Brian In Korea

Coffee Grown in Korea?

2011-01-05T06:44:00.000-08:00

As a kind of follow-up to a previous post about coffee, I was recently sent an article about a Korean woman named Mrs. Roh Jin-Yi who grows coffee on a plantation on Jeju Island.

The interesting thing about that is Korea does not have an ideal climate in which to grow coffee, even in the southern parts of the country. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Despite the unfavorable conditions, even Jeju being too cold, Ms. Roh has been persistent in realizing her dream of cultivating coffee. And she has succeeded to reap enough coffee for about 10% of Jeju citizens to sample taste.

And last October, Ms. Roh even held the first Jeju Coffee Festival in her own coffee plantation. At the festival, there was coffee tasting, coffee drinking competitions, hands-on experience of roasting coffee beans and hand-dripping.

The best part about this is that she's not doing this to make any money. In fact, if she makes money off of this, she plans on using it to open a coffee museum. All of this is based solely on her passion for coffee. I wish her the best of luck with her plantation!

The full article can be read here

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-25T21:46:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I hope each and every one of you had a wonderful day spent with family and friends.

Also, I just wanted to say that I SAW SANTA

He's a bit thinner than I imagined...

Coffee Anyone?

2010-11-25T09:03:00.000-08:00

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to everybody in the US!

Ok, seeing as how I haven't posted anything in a month, I figured I should write something. School and other matters have been keeping me busy, so I haven't been able to really do anything special lately.

However, last weekend, I went to Insadong with a friend for lunch. We had some bossam and then we wandered around looking at the street vendors and shopping areas. Eventually, we decided to grab some coffee.

After wandering around for a while, we decided to just go to Starbucks because it was closest and my friend had to leave soon. Here's a picture of the place. Notice anything?

The name is written entirely in Korean. "So what?" you may ask. Well, it turns out that this is the only Starbucks in the world whose sign is written in a foreign language. Apparently in order to keep the traditional feel of the Insadong marketplace, Starbucks was required to use Hangeul in their sign.

So that's my little tidbit of information for today. To find out more about coffee in Korea, check out this video by qiranger, the expert on coffee!

There's Something Fishy in Noryangjin!

2010-10-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

Today, I met some friends who also attended Indiana University and we had dinner at Noryangjin (노량진). I had always wanted to try sannakji (산낙지, live octopus), and tonight, I finally got the chance!

Noryangjin is the place to go if you want seafood. They have a huge fish market right next to the subway station that sells all kinds of seafood. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of the market itself, because we were too busy trying to find a good place to pick out the fish we wanted to eat. I definitely plan on going back someday and looking around more!

We finally found a place that looked promising, picked out an octopus that cost around 3,000 won, and then picked out a kingfish (민어) that cost around 40,000 won. It was an expensive dinner but it was cheap when we split the cost amongst ourselves. Besides, the amount of meat that we got from the kingfish plus the fact that it was fresh was well worth the money!

We took the fish to the place where we were able to eat it and waited while they were cutting up the kingfish and the octopus. After a few minutes, they brought out the cut-up octopus. Basically, what they did was cut up the tentacles then serve them in sesame oil and sesame seeds. Sometimes, they will also serve it whole.

The dish was actually very good! The sesame oil provided most of the flavor. The octopus itself is really chewy. The thing that freaks most people out is the fact that the tentacles still move and wriggle even after they have been cut up. Also, while eating it, the suction cups will stick to your mouth and teeth. It's a very strange feeling, but it doesn't hurt. When eating it, you should be careful to thoroughly chew it, especially when drinking alcohol, or else it could stick to your throat and cause you to choke. From what I hear though, this doesn't happen often.

Here's a video I made of my friends and me eating sannakji.

After we were finished with the sannakji, they brought out the cut-up kingfish on a plate.

Of course, we ate that raw as well! We dipped it in a sauce made up of soybean paste (된장), red pepper paste (고추장), garlic (마늘), and green pepper (고추). Then we wrapped it in lettuce (상추) or sesame leaves (깻잎) and enjoyed every last bite of it!

We ate that along with some roasted shad (전어) while drinking soju.

No, I didn't eat the heads, but we did feed them to the cats watching us from outside the window, despite all the signs warning us not to... Whoops!

Any Suggestions?

2010-10-20T10:35:00.000-07:00

Every time I chat with my parents on Skype, they always ask if I've been going sightseeing. Unfortunately, the answer is usally no. The past month and a half has been filled with research, study, and administrative stuff. Of course, I have been meeting friends and I have done some cultural things, but most of my time has been wasted on school.

That's about to change!

Now that my stats midterm is over and I finally have all of my major tasks out of the way, I can start exploring South Korea and having more fun. With my extra time, I plan to study more Korean (something I've been neglecting since I've arrived) and work on my math skills a little more. However, I also want to start living it up a little more. After all, I didn't come here just to study.

I recently bought myself a new toy that will make recording my exploits here a lot more fun. I bought an iPod touch a couple weeks ago, and it comes with an HD camera, so I can take video footage of my shenanigans.

This brings me to a question I would like to ask you: What kinds of things would you like me to talk about/ record in Korea? If it's reasonable (and not life-threatening) I'll see what I can do. I already have a few things in mind, but I'm just looking for an outside opinion.

Stranded at Sadang

2010-10-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

Seeing as how my last post was about a month ago, and some friends have been pestering me about this, I figured I should update my blog.

I guess I can tell you about the time I got stranded in a subway station!

