Happy spooky month (and officially the 3rd month we’ve been on Asia)! We area little bummed because we love Halloween, but *spirits* are great still. Today is our last day in South Korea, as we fly out to Singapore tomorrow (for our 3rd official country in Asia!). We were a little tired, especially Caitlyn, after not sleeping super well. Caitlyn had booked a cooking class for 10:30 this morning, so we got ready and hopped on the subway to ride 30 mins to outer Seoul. We met our instructor, Anne, at the station in front of flower shop. She is a part-time English teacher, and had been doing this class for years but stopped for the past three years due to Covid. She told us she is really excited as we are actually her first clients since pausing the class! She first walked us through market, explaining all of the vegetables and different foods that we have been curious about in Korea. So many of the vendors recognized Anne, telling her that its been a while. We were buying a pear for the meal later, and the vendor gave us a small bunch of grapes for free. Anne said they are crispier, sweeter, and juicier than the grapes we are used to, but we felt they were just larger and tasted almost the exact same. One of the vendors pointed at us and had a brief conversation with Anne. She reported that they said that we are both very beautiful people, and said that we must be brother and sister because we look so similar. Luckily, we are not. Anne mentioned that this style of market is actually very new. It turns out almost everyone did their shopping at supermarkets until around 10-15 years ago, when the government tried to change that and opened nicer outdoor arcades with lots of parking, cover from weather, and air conditioning or fans.
After the market (and only buying 1 pear), Anne took us out to her car and drove us to her parents’ house. She said their house has a bigger kitchen than hers, so she prefers to do her classes there. We arrive at a large apartment building and ride the elevator up to the 5th floor. We arrive and the place is absolutely beautiful! One of our favorite things were the large windows offering a stunning view of Seoul. Anne’s parents were both there to greet us, both very friendly, but her father retreating to a room pretty quickly while her mother was seemingly doing some of her own cooking. Funny enough, Anne’s mother also mentioned that we look like we are brother and sister (never gotten this once in America). Anne started to discuss the plan for cooking, when her mother started speaking to her in Korean. Anne then brought up all of the lovely embroidery work all over the condo, describing the significance of each piece and informing us that her mother did all of it. It was absolutely beautiful, with her mother being a very talented artist. After showing us the living area and kitchen, Anne took us to the dining room and begun to show us the traditional dress that her mother sewed and embroidered for her as well as the traditional clothing that her mother made for her husband. They were both clearly proud and enjoyed showing these off. We asked Anne if she learned how to cook from her mother, and she said “oh, no”. It turns out Anne was a terrible cook in her youth, and was never able to cook like her mother. Eventually in her adulthood, she decided to enroll in culinary school and learned how to cook! Back towards the kitchen, there was a large folding table set up with an electronic grill, and a second set up on a small countertop just next to this. Anne had us on either side of the folding table while she stood at the countertop. There were a few plates, some silverware, spatulas, chef’s knives, and two containers with raw carrot, onion, cabbage, leek, garlic, and green onion.
The booking allowed us to cook any two Korean dishes that we like, as well as a Korean stew. The webpage had offered a few items, but you could suggest any dish. We chose to do a kimchi stew, a vegetable and seafood pancake, and spicy stir fried squid. Anne first taught us about the squid, telling us that you can use fresh squid for many dishes, but for these, you can used frozen squid and it is just fine and easier for us to get in America (she tried to modify the recipes to ensure that we would be able to get all of the ingredients). She first showed us that you score a squid in a checkered pattern before cutting it into strips. She put that aside and we set to work on the vegetables. Anne quickly discovered that David was not as good at food prep as Caitlyn, and they both helped do the cutting for David’s vegetables.
