해장국 (Haejang-guk), aka “Hangover Soup,” is a hearty stew served across Korea. I ordered it by random, assuming that the hae referred to “seafood,” but my error was a pleasant mistake. Honestly, it seems a lot like any other soup in Korea, although the addition of a chunk of bone and the coagulated blood are nice touches that should provide valuable nutrients.
국 (guk) is a word meaning soup, and 해장 (haejang) does literally mean “to get sober,” so the nickname is a proper translation.
I can attest to having it in the middle of a drinking session and not having a hangover the next day, though I wasn’t drinking that much to begin with. Worth a try, but I wouldn’t want it if I actually had a hangover.
I slept well and had about an hour to drink coffee and study before breakfast officially began. It’s a generous, if carb heavy (not that I am giving any fcks about carbs) spread: ramen, cereal, and toast.
After changing into day clothes, I took off to a nearby cinema to catch the first showing of Captain Marvel. I got there right at the scheduled start time, but there was about a ten minute window of commercials and trailers. Despite being a 9:20 am showing, there were about at least a dozen people in the decent sized theater. I was happy to find the ticket price to be half of what I scoped out in another theater. The movie was a solid, if uninspired, Marvel entry. Brie Larson seemed to be doing more posing with attitude than acting. I kept imagining the alternate universe where Hillary won, and seeing the movie as the victory lap it deserved to be, rather than the “girl power” anthem that feels hollow in the real rage of the #metoo era. I suppose it is an example of art imitating life. Black Panther (i.e. Obama) blew the socks off everyone, while Captain Marvel (i.e. Hillary) falls a little short. In any case, I’m looking forward to End Game next month.
I chilled back in the hostel lobby for about half an hour before going to lunch. There is a reasonably priced old-school Korean restaurant just down the street, and I am planning to go their pretty much everyday. The clientele is all middle aged men and construction workers, so its right up my alley. Of course, I had kimchi stew, but I swear I’ll eventually try everything on the menu.
I took a nap and continued studying Korean through the afternoon, until it was time to go for a run. I did two laps along the beach and tried to up the pace over a shorter distance. I showered and immediately went to the Home Plus to grab a salad and some sort of snacky thing.
In the afternoon, I had googled “pub quiz Busan” on a lark, and found a bar that was hosting a pub quiz that very night. Though I had been hoping to keep my dry streak going a couple more days, its been too long since my last trivia. I took the subway over to the Gwangan beach area where “HQ Gwangan” is located to find the bar completely devoid of people. The quiz was scheduled to begin at 9:30 (which is completely insane), and I rolled in just after 8. How was there no one there grabbing a burger and a drink to unwind after work? By nine, the place was hopping with English teachers. I joined the team of the guys sitting next to me playing Scrabble at the bar.
So apparently, all the pub quizzes in Korea turn it into straight up gambling. Everyone pays in (2 bucks a person) and the winning team takes the pot. That is one way to balance team sizes. We had a decent showing in a three way tie for second, but there was no scenario where we could have answered differently to get us in to first place. My teammates have already invited me to join them next week.
I left with enough time to catch the subway back to Haeundae, and swung by the GS25 to grab a little snack as a 夜宵 (ye4xiao1) because I was really feeling the three beers I had drunk over 3 hours. The spicy ttoekbokki was probably a bad idea, but it didn’t keep me from falling straight asleep. There was no one else in my dorm, so I didn’t have to pretend to try to be quiet coming in and brushing my teeth.
Night scenery
Friday morning, I was hanging around downstairs quietly working during the breakfast rush, when I was asked to help shoot a promo video for the hostel. The manager had asked me the other day and I agreed since I like the place well enough. I ran upstairs to get cleaned up and shave. It was just a few minutes of me acting like I was helping myself to the breakfast, and since I can’t waste food, I ate a second breakfast. I was given a few vouchers for free coffee by way of thanks.
Since I had two breakfasts, I figured I could skip lunch and took a long nap instead. In the afternoon, I redeemed one of the vouchers for an Americano in the hostel’s cafe. The cafe space in the other building is actually a lot more cozy than the fairly sterile lobby/lounge in the building where my dorm is.
