Boryeong Mud Festival 2011

Way back, on a humid weekend in late July, I travelled with some of my old mates from Gwangju-si to the Boryeong Mud Festival. The 14th Boryeong Mud Festival was held at Daecheon Beach in Boryeong city in Chungcheongnam-do, a province on the Western coast of Korea. 

Our first visitor from home

Back in spring we got our first visitor from England, to be honest I hadn't really expected anyone to make the long journey out here. Korea is neither cheap nor easy to get to from England, and doesn't exactly have a huge amount of beaches or good weather, so it's not a common tourist destination. Still our friend Tom who we know from university made it all the way out here just to see us, which was quite an honour.

His journey out here went completely smoothly for thousands of miles until he was a few miles from Gwangju when his bus broke down! So he was sat by the side of the road waiting for an hour for a new bus to come along and take him those final few miles. Luckily he'd hired a phone at the airport so we could keep in touch and I knew what had happened. When he finally arrived we returned to our apartment and had a bit of lunch and then didn't do much for the rest of the day. Tom was obviously pretty tired from an 11 hour flight plus bus delays etc. so we just chilled out, had a chat and caught up on news and gossip from home.

So Gop Chang

Another Korean food adventure but in Korean food rather than Korean attempts at western food this time. Last Friday I was on my out of the school at home time when once of the other teachers called me over and asked me if I wanted to come for some food and drinks with them, having no other plans I thought why not. It was a good group, just me, the art teacher and geography teacher both of who speak good English and the Chinese character teacher who speaks almost no English, I get on well with all of them. We wandered down to a restaurant in Gwangju, close to the 'Italian' place I went to the other week.

Starters were some cold kimchi soup called mul kimchi (물김기) -literally water kimchi which was delicious and spring onion kimchi (바김기) which was also nice, and a few other bits and bobs.

Then they brought out the main sizzling on a hot plate.

So gop chang (소곱창)The picture is midway through the waitress cutting it up into little pieces, what comes out looks a bit like a Cumberland sausage, it's a big meaty spiral.

So what exactly is it? Well the teachers who I was with weren't really sure how to tell me what it was but they eventually settled on cow's stomach pipe. I think it is small intestine but maybe its esophagus, either way some part of a cow's digestive system. Considering where it comes from it is surprisingly tasty! Its basically just beef fat surrounding a chewy tube, the fat is lovely and tasty but the tube doesn't taste of much and lets the whole thing down a bit by being very chewy. The potatoes and onions that came on the same hotplate were very tasty having cooked in the beef fat, nom nom!

So the moral of the story is, cow intestines can be tastier than you'd think!

Fighting for Korea - World Cup 2010

Well the World Cup madness is over for another 4 years for England and for South Korea but we had fun "Fighting" for (supporting) our adopted country while it lasted. The world cup has provided us with plenty of amusement and material for lessons but its not just the action on the pitch that has been amusing.

Take the Korean World Cup advertising campaign for instance. The advertising campaign shows a group of foreigners standing around looking annoyed with their fingers shoved in their ears as they are shouted at by a stadium full of chanting Koreans. The slogan "Shouting for Korea" seemed to be an attempt to encourage the Koreans to shout even more than they usually do to cheer their team on. Presumably, this was in the (mistaken) belief that if they did it enough they might be able to annoy the other teams into losing. There were also loads of funny/irritating World Cup songs including the insanely catchy World Cup Song No.1 by K-Pop boy group 2AM which I played as a prize for my 2nd graders - by the end of that teaching week I was waking up humming that bloody song! And of course who could forget the 'Shouting Dance' by Big Bang.....

Imagine trying to get the English fans to learn that many moves!

About 3 weeks ago we were visiting a Korean friend of ours in Suwon (the provincial capital of Gyeonggi-do) for the weekend and we just happened to be around for South Korea's first big World Cup game against Greece.Our Korean friend lent us South Korea t-shirts for the night and we went down to a sam gyop sal (bacon barbeque) restaurant to cheer on the "Red Devils", stuff our faces and drink plenty of soju (of course).