It was clear that she was a little bit rusty in teaching, having forgotten to have us put onion powder in the pancakes and accidentally having us put sugar instead of salt in the pancakes, but we still learned a lot. The stir fry was nice and simple, with a few vegetables, some oil, some chopped squid, and gochujang sauce. We were surprised with how short the food had to sit on the grill to be completely cooked (maybe 3 minutes at the most)! The pancake was very simple as well, with some all-purpose flour, starch, water, a few vegetables and the squid. Mixed all together and placed in thin piles on the grill, they did not take too long to cook either. Anne explained the process of the kimchi stew, but we didn’t really participate in cooking this. She first made a broth with dried anchovies, shrimp, and seaweed. Then, in a separate container, she stir-fried the kimchi in oil from a regular can of tuna. She then added the broth, and then once it was boiling, she turned it off and before serving added the tuna from the can.
We plated the food that we made (and Anne’s stew), and she had us sit down in the dining room. We hadn’t realized, but Anne’s mother had been working on all of the side dishes for our meal as we were cooking. We sat down with our food as well as kimchi, kimchi pickled cucumbers, spicy and sour kimchi-style squid and vegetables, stir-fried potato, steam eggplant, and spicy pepper pancake.
The side dishes were all delicious, with David liking the pancake the best and Caitlyn liking the potato. Our pancakes didn’t turn out very well, with the flavor being a bit off from the seasoning mishaps, but mostly because we didn’t cook ours all the way through. The stirfry ended up very nice, with a good spice to it. To be totally transparent, having been in Korea for a few weeks now, we have gotten a little bit Kimchi-ed out. We did our best to eat as much as possible to be polite, but our appetite wasn’t very strong.
After dinner, we stood up and went back into the kitchen where they were cleaning. We told them how good it was and how stuffed we were. Anne then said we would make a traditional Korean dessert. We were nervous for how much more we had to eat, but quickly realized it was a small dessert! She had us press together two types of dough into mounds into a tiny cookie shape. One dough was black sesame, and one was roasted soybean.
Once we pressed them into a few small cookies, Anne had us go back to the dining room. She arrived soon with our cookies as well as some grapes and the pear from the market, cut up into bite-sized pieces. There was also a traditional Korean medicinal beverage made from some small berries (we saw these at the market and talked about them) and tasting similar to cranberry juice.
We ate it all, enjoying the cookies (we don’t remember the name) and the fruit. We were extremely full, and thankful that there wasn’t a second traditional Korean dessert. We thanked Anne and her mother, and Anne brought us down to her car and started to drive towards the station. Along the way, we asked a lot of questions regarding Korean’s perceptions on Americans as well as the Korean War. Her parents were in their early 70’s, so they were babies during the war, but Anne told us some fascinating stories. When the north begun to invade, pushing the borders of South Korea down to just a small area outside Busan, her grandmother fled their town in the northeast. It was in the dead of winter and extremely cold, but her grandmother walked the entire way down to Busan holding Anne’s father bundled up, keeping him warm. We heard stories of how her father feels that living in Seoul is so surreal compared to his life as a child in the countryside. She mentioned that no one had clocks after everything was destroyed, and she asked her father when they knew to go to school. She said he told her that they went when it felt like it was school time, and that this was okay because the teacher didn’t have a clock either! She mentioned that the most reliable source of time telling was putting a stick in the ground in the garden and using it like a sundial. We had asked if there was any lasting feelings regarding the Americans in relation to the Korean War, and she said that no one even thinks about the war in general anymore. We asked about North Korea and she said that the only people in the world that seem to be not scared of North Korea are South Koreans. She said when she spent time in Europe and when she meets foreigners, everyone is always so concerned and scared, which is funny to her. She said a few months ago, for the first time, the missile defense system alarms were erroneously tripped, sending messages of impending missile launches from the North into South Korea. She asked if we knew her they reacted and we asked if they were scared. She responded by miming looking at her phone and then turning it off and going back to what she was doing. We also asked her about sentiment regarding Americans in general nowadays. She said that she feels the recent political environment of America has probably damaged some of the views on how South Koreans view America and Americans, but clearly wanted to be polite and didn’t say much. She has a sister living in LA and she said she is always surprised to hear how America actually is from her as opposed to the media that makes its way east. We really enjoyed this conversation with Anne, and felt fulfilled that we were able to get a lot of answers to questions we have been pondering for the past few weeks. She dropped us off and gave us big hugs, sending us towards the subway. In reflecting on the class as a whole, we both had an amazing time and are so glad that we did it. We loved getting to see an actual Korean house as opposed to hotels, we enjoyed learning more about the cooking, and we feel it was a really impactful cultural experience. David does wish that Anne had spent a little more time explaining the cooking and watching our grill and our methods. Instead, it felt more like we were following along to an instructional cooking video. Caitlyn really enjoyed the class, but she also cooks frequently at home and appreciated that Anne was not hovering over us and allowed us some culinary freedom.