I was getting really restless by mid-afternoon, but as the pollution had crept up beyond my running threshold I couldn’t go for a run. I did take a long walk, winding my way up and down most of the streets in the fairly smallish Haeundae neighborhood. It was nice to get out of the hostel, but I still had the problem of nothing to do and feeling overwhelmed by ennui.
At 5 pm, I moseyed over to the supermarket next door and grabbed a bottle of pomegranate soju. I busied myself with vocabulary while working my way through the bottle slowly and managed to forget my ennui. I suppose the many groups of people checking in provided some degree of distraction as well.
When I finished the soju, I headed over to my “favorite” restaurant to try something else off the menu, and I picked up another bottle of original soju on the way back to the hostel. I noticed a police car parked in the street and there were two cops in the lobby talking with the front desk. When they left, I asked the guy at the front desk what was up. Apparently, a guest had dropped a wallet outside the hostel in the morning and it disappeared. So, maybe Korea isn’t as perfectly safe as I have been imagining it.
The evening picked up from there as I was relaxing into the soju. A Metallica song somehow found its way onto the playlist which is usually just a dozen generic pop songs on infinite loop (thanks to Youtube’s algorithm), and a Latvian girl struck up a conversation with me when she noticed I was rocking out. We chatted while she was eating her bento box dinner and had a bit of soju together. She has tickets to see them in the summer (jealous!), though the thought occurs to me if I’m kicking around Europe in the summer, I might be able to attend some concerts. We took a stroll around a nearby park to soak up the night scenery.
Back at the hostel, she went straight up to go to sleep, but I had half a bottle of soju left in the fridge to drink. There was a large party of Chinese speaking folks chowing down on bowls of instant noodles and takeout boxes of crab legs. (Srsly wtf). I asked them where they were from in Chinese, they answered Taiwan, and then promptly cleared out. (Srsly wtf).
By the time I finished my soju, it was maybe 10 and the lounge was empty except for a Chinese girl taking photos of everything on her phone. I honestly can’t for the life of me remember if we conversed in English or Chinese, but we talked for a while. I was slightly disappointed to find I had some roommates snoring away, but such is life.
In a span of two days, I came across “아르바이트” from two different sources, and it is far too interesting a word to pass up. At first glance, it is obviously a loan word because it is too long and there are a bunch ㅡ’s in it.
Loan words in Korean adopt a number of very predictable patterns to approximate non-native sounds. [1] There are straight substitutions for consonants that don’t exist in Korean. For example, ㅍ (p) substitutes for “f” or ㅈ (j) substitutes for a “z” sound. [2] Vowels are combined to create new diphthongs. The long i sound (as in “eye”) is created through the addition of 아 ( “a” as in father) and 이 (“i”, but sounds like “ee”) — 아이 (“ai”) –, while 에 (“e” as in bed) and 이 (“i”) combine to make 에이 (“ei”, but pronounced like “ay” in day). [3] consonant clusters have the neutral “eu” sound as place holders. For example, 스트레스 is technically “seu-teu-re-seu”, but if you ignore all the eu’s, you get “stres,” i.e. stress.
So, when I come across “아르바이트”, I sound it out to see if I could identify the English: a-reu-bai-teu –> arbait… Arbeit! WTF is a German word doing in Korean? I thought it was a fluke until I saw it twice.
So, “arbeit” in Korean appears to refer to part-time work or a manual labor type wage-based job. I have some serious questions about how this entered the language. The general (native) way to say work is 일하다 (il -hada). This is a verb-object combination, where hada means “to do” and takes il as the object. What does il mean? The dictionary lists three distinct words: work, day, one. For “day” and “one,” il is the Korean pronunciation of two Chinese characters: 日 (ri4, “day”) and 一 (yi1, “one”). Maybe 일 is a native Korean word meaning work, but I like the supposition of it being related to day such that the etymology of work in Korean would be “what you do all day.”
It should be a given that what passes for Chinese food in America is light years away from “authentic” Chinese food, but there is one dish that bridges the gap. I remember the first time I had sweet and sour pork in China and thinking it tasted exactly like Panda Express (in a good way). The same can be said for Korea, as despite their versions of Chinese food being bizarre to my sinified palate, one invariant served at pretty much all Chinese restaurants in Korea is a dish called tang-su-yuk (탕수육).
