Seoul (Day 1) - We basically just ate all day long

In my opinion, that there's no better way to get to know a new city and a new culture than by spending a day eating your way through town.  Palaces, temples and museums are wonderful -- and don't worry, we'll get to those soon! -- but for now, let's see what people eat in Seoul.

We started the day with a breakfast at one of the ubiquitous Paris Baguette Cafes.

I forgot to take a photo in the morning,
so here's what it looks like at 10pm at night.

The pastries were appealingly displayed on tables, with trays and little tongs on hand for
us to make our selection.

I wanted to try one of everything.  That seemed a little extravagant, so I settled
with an assortment of six.  It's the most sugar and carbs I've eaten in a long time!
From top left: cream cheese danish, Belgian waffle, leek-filled doughnut,
purple sweet-potato churro, gooey bread with red bean, gooey bread with cheese.

Adorable mango smoothie.
The Koreans have an advanced culture of "cute" and it manifests in many ways...

Amanda thought she had ordered something like a snow cone with fruit.
It turned out to be much more elaborate.

The pastries were delicious and filling -- we both had to wrap a couple to go, that's how full we were -- and so we set out into the steamy city to see what we could see.  Turns out, one of the first things we saw was a shop selling freshly cooked Belgian waffles.  Second breakfast!  

One doesn't pass up an opportunity to eat a Belgian waffle hot off the presses

Sadly, while it looked like a Belgian waffle, it was't quite right.
Doughy and warm, yes; God's gift to taste buds on earth, no.

By the time we had finished our waffles, we had about an hour to sight-see until we met up with Veronica for a food tour through Insadong, one of Seoul's more vibrant neighborhoods.

We started with lunch at the Insa-dong Tofu Restaurant, which was nestled in a tiny back alley where we never would have found it on our own.

Address:  Insa-dong 30-12, Jongno-gu, Seoul; 02-735-9996

Apparently a "simple lunch of one entree and two sides" consists of about 48 different dishes.

Tofu with mustard sauce (one of Amanda's favorites)

Korean coriander

Tiny eggs in a squash paste sauce.
Veronica was super impressed that Amanda and I both had the chopstick skills
to pick these things up without using a spoon.

Leek pancake

Glass noodles with soy sauce (this was one of my favorites)

After a while, I gave up on trying to photograph everything individually.
The plate on the right has pork and tofu with lettuce leaves. You dip the pork in one of
the little pots of sauce and wrap it in the lettuce.
On the left are bowls of stew: the red one is a spicy tofu stew; the yellow one
is a milder puree.  We ate the stews with rice.

Leaving the tofu restaurant, we wended our way through more tiny streets, past many shops and restaurants in low-slung traditional Korean houses until we arrived at Koong, a traditional dumpling restaurant.  Veronica ordered a plate of mung bean pancakes and a plate of pork dumplings, both of which were really delicious.

30-11 Gwanhun-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul
www.koong.co.kr; 02-733-9240

Mung bean pancakes with spicy dipping sauce.
These were fantastic; I could have eaten the dipping sauce by the spoon.

The pork dumplings were even better.  They were made by hand by a little woman sitting
in the front of the restaurant, and the freshness was noticeable.  They also came with
a savory dipping sauce; following Veronica's lead, I poked a hole in the dumpling and
spooned the dipping sauce in.  Delicious!

When Amanda and I slowed our eating, Veronica warned us that
it would be "over an hour" before our next meal, so we should eat up.
We fortified ourselves by finishing both plates.

That hour between meals ended up being more like an hour and a half.  Veronica led us on a scenic walk through one of Seoul's historic neighborhoods.  We were waylaid by rainstorms, and foiled twice by shops that were closed on Mondays.  (Having only just learned that Amanda and I don't drink, Veronica was improvising, trying to find a good place for non-alcoholic desserts.)  Eventually we returned to a place very near where we started, in Insadong, where the specialty was sweet red bean desserts.

I didn't get the name or the address of this place.

Sweet red beans, topped with sunflower seeds, with ice flakes.
This was a standout among everything we tried today. The "ice flakes" were absolutely
divine, with a lightly sweetened flavor that melted in your mouth.  A wonderful pairing
with the heavier, earthier flavor and consistency of the beans.

Sweet red bean porridge.
Looks like chocolate mousse, tastes like sweetened refried beans.
I liked it, but not as much as the beans with ice flakes.