Caitlyn was exhausted from having such poor sleep last night, so she wanted to go back to the hotel and nap for a while. We relaxed and napped for 2 hours or so, then worked on some packing and organizing.
We eventually left to go see our final sight, the N Seoul Tower. This tower is a massive structure sitting atop a mountain in the middle of Seoul. There is a cable car that will take you to the top, allowing you to avoid a multi-hours hike. We decided to go take the cable car, and chose to walk to the base of the mountain and avoid having to figure out which bus takes us there. We arrive and see a large glass elevator that takes you to the base cable car station, a few hundred feet up the mountain. There appeared to be stairs somewhere nearby, as we saw people bypassing the elevator on a road that we knew to go nowhere according to our maps. We decided to stay in line as websites said it holds a lot of people and moves quickly. We were also glad to have some downtime to continue to work on the blog, as we have gotten pretty far behind.
This actually ended up taking around an hour. We finally get to the top and see the ticketing station. We notice a small line, but then follow it further to see that it goes back hundreds and hundreds of feet, and there did not seem to be many cable cars (honestly, we only saw one!). We quickly decided that we didn’t want to waste a few more hours on our last night, especially as we wanted to go find some dinner and finish packing tonight.
We wrote-off the hour+ time wasted as valuable blog time, and headed down to get food. We walked the stairs down this time, realizing that they actually weren’t as bad as it seemed like it would be. As previously mentioned, we were a little burnt out on some of the classic Korean flavors at this point, so we settled on getting Korean fried chicken for our last meal. We had found a good looking restaurant near the Myeong-Dong night market previously, so we went over to see if we could grab a seat.
This restaurant did traditional chicken, but used olive oil which they proudly called “one of the best superfoods”. Caitlyn found this hilarious as they were still frying chicken. There was a short wait in line, so we picked out what we wanted while we waited (sharing one portion of half/half golden olive chicken, and half sweet & spicy). We were seated in awesome seats next to an open area on the side, and quickly got our chicken. This is some of the better chicken we have had in Korea, with David very happy with the plain chicken and Caitlyn enjoying the sauced one.
We finished our food (well, David finished his portion and most of Caitlyn’s), and started heading towards home to finish packing. Almost home, we heard loud music and saw bright lights. In the park we had seen the other day being set up for a festival, a live band was playing suspended high in the air by a crane, with two dancers swinging around as well. We caught a few minutes of this before deciding to head back home.
Over the past few days, David has been spending a lot of time talking to one of the hotel attendants whenever he passed by the desk or went downstairs for laundry or to exchange money. We mentioned him earlier in some capacity, but we don’t feel like going back in the blog and seeing what we said. We are pretty sure that we mentioned him before, and how he speaks great English from both watching movies and listening to songs as well as doing what he can to learn from Foreigners and any family he has who speaks English. His name is pronounced “yoong-chae” (unsure of spelling), he is probably a bit younger than us, and he is extraordinarily friendly, always asking about our days. He always makes intense eye contact, which we found a little unsettling at first, but very charming by the end of our stay. Back at the hotel, we were delighted to see that he was working this evening. We walked up to him and told him that it was our last night. He shook both of our hands, and said how much he has enjoyed meeting us and spending time talking with us and getting to know us. He asked if we had a WhatsApp or an Instagram so that we can keep in touch, and David added him on Instagram. We are hopeful that we get to keep in touch at least a little with yoong-chae, as he definitely helped make our time in Seoul a more positive and special experience.