I can’t imagine a less appetizing looking dish
It doesn’t take a linguist to realize that tang-su-yuk sounds an awful lot like tang-cu-rou (糖醋肉 “sugar vinegar meat”) or more properly 糖醋里脊 (tang2cu4li3ji3 “sugar vinegar pork loin”), although the Korean dictionary says that the hanja (Chinese characters) behind tang-su-yuk are actually 糖水肉 (tang2shui3 rou4, “sugar water meat”). Though, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.
To the best of my knowledge, China has at least three distinct schools of sweet and sour pork. There is the Cantonese style centered around Guangdong and available at every Hong Kong cafe (港式茶餐厅); there is the southern (江南 jiang1nan2, a.k.a. south of the Yangtze) style centered around Hangzhou; and there is the northern style, which I associate most strongly with Dongbei (东北 “Northeast” a.k.a. Manchuria), though technically speaking Dongbei food is based on Shandong cuisine.
In Hong Kong, one orders 咕咾肉 (gu1lao3rou4 in Mandarin), which I assume has some meaning in Cantonese. The meat is chopped pork ribs (排骨 pai2gu3) that are lightly coated in flour or corn starch to create a very crispy, but thin outside texture. Bell peppers, onions, and pineapple are briefly stir-fried in, though the vegetables usually retain a bit of their raw edge. Needless to say, the dish is heavy on the sweet.
In the lower reaches of the Yangtze river, one orders 糖醋里脊 (tang2cu4 li3ji3), where the name is a literally description of the ingredients: sugar and vinegar. 里脊 means tenderloin, so there are no bones in the dish. Relatively lean, elongated pieces of pork are thickly battered and served in a brownish sauce. Much like McDonald’s failed launch of mozzarella sticks, there is often a moment of disappointment when you bite into what looks to be a big chunk only to find there is barely any meat inside.
In northeastern China, you order 锅包肉 (guo1bao1rou1, literally “pot wrapped meat”) whose name probably has an interesting origin story associated with it. This dish batters large, thin slices of lean pork and better restaurants add a bit of shredded ginger to the sauce. Unlike the other two forms of sweet and sour pork, the pieces are not bite sized. Though there is still a lot of breading hanging off the pork it is usually fried very crispy on the outside and chewy inside.
All in all, I probably prefer Guobaorou, but they are all good in their own rights. Just hope that the kitchen is able to walk that fine line between sweet and sour to achieve the perfect balance.
I definitely ate too many choco pies, finishing off the entire box of twelve within a day. I regretted the donuts even more, but continued my obsession with cramming Korean for most of the day, the hours ticking by uneventfully.
As I was planning to move on to Busan the next day, I had arranged with my host to treat him to dinner. He had a lecture to give at a local university and a window of time between the end of his day job at a middle school and the graduate seminar. He picked me up and we drove to the university, parked, then headed off campus to get some Chinese food.
I chilled in a lounge in the graduate building while he went up to do his professor thing. I tried reading, but an old acquaintance decided to reconnect, so I spent much of the hour switching over to WeChat to answer messages. I’m not really qualified to be giving anyone life advice, especially regarding such weighty decisions as “should I marry this person.” I barely knew you, why ask me. You should at least have to climb a mountain or something if you want to seek my wisdom…and be limited to three questions.
In no particular rush to get out of the house, I took my time the next morning packing up and organizing my suitcase. Of course, I still put in a few hours of study. My one contact in Busan went so far as to send me a bus schedule, which bodes well. I shouldn’t be complaining, considering I basically just had a free apartment for a week, but overall a lot of my contacts have fallen through, leaving me to dine alone a lot more than expected.
I walked to the Bus Terminal at East Daegu Station along a road with police stationed every 50 meters. I wonder what was going on. That’s the kind of presence for clearing a street for a really important motorcade. The sidewalks were fine. I bought my ticket no problem, and had nearly an hour to kill (to save 2000 on the ticket between “regular” and “express”). I had only had one meal mid morning to finish off the rest of the kimchi and lettuce (in a pot of ramen noodles) and being nearly 2 in the afternoon, I was feeling a bit peckish. I decided to treat myself to a bubble tea and a bag of chips.