Lotus root tea and super-fluffy seed-covered things
that didn't have much flavor.

It was six o'clock by the time we finished our food tour.  Veronica helpfully suggested some places for dinner, only we really were so full by then that we couldn't imagine sitting down for another meal.  So we walked through the city, taking in the now rain-free ambiance on our way to an evening theater performance (more on that separately).  The theater was in a lively part of town with street-food vendors everywhere.  By the time the performance ended, I had digested enough of our earlier meals that I could try out a skewer of sausages.

Perhaps Korea isn't known for its sausages, but they were just what I wanted:
something not fried, not sweet, not kimchi!

This won't be the end of our gastronomical adventures in Seoul.  Before parting ways with Veronica, she promised to send us recommendations for every remaining meal during our stay.  Can't wait to discover more Korean food!

Staving off jet lag on the first night in Seoul

As we emerged stiffly out of the plane in Seoul, we were welcomed by the tepid humidity I remembered so well from last year's layovers on the way to and from Vietnam.  I remain baffled why such a beautiful and otherwise fully modern airport would not have air conditioning!

The building itself still was just as impressive as had been last year . . . 

I guess the warm humidity is good for the orchids!

and my feet were just as swollen -- presumably from all that sitting and altitude.

I hate how after super-long flights my feet usually look fat
 and sausage-like due to the swelling.

We made our way smoothly through immigration, customs and the baggage claim.  And by "smoothly" I mean "eerily smoothly."  Everything was so clean and orderly and well run that Amanda and I -- accustomed as we are to the US flying experience -- kept looking at each other like, wait a minute, isn't air travel supposed to be one long frustrating pain in the neck?

Cindy, a friend of Amanda's, met us in the public area outside of customs.  She generously and oh-so-patiently offered to shepherd our groggy, jet-lagged selves into the city.  On the way she pointed out that we were two days into the official monsoon season just in time for said monsoon to dump sheets of rain upon us.

Cindy also gave us a crash course in Korean cuisine.  First thing we did in the airport was stop for a snack in a Korean cafe.

Bibimbap (left) and gimbap (right)

Then, after we'd gotten to the hotel and dried off from the cloud burst, she took us to a Korean barbecue restaurant for dinner.  We let her handle all the ordering.

Moi with Cindy.  Apparently the peace sign is a Korean thing.

Grilled pork, with various trimmings to eat with it.

My first little compilation

Kimchi kigae (hot kimchi soup with tofu -- much better than I'd expected)

Nemyeong (cold buckwheat noodle soup)
The flavor was good, but the texture was slimy (and wasn't helped by being cold).

I'm happy to report that, so far, the food has been better than expected.  I've never really liked Korean food; I've tried it several times in the US and always come away thinking that the kimchee and other fermented and/or pickled items were unappealing if not downright repulsive.  Although I can't say that all of it was my favorite, it has been a nice surprise to discover that some of it's pretty good!

Getting to Seoul (and what we ate)

It's one thing to stay up till 2am packing for a trip -- what with the caffeine, the excitement, and the indecision over whether to pack all four pairs of shorts and two pairs of jeans, you declare that sleep is overrated and you'll have plenty of time for that on the plane.  It's another thing to have the alarm clock go off a mere three hours later and realize that hitting "snooze" is not an option because the airlines don't wait.  At that point, you curse those pairs of shorts and take comfort knowing that the flight to Korea is very, very long -- oh blessed nap time!

Fortunately, by the time we got to the airport, the sun was up and the excitement of traveling had set driven all that sleepy grogginess right out.  We were on our way to Korea!

Yes, mother, her hair is purple.

The first leg of the trip took us to Vancouver, British Columbia. A short jump of only about 35 minutes, the flight hardly seemed worth it. But the low altitude of our two-propeller plane meant we could soak up the spectacular natural beauty of Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands and the snow-capped Cascades. Also, it meant one more stamp in the passport than we'd have had if we'd gone straight to Seoul -- woot!

 
Our Canadian layover was long enough for a comfortable meal, and although it was still only 10:30am, we had been up long enough to be ready for lunch.

Burger with bacon, cheddar cheese and a mixed green salad

Or maybe we should call it brunch, or elevenses, or whatever -- because as soon as we got on the plane they served us another lunch. Naturally I wolfed it down. Travel mode is akin to survival mode, in the sense that you don't turn down a hot meal when you don't know when the next one will come. 