Back in the hotel room, we packed up while watching old Friends episodes and finishing some of the beverages and soju in our fridge. We weren’t feeling much like drinking soju, so we had what we felt like and accepted that we would have to throw some out. We finished up almost all of the packing aside from things we would have to put away in the morning, and headed to sleep.
David’s Thoughts of the Day: Everyone speaks such great English in Seoul. This is probably the #1 city we have visited so far with the highest number of English speakers, and some of the most clear accents of any city.
Caitlyn’s Thoughts of the Day: it was such a great experience being able to see a real home in Korea. While Anne’s parents live in a (what appears to be 2 bedroom) apartment, the layout style is so different than American apartments. They had a large open living room that connected to a large kitchen, with a separate dinning room. Additionally, traditional Korean homes have a separate kimchi fridge, which is just as large as a regular fridge! There is much more a sense of minimalism from what we have seen in Korea, and something that I hope to adopt when we return to the US.
Steps walked: 12,591
Miles walked: 6.06
Total miles walked in Seoul: 42.77
Total miles walked in South Korea: 136.28
South Korea reflections:
Favorite memories – David liked the Busan Cablecar and spending time with Henry and Emma in Hongdae district in Seoul (Caitlyn agrees that this evening was a highlight for her, too!). Caitlyn’s favorite memory was going through the Arte museum in Jeju, especially the giant room with the changing walls. Caitlyn also loved exploring the temple by the sea in Busan.
Favorite days – David enjoyed the day seeing Jeju’s east side and going into the lava cave and the other cool sights. Caitlyn’s favorite day was the day in Busan where we saw the Jalgachi fish market, saw the culture village, and also did the cablecar (Busan AirCruise).
Favorite foods – David usually loves street food, but was pretty disappointed in South Korea’s street food for the most part. He mostly enjoyed the special local lunch on our last day in Jeju with the mushroom bimimbap, soup, and dumplings. The fermented fish intestines were also a favorite of David. Caitlyn’s favorite food was the Korean BBQ we had in Seoul with the marinated short rib and pork galbi. She also wants to give a shout out to the candied tangerines on a stick. She will miss that sweet treat.
Reflections – This was a very different experience than Japan. We set ourselves up some for thinking that the two countries would be a little more similar, and I think we were a bit shocked with how different it was off the bat once landing in Busan. We have realized in reflecting that we enjoyed each place more than the last, with Seoul being one of our favorite cities that we have been to. We spoke about rating the countries we have gone to and are going to, and we decided that we both think Japan is a 9/10 if not higher, and we had discussed in Gyeongju that we felt South Korea was only a 5, or maybe a 6/10. We will say, once we visited Seoul, this bumped up to a 6/10, but we just don’t know if South Korea is for us. The food was nice, but Caitlyn mentioned how previously she felt confident that Korean food was her favorite type of food, but after coming here and eating authentic Korean food, this has dropped down. While writing these reflections, we realize how complicated it is to rate a country, or to rate and reflect on our experiences. For example, we both feel that Seoul knocks every other city in Korea out of the park, but notice that our favorite memories and days are all in other cities in South Korea. We can rate a country based on the type of experience we look for with travel, or by how lucky we got in choosing our activities or the restaurants that we ate at or if the weather was kind to us, but none of this really tells the story of our time in a country. We do our best to put insight on this blog so that we can reflect on our memories for years to come, but I don’t think we can ever put our experiences and the cultural insights we have gotten into words on a website. We can say that we are extremely happy to have spent a few weeks in South Korea, and we are thankful for the kind, generous Koreans that have made it even more special of a journey.
New foods tried:
Dried anchovies/fish fry
Mud fish soup
Fermented pollock intestines
Whole baby crabs
Black Pork
Pork jowl
Pork neck
Egg bread
Abalone
Bluming Travelers 