I dozed the first part of the bus ride and spent the rest of it watching educational videos. The bus was supposed to take close to two hours, but the maniac of a driver got us there in under 90 minutes. As we were veering through the streets of Busan, as if in some cut scene from Black Panther, I was starting to get nauseous.
I’ve been so looking forward to staying in this guesthouse. I stayed here in August 2017 and found it immaculately clean, spacious, and the best value for money I’ve ever seen. I was relieved to find that a year and a half absence hasn’t ruined the place. I didn’t notice how starved for company I’ve been these past two weeks, but I was trying to quietly work, but every person who walks in or out pricks up my ears. They like to throw movies on the projector in the late afternoon and evening, and the first movie to show up was Okja (about the giant pig). I’d never seen it, but only made it half way before being too distracted by the conversations within earshot and workmen repairing lights.
There is a Home Plus supermarket only about 600 meters away, so I made up for the junk food lunch by eating a salad dinner. The evening was a bit quieter and I got a little more work in before heading up to sleep. I almost had the entire 4-person dorm to myself, though I heard someone come in as I was drifting off. I didn’t see him in the morning, and he is already checked out. That is one thing that is a little weird about this place. A lot of people pass through so quickly. It’s also more like a hotel than a hostel. There are two entire buildings, each five stories, with rooms. Whole families come.
First there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is.
— Zen Poem (also lyrics from a Donovan song)
As I am plugging along in Korean, learning hundreds of grammatical points and 18 different ways to express the future tense through nearly indiscernible differences in conjugation, I come across the following:
You start off learning lots of adjectives (aka descriptive verbs) in their “infinitive” forms all of which end in the 다 (da). 예쁘다 (yeppeu-da) means to be pretty, and one can imagine on the streets of Korea there are plenty of occasions to say so. However, it couldn’t possibly be right to go around saying things in the infinitive form (“to be pretty”) when it would be more appropriate to say “she is pretty” or “you are pretty.” Of course, there are a whole host of considerations for how casual or polite you want to be and additional subtleties that could be added to indicate that this is new information to me (e.g. I’m just discovering this).
And then I come to the lesson on a “narrative” form where the conjugation ends up exactly the same as the infinitive. So, it would have been fine to say 예쁘다 (yeppeu-da) all along as long as I wasn’t speaking to myself.
Sunday and Monday passed pretty much the same as others days: up early, drinking coffee and studying Korean, lunch and siesta, and a few hours in a cafe in the afternoon. The key difference is there was a window of relatively clean air allowing me to train two consecutive days.
I like the running circuit I can do here in Daegu, with two minor exceptions. Firstly, to get to the river, I have to go through quite a few traffic lights, so that first kilometer is really stop and go. Secondly, the entire circuit is quite long–12 km (an entire 1.5 km more than my last run in Seoul)–and any variations to improve the scenery would make it even longer.
Having a fridge full of green leaves, I stuck to salad on Sunday night after my run, so obviously I was pretty hungry when I woke up Monday morning. As the air was still clean, I had a notion of spending the day out and about in town, starting with a leisurely breakfast out. I packed up a salad for a potential lunch picnic and went to the nearest McDonald’s around 9am. It was a two-story joint with a drive-thru — very fancy. I didn’t necessarily want to go for the super deluxe breakfast, so I took a few minutes to weigh over the menu before noticing that there was no cash register. There were only two self-service terminals and I had the sudden realization that I couldn’t pay cash. It’s funny, I remember “China Watcher Twitter” mercilessly laying into a piece about China’s transition to cashless and non-acceptance of foreign credit cards from a couple weeks ago. The headline thing was not being able to buy McDonald’s with whatever fancy credit card the reporter had. While McDonald’s in China have those same self-service terminals, they also always have staff working the counter. Yet, here I am in Korea experiencing a moment of shut out because I don’t have a Korean bank card. Koreans, generally speaking, use plastic for everything, including minor purchases. The clearance system must have really low fees or something otherwise those takeout coffee counters charging 1500 for a coffee wouldn’t survive.
