights.

The third and final appetizer is a vegetable salad. The main ingredient is the lotus root in the middle (topped with a few pieces of egg and red pepper) along with green onion, bean sprouts, mushroom, pear, beef, and a small amount (~a tablespoon) of dressing. The ingredients were mixed after taking this picture.

As the restaurant CEO told us about these appetizer dishes, we also found out his son also lived in San Francisco and studied game design. When he visited Los Angeles for a conference, he reported back to his father that the Korean food in LA was “much better” than that of San Francisco!