Chicken with rice

Despite my early-morning intentions to sleep during the entire flight to Seoul, once I got on the plane I just couldn't do it. I mean, when else am I going to have all those uninterrupted hours to read books and watch movies and listen to playlists of international music curated by an airline for mass consumption?

I began by finishing Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, which ended in what I felt was an unsatisfying state of disarray.

Then I settled down with a new book about sex.

Well, more like the physiology of sex and history of our scientific study of it.  The first few chapters of Mary Roach's book, Bonk,  were all about how awkward it is to be a scientist researching (or a nonfiction author writing about) everyone's favorite but oh-so-unspoken pastime, and about how it took science a really long time to research things like vaginal orgasms with a straight face and any sort of scientific rigor.  (It's a super interesting book, and Mary Roach has a wonderfully wry take on the subject matter; I only wish she'd provided a couple of diagrams for those of us whose only experience with lady parts dates back to the oh-so-chaste diagrams they show in 8th-grade sex ed.)

When my eyes got tired of reading, I switched from text to video.  I watched Kate Blanchett fall apart  beautifully in Blue Jasmine . . . 

and marveled, sometimes literally with bated breath, as Tim Jenison figured out how to recreate a Vermeer painting in the documentary Tim's Vermeer . . .

before taking a break for ramen . . .

and then finally catching up on the latest season of Sherlock.

By that time the flight attendants had brought up the cabin lights and were serving breakfast.

More chicken with rice

Before I knew it, we were descending into Seoul.  Only then did I realize that I'd forgotten to take a nap!  It's just so hard to fit everything in during a ten-hour flight!

Vacation!

Destination:  South Korea and Japan.  The fun begins in T minus 5 hours.

Not only do I have approximately 17 different outfits in here;
I also have a full kit for climbing Mt Fuji.  

I bear my testimony that packing cubes are true.
In the name of REI, amen.

Boba Fett!
Traveling the universe in a film canister on the side of my bag.

After our separate adventures in Vietnam and Russia last year, Amanda and I are joining forces again this year.  Instead of just meeting her in Seoul, I invited her to come up to Seattle a couple days early.  That meant a cheaper trans-Pacific flight for her, pleasant packing company for me, and a great excuse for both of us to start eating good food before we even got to Asia.

We celebrated the start of our trip with dinner at Tilikum Place Cafe.
I started with a shrimp salad with avocado puree, spring vegetables and endives.

Lamb chops and stuffed peppers

We go first to South Korea, where we'll spend a few days exploring Seoul and deciding whether or not we like kimchee (I have my doubts).  Then it's off to Japan for ten days of food, nature, culture and public bathing (possibly with bears).  It's going to be an adventure!

Six-week-old Seattlite

Six weeks, folks.  I realized this morning that it has been six weeks since I got to Seattle.  When I thought about the things I've learned and done since then, the number "six" seemed both too long and too short, and I wondered, "Am I developing properly?  Am I ahead of the curve, or developmentally challenged?  What am I expected to have accomplished by now?"

For help answering these questions, I turned to the wisdom of the Internet and discovered that parenting websites will tell you exactly what you should be doing every week of your life.  For example, the experts at What to Expect.com explain that "at six weeks, your [Seattlite] is getting a firm grasp on life."  At first I felt a little panicky because having a "firm grasp on life" seemed awfully ambitious for someone with only six weeks under his belt, but then I realized they were being literal.  As in, I should be figuring out how to grasp things.  With my hands.

That's it?  Piece of cake!  I can totally grasp things with my hands.  Heck, I can even do more than that:  I can grasp things, and pay for things, and dress myself, and talk to people and walk around.  So if grasping things is the expectation, then I'm way ahead of where I need to be.  Whew!

Speaking non-literally, though, I do actually think I'm starting to get a grasp on life here in Seattle -- with "starting" being the key word.  I don't always need GPS when I drive; my weekly routines are beginning to gel; I feel like I can say that I actually have friends here instead of just acquaintances.  And those friends are helping me get a grasp on other important aspects of Seattle life, such as brunch and bookstores and shopping and bike polo . . . .

I met Matt (a friend of a good friend in DC) for brunch at Oddfellows Cafe in the Capitol Hill
neighborhood.  A packed and popular brunch destination, the food was good but the service
very slow and inattentive.