Anyways, digression aside, I had a backup option, namely a “Coffee and Bagel (100% Original)” place I had passed on my run. I literally cannot even remember the last bagel I had, and I was salivating at the Instagramability of the breakfast. It was open, but there wasn’t a single bagel. wtf. I went back to the apartment, made myself a cup of coffee and cooked that last package of ramen. It was 10am.
For my second run, I knew it was going to be quite warm outside, so I dug out my exercise shorts (as opposed to the old sweats I’ve been wearing all the time). I also grabbed a pair of 0.5 kilogram dumbbells that were sitting around the apartment. Though baffled by the idea of such light weights (what practical function could they possibly serve), I figured they’d give the run a little extra oomph. I headed west along a major avenue, followed the path along the river south for several kilometers to the edge of town, cut up at the bridge which lead to Suseong Lake, did an entire lap around the lake, and followed an avenue straight back up to the apartment. I forgot to turn off my tracker until I stumbled into the apartment and the gps had some malfunction on the first kilometer, but that lap added about 2km to the total distance. I’m insane.
Before leaving the lake, I noticed a man with a large camera taking pictures. It took a few beats for me to realize he was standing under a tree in full bloom. Spring is starting.
I took a hot shower, put on a pair of sandals and went out to get some real food. I guess I’m doing it right by not eating Korean food everyday (I don’t count noodles or dumplings) because every time I sit down to a simple Korean meal, I am just overwhelmed by joy and gratitude.
I swung by a Dunkin Donuts to get a couple donuts for the next morning. They had cleaned out the display case and had just the last few sitting on a tray by the cash register. Note to self: learn how to incredulously say ” how are these not discounted?” in Korean. And to make sure I didn’t eat the donuts that night, I grabbed a box of choco pies (which were discounted) at the mart at the bottom of my building.
When people ask me what I’m doing in Korea, I like to joke that I am here to learn Korean and eat my body weight in kimchi. There are many kinds of kimchi (a taxonomy for which has just been added to the top of my to-do list), but when I say kimchi, I mean the prototypical version made from Napa cabbage. Any meal that comes with a little on the side is a good meal. Any restaurant that has a jar on the table is a good restaurant. If you believe the propaganda, kimchi burns fat, builds muscle, improves concentration (for learning), regulates moods (to cure depression), and promotes household harmony.
Unfortunately, there are limits to how much kimchi I can eat in a sitting. Unless I’ve a bottle (or two) of soju and possibly some potato chips or roasted peanuts as well, the sour, pungent, spicy, cold nature of kimchi means it is best in small doses. Unless you cook it.
Hot kimchi is an entirely different beast. Throw it on the grill when you are barbecuing thinly sliced pork belly, throw some in your fried rice, or make a pancake out of it and the flavors of the kimchi blend with the other foods into a rich and savory tapestry. However, the absolute best way to eat kimchi is in its stewed form, aka kimchi jjigae (김치찌개).
If it wasn’t enough food for one person in the first place, the auntie came by halfway through to give me a fried egg.
I like to go to the cheap little Korean restaurants where there is a small range of classics–such as bimbimbap, fried rice, dumplings, noodles, etc–but I invariably order the kimchi stew. Even among the holy trinity of stews–kimchi, soybean paste (된장), and tofu–there is no god but kimchi and I am its prophet. Soybean paste stew is a classic, but best served along with BBQ (where it reportedly serves some health benefit). Tofu is nice, but you usually get some nice chewy tofu in your kimchi stew, whereas the tofu soup is usually a silken tofu.
A bowl of kimchi stew is an indescribable experience from start to finish. It’s served boiling in a stone pot, so you whet the appetite from the array of banchan before you can start picking out pieces of softened, steaming kimchi leaves with your chopsticks. The broth is hot, salty, savoury, spicy, sour, and pungent, checking off every flavor except sweet. You take a spoonful of rice every so often to clear the palate and enjoy the heady rush of flavors once more. Halfway through the bowl you give up on all pretense of restraint and dump the rest of your rice into the pot so that every grain can become infused with scarlet goodness. On the bottom of the bowl, you discover a secret trove of pork you weren’t expecting like an unannounced prize in the cereal box.