About 2 weeks ago, I decided to go meet my friend in Myeong-dong. Before I left, I checked the weather forecast the old-fashioned way: by looking out my window. What I saw was this:

It was raining down pretty hard at the time but it didn't seem too bad. I thought to myself, "It doesn't look so bad. Hell, it'll probably stop by the time I arrive at Myeong-dong" (a 45 minute ride by subway). Little did I know I was venturing out into the worst rainstorm Seoul had seen in years.

While riding the bus from my dorm to the subway station, I had second thoughts. The streets near the station were flooded and the water at some points was up to people's waists! When I got off the bus I got soaked by the pouring rain, so to keep myself calm, I just told myself, "It's still better than Indiana's weather!"

Here is my route to get to Myeong-dong. I start at Nakseongdae station, ride the train one stop over to Sadang, where I transfer to the 4 line and ride up to Myeong-dong. Easy right?

I only got to Sadang. Here's why:

The station flooded. Apparently, at the exact same time I arrived at Sadang station, Seoul Metro decided that they were not going to take any more passengers out of the station and all the trains were just going to pass through without stopping there.

I called my friend and told him about the problem, and he said that he could take a bus down to Sadang station, but it would take a while. I told him that was fine and decided to walk around the station and explore for a bit since it had some shops and places I could grab a snack or something. In the beginning, he asked if there was any other way I could get up there, but I know nothing about the city bus routes and I was too cheap to pay for a cab.

About an hour later, my friend calls and tells me that he's still riding the bus and is waiting for the next one to come and that they're running late because of all the rain. At that point, I had run out of things to do so I decided to just sit and wait for him. I sat on a bench sipping some Coke Zero while playing games on my iPod.

At one point, some middle-aged man (from here on, ajosshi) sat next to me and started talking to me in Korean. We just talked about the crazy weather and how our plans got ruined. It wasn't much of a conversation, but I was happy that I got to practice some Korean a little more. Eventually, he got up and started helping some people who were closing down their shop.

About a half hour had passed so I tried calling my friend again a few times, but there was no answer. His phone ran out of batteries.

Later, my iPod battery died so I just did some people watching. Most of what I saw was just a lot of people climbing over the "Do Not Enter" tape to get to one of the exits (which was blocked off anyway) and the ajosshis working there trying to stop them. I swear, either those people think the rules don't apply to them, or they just don't understand Korean.

Another hour passed when my friend finally called me back from a pay phone and told me that there were some problems on the bridge that went across the river, so none of the buses that go on that bridge were running either. At that point, we decided to cancel the plan and just meet another day (something that probably should have been decided hours before then).

That still left me with the problem of how to get home. I attempted to find a bus that would go to Nakseongdae, but I had no idea what I was doing. In the end, I sucked it up and paid for a taxi. Luckily my dorm wasn't as far as I thought and it only cost me about 4,500 won. So I pretty much wasted a whole evening sitting in a subway station waiting for a friend that would never come. How depressing...

Oh well. At least I can say I got some language practice out of it!

Ssireum (씨름)

2010-09-12T08:01:00.000-07:00

Guess what I did today! If you haven't read the title, then I'll just tell you. I participated in a ssireum (씨름) match! Ssireum is a type of Korean traditional wrestling, and the goal is basically to get your opponent on the ground. Here's the wikipedia article that explains it.

It all started when I visited my friend Chris in Hongseong. We wanted to grab a bite to eat and he suggested that we check out a local festival that was occurring.

We made it to the festival, and the first thing that caught my attention was the ssireum match that they were setting up. I had always wanted to see ssireum live so we decided to watch a few rounds.

They began the event by explaining the rules and showing the crowd the different techniques that are used. Here are some videos that I took with my phone. The quality isn't that good, but hopefully you can get the gist of it.

At the end of the second video, you can see a man walking up and waving to us. That is where all the fun began! He motioned for us to follow him, so we did. Then he handed us some free polo shirts that were made for the event. After receiving the gift, he then moved on to inform us that we are going to take part in the amateur contest they were going to have.

I was a bit nervous, but Chris was all for it. We thought that they would just have us, the foreigners, wrestle each other and put on a show, so we just figured we could fake it. However, when the time came, we had to pick random numbers out of a bag to determine our order.

Chris and I ended up making it on opposite sides. He was red and I was blue. He ended up going before I did, and was set against some decently big man. Chris lost his match, and then a few matches later, they called me up.

The person I was supposed to go against ducked out so I ended up going against somebody on my own team that I had been making small conversation with. In the first round, I managed to struggle for about 10-15 seconds before he took me down. After each round, each of the wrestlers step off to the sidelines and the coach took that opportunity to tell me about how to do a leg sweep on the guy.

In the second round, we struggled for a bit but then the ref stepped in and positioned my leg so that I could get a leg sweep in. Then I managed to "take down" my opponent. I knew it was rigged, but hey, it was still fun!

In the final round, he took me down within the first few seconds. Even though I lost, the experience was still exhilarating. It was my first time ever doing any type of wrestling, and even though I was the foreigner, the crowd was still cheering for me!

As Chris and I sat watching the other matches, a few people walked past us and complemented our performance, saying we did a good job. Others would just come up and make small chat with me (all in Korean) about ssireum and ask questions such as where we came from. For me, it felt good that people were being so warm and friendly towards Chris and me. It was an extra bonus that they would speak in Korean to me and I (for the most part) could answer them. Overall, it was probably the most fun I've had since I arrived, and it was the most culturally valuable experience as well! Even though I knew that we were picked just because we were foreigners, I still felt like I was welcome in the community and they were happy to have me there.

I think Chris also gained a new motivation for learning Korean: next time, he won't get suckered into things like this so easily!

With that, I'll leave you some pictures that I took with my phone. (I'm still using my Cliq here as a camera and camcorder) Sorry for the bad picture quality!