After brunch Matt (who is a lawyer and aspiring fiction writer) walked me over to another
Capitol Hill institution:  the Elliott Bay Book Company.

Oh yes.  Anyone who thinks that coming to this bookstore is one of the first "must dos"
for a newborn Seattlite is clearly friend material.

My contribution to the local independent bookstore economy:
purchasing one copy of this send-up of Seattle culture.

On Friday I went with Colin (a friend from law school) to Totokaelo.
It's a gorgeous shop with very high-end designer clothing.  One look at their
website suggested that I was neither cool enough nor rich enough to shop there, but Colin
convinced me to check out their annual summer sale anyway.
It was the most fun I've had shopping for clothes other than suits in years
(and my bank account is definitely going to feel the consequences...).

Fashion show!
Boots from Maison Martin Margiela,
Sweater by A.P.C, and
Skinny jeans by Acne.
(I got a couple more summery
tops too, in case it ever warms up.)

Raincoat by Jill Sander
Probably the coolest piece of clothing
I own, and the best constructed.
I justified the splurge on the fact
that once summer ends I'll likely be
wearing it every single day.

With a hood and bell-shaped
silhouette, it's the exact opposite
of what I normally go for
in a coat -- but why not try
something new for a change?

But what about bike polo, you ask?  Is that even a thing?  Turns out yes, it is a thing -- invented in Seattle and exported to the rest of the world, bike polo is what it sounds like:  a bunch of guys (I didn't see any women) on their bikes playing polo on a hard-top tennis court.  It was very scrappy, with improvised equipment (the mallets appeared to be broom handles with plastic cups on the end) and incredible bike dexterity.  Check out the video:




Oh, and consider this:  All of these activities happened on the same half block.  The cafe, clothing store and bookstore are adjacent to each other in the same row of buildings, and the bike polo court was in a park across the street.

Left to right:  Elliott Bay Book Company, Totokaelo, Oddfellows Cafe

Office sleep-over!

If you had asked me yesterday afternoon what I would be blogging about today, I would have said something about my first foray into REI's flagship store and dinner with a friend from law school at TanakaSan.  And while I promise to go back and write about REI some other time (because AWESOME), right now I need to tell you about how I became a homeless person on the streets of Seattle with nothing but a pair of brand new hiking boots to my name.

Here's what happened:

After finishing dinner at Tanakasan, I walked home with my shopping bag full of hiking gear and, upon arriving at my building, discovered that my keys -- building fob, house key, car key, mailbox key, storage unit key, bike rack key, office key, grocery store rewards card -- were nowhere to be found.  Not in my bag (where they were supposed to be); not in my hands (where I wished they were); not in my pockets (where I knew they would never be, because pocket bulges are so vexing).

I mentally traced my steps back through the evening to think of where the keys might have gotten lost, and I realized, with a sense of growing horror, that they must be lying somewhere on the floor at REI.  Maybe among the hiking boots; more likely beneath the racks of puffy down vests and colorful Gore-Tex jackets.  That's where I had gotten so distracted by fabric and fit (gosh, I love high-end sportswear!) that I'd basically flung my tote bag down and started trying things on.  How easy it would have been for the keys to slip out unnoticed!  I figured it was worth a shot to check at the restaurant, but no -- no luck there.  REI it must have been.

This brings us to an important life lesson:  The problem with going shopping at night is that by the time you realize you've left your keys on the floor of the store, the store will be closed and locked until morning -- which means that you will be essentially homeless for the next ten or so hours.

I thought for a minute about what I might do.  I could have looked for a hotel, but the only ones nearby would have been very expensive.  I contemplated finding a bench in the park, but I didn't want to take the spot from a person who was actually homeless (or get murdered for witnessing whatever drug deals SURELY go on in city parks at night).  Then I remembered that I still had the access card to my office building -- so as long as my office door wasn't locked (and it wasn't), I could hole up there for the night!  Problem kind of solved!!

As I walked back over to my office, I tried to convince myself that this was going to be lots of fun. I mean, what's not to love about a slumber party by yourself on the floor of your office?  Well, basically everything, it turns out.  Like for example how watching Netflix at your desk still feels like a distraction from work, even it is 11:30pm on a Friday night.  And how lying on the floor with no blanket and only a pad of paper and some pens for a pillow is mighty uncomfortable.  Also cold.