Kimchi stew is also super easy to make since the kimchi pretty much provides all the seasoning you need. Oh sure, a teaspoon of salt, a dash of pepper, and maybe even a spoonful of chili or soy sauce will help if you dilute it by adding too many vegetables to the pot–I recommend sticking to just Chinese onion (大葱) and some kind of large, mild green pepper on top of the tofu, pork, and kimchi base.
I was vaguely aware that March 1 was a holiday in Korea, having come across it on a list of public holidays in a textbook, and though it seems that, yes, everyone had the day off from work, it didn’t seem a big deal. For the record, the holiday commemorates the start of a (ultimately unsuccessful) independence movement against Japanese colonization that began March 1, 1919. Considering it is the centennial, you’d think it be a bigger deal. Then again, given the anti-Japanese rhetoric I’m used to in China, maybe its a good thing that Korea doesn’t get too nationalistic about things.
I had lunch with my classmate and his younger brother, who is thinking about applying to grad school in the US. We talked about training dogs and growing coffee plants. After lunch, we went to a coffee shop by a lake and kept chatting. We double parked and just left the keys in the ignition so anyone could move the car if they needed to. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that. I get that Korea is safe, but wow. I sometimes talk to women from the US or Europe, who say they’d never walk alone at night there, but feel safe here. I feel it too (though obviously from a different perspective and a generous helping of privilege), but seriously, why would I ever want to move to a place that is dangerous and crime ridden. American carnage, indeed.
In the mid-afternoon, duty called, so my friend had to rush back home, dropping me off on the way. Having accomplished the ambitious goal of leaving the apartment, I was content to stay in for the night, eating a salad and watching ten minutes of a movie before I realized I didn’t have the attention span for it. Strange, I’m spending hours intensely focused on Korean study, but I can’t turn the brain off and just watch a movie.
Saturday morning, I continued my studying campaign, stopping only for lunch and a light nap. After my nap, I forced myself out of the house to go around the block to a coffee shop, whose name I thought was “Cup of Inspiration” but was actually Hands Coffee. I had barely sat down when I received a VoIP call via WeChat. By the time, I got off the phone, whatever inspiration was in the long black had long since been sucked out of me. I fiddled about for an hour or so before leaving to visit the grocery store again.
Rather than buying salad mixes (which have basically been just lettuce and cabbage to begin with), I bought a couple of kinds of lettuce which were on sale and spent a long time looking over the produce section debating some fancy (carrot, cucumber, tomato) upgrades to my rabbit diet of the next several days. Ultimately, I decided to spring for a bag of apples (사과 for a 傻瓜). Craving a particular food item, I picked up a pack to make myself for dinner.
And so the hours passed.
I’ve been getting a lot of input from a variety of sources telling me what to do with my life. There is the “write about your travels” camp, which I would think this blog is fulfilling, but that’s ignoring the two unfinished travelogues in the proverbial desk drawer. There is the “be an online celebrity” camp encouraging me to go full on with Chinese social media, posting daily videos and I suppose eventually figuring live streaming and some sort of English teaching based monetization scheme. Seriously, I have two offers from friends back in China to be my agent and push content out into the interwebs. Finally, there is a camp of one who suggests different things every time I talk to him.
I’ve definitely been neglecting my duties as a culinary ambassador (aka clueless whitesplainer), so I’m reaching into the photo album archives to bring up this classic snack food: tteokbokki (떡볶이). I’ve only had it the one time so far, but I have found myself craving it more and more over the past week. Chewy “rice cakes” in a spicy sweet sauce, how can you do any better? Maybe by adding some oden (오뎅, borrowed from Japanese, but meaning “fishcakes” here). The square guys in the picture have a chewy tofu texture with a mild fishy flavor. They are usually served on skewers and you can ask for a bowl of the “soup” to drink on the side.
I briefly introduced 떡 (tteok) on the travel blog when I had a “traditional” tteok soup for the lunar new years. While you can buy bags of sliced tteok from supermarkets, its the tteokbokki format that is sold in every night market and street corner. 볶이 (bokki) means “stir-fried,” which feels like a misnomer, as they are usually just hanging around simmering in the oh-so spicy, oh-so delicious sauce. You’ll also see 볶 on the menu of small snack shops for fried rice (볶음밥, bokkeumbap).