SO COLD!!

By around 4:00am I was basically a frozen icicle.  I grabbed the socks that I had bought at REI out of the bag, pulling one pair onto my hands like mittens and draping the other pair over my lower arms like tiny, ineffective blankets.  I found a laptop cover and set that on my chest so that I could pretend that weight equaled warmth.  Then I just lay there reminding myself that at least it wasn't as cold as it was in Puno! (but still secretly wishing that I were in Puno, because then Amanda would be there, too).

That's when it occurred to me (not for the first time!) that our nostrils have a design defect.  When you're freezing cold and huddling yourself together, the last thing you want is little puffs of wind blowing on your bare arms.  BUT THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT OUR NOSTRILS ARE APPARENTLY DESIGNED TO DO.  Think about it -- they're pointed straight down, aiming each outgoing breath right at your poor bare arms, causing great discomfort and distress.  You basically have a choice between holding your breath forever and freezing to death.

Seriously, if I ever have any say in evolution or creation, I'm going to vote for adjustable nostrils -- like those air nozzles above your seat in an airplane -- that you can swivel around to direct the air off of you.

Despite my non-adjustable nostrils, I managed to doze off for a couple more hours.  Once the sun came up, though, the struggle seemed futile, so I got up and watched some more Netflix until Starbucks opened and I could get a hot chocolate.  With that jolt of heat and sugar, things started looking up.  The sun came out; the birds were singing.  REI opened right on time and, praised be!, my keys were waiting for me right behind the customer service counter.

So, as they say, all's well that ends well.

(And by way of post script, let me just say that the moral of this story is not that I need to start carrying my keys in my pockets (as some have suggested, ahem!), but rather that I need to stock my office with pillows, a blanket, toenail polish and some popcorn for the next time I have an impromptu slumber party.)

Oh, the perils of being a woman in love!

Suppose you're a beautiful young woman.  You meet the man of your dreams and fall in love.  He loves you, too, and life's a fairy tale.  Unfortunately, if you're the heroine of a fairy tale and you fall in love at the beginning of the tale, then you're in for a rough spell.  Sooner or later your prince will betray you and break your heart.

What do you do next?

As I learned this weekend, it depends on what kind of fairy tale you're living.  And when it was written.

According to the 19th Centry ballet Giselle, which I saw performed on Saturday by Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet, your next move is to die.  Why?  Because ROMANTICISM -- that's just how it works (be grateful they gave you a mad scene instead of a bloody hanky and a cough).  In this case, specifically, you have to die so that (1) your man can realize that he really did love you and never should have made you die of a broken heart in the first place, (2) you can rise from the grave and start hanging out with a posse of scary lady ghosts who force hapless men to dance themselves to death, and (3) demonstrate true feminine love and devotion by protecting your man when your new friends find him weeping over your grave.

It's a weird story, the product of the French Romantic imagination working on an old German folktale, and it's one of my favorites in the classical ballet repertoire.  It's the only classical ballet that I know of where the principal conflict is between two women (Giselle and the leader of the Wilis), and where the prince is the one who needs to be rescued by the heroine.  The story is by no means a feminist manifesto (it is a 19th Century French ballet, after all), but at the core there's something there that's interesting and exciting.  I always get goosebumps the first time Giselle breaks rank to shield the prince and face down Wilis.

Disney's Maleficent, which I saw tonight and really enjoyed, took the story after heartbreak in a slightly different direction.  In this tale our (anti-)heroine's grievous physical injury was the betrayal, not the result of it.  And she did not die; if anything, she became harder to kill than ever before.  It's hard to say whether she continued to love her prince (probably not), but in any event there was no forgiveness or mercy (on his account, at least).  In the long run, that wasn't the relationship that anyone cared about -- as in Giselle, all the real action played out between the two women.  They did not do battle over a man; instead they grew together in spite of a man.

The movie paid tribute in many ways to Disney's wonderful 1959 animated version, but in spirit it felt more akin to Frozen: a heroine who is also a villain, a rejection of the traditional notion of what "true love's kiss" might be, a willingness to play with the classic Disney tropes with a certain amount of humor and self-awareness.  It makes me want this movie to do as well as Frozen has -- I want whoever's greenlighting these sorts of projects at Disney to keep them coming.