Sam gyop sal, delicious pieces of pork belly, cooked on a camp stove at your table nom nom nom!

Are you busy? In Korea is polite to wait to have your drink poured for you. The youngest person does the pouring apparently. But if you get bored waiting just ask "Are you busy?"!

We were wearing the old Korea football shirts that said "Be the reds!" (whatever that means). The new ones say "The Shouts of the Reds!" as the Korean team are the reds and "shout" seems to be a popular Englishee buzzword over here at the moment (as if the Koreans need any more encouragement to make loads of noise all the time!).

We were given these inflatable plastic thingys to bash together whilst shouting "Dae Han Min Guk" - they make a hell of a lot of noise

Rowan inflates the plastic things.

There were loads of Koreans there, mainly families with excited young children but also groups of young men hitting the soju hard and young couples too. The atmosphere was fantastic and the crowds were rewarded with an entertaining game and a Korean victory.

Spot the waygook! (foreigner)

We foreigners joined in the cheering too - "Dae Han Min Guk" (I think it means Republic of Korea)!! In fact, the Koreans in the restaurant were so impressed with our "Shouting for Korea" that when the game was won a group of men came over to our Korean friend and gave us a load of money and explained that it was to pay for our meal to thank us for our support! Best football game ever!

A happy Korean fan strikes a pose!

Some crazy Korean fans wanted to celebrate their country's win by having their photo taken with us in Suwon city centre! Say "kimchi"!

We engaged in a bit of celebratory, post-match, deep-fried cheese munching - delicious!

No, that's not a bloodied dismembered finger that Rowan's eating, it's just a deep-fried breaded lump of cheese dipped in ketchup!

An Italian in Gwangju

Well I was supposed to be going out for a meal with my principal, vice principal and the English department this evening, I was really hoping it would be fun and relaxing since my 2nd grade class had been the worst behaved, most insolent little buggers that I've had the misfortune of trying to teach since coming to Korea. It was a pretty nice evening, if somewhat bizarre, much like Korea in general then!

The principal couldn't make it because she had a meeting and half the English department got out of it due to a variety of excuses so it was the usual suspects of my handler, my schedule organiser and my boss plus the vice principal and the co-teacher from my awful 2nd grade class. We went to an Italian style place (emphasis on the style, it was definitely not authentic) called Sorentos. I was offered a menu to choose something from and I went for spaghetti carbonara as a fairly safe and hopefully cheesy option.

We ate it Korean style, that is we had 3 big plates of pasta between us, and we would take bits from each onto our own little plates, a little weird if you're used to sitting down to your own plate of something but a good way to taste a lot of things and make sure that you don't end up wishing you had what someone else had ordered. Korean style eating also involves serving all the dishes at the same time rather than in order like a western meal.

The three spaghetti dishes were carbonara, spicy tomato and prawn and cream and prawn, all fairly unremarkable. The carbonara was pretty poor, with lots of cream and no egg in the sauce, hardly any cheese and no pepper, but it did have some reasonable ham in it and the mushrooms were ok although they were random Korean mushrooms. The spicy tomato and prawn was better and surprisingly not ridiculously hot. I didn't try the prawn and cream.

Next we got a pizza, which was nothing special, thin crust, lots of cheddar style cheese and a few olives and olive tapenade. Also pretty awful squid and clam risotto which rather than being cooked with regular stirring and slow addition of stock in an open pot to produce a creamy texture had obviously been cooked in a rice cooker.

The chicken salad was definitely the highlight of the meal due to the dressing of... (wait for it) strawberry yoghurt! That's right folks, lettuce, tomato, coated chicken strips and a gravy boat of strawberry yoghurt, one of the more bizarre adventures in Korean food I've had yet. They really have some strange ideas about western food over here. They seem to have the strange notion that all Western food is supposed to be sweet - maybe that is why you get sugary garlic bread over here and even the infamous garlic donut!

Desert was another interesting adventure although a suprisingly tasty one. We had iced azuki beans called patbingsu (팥빙수) with fruit and random chewy, gooey sweeties, I wasn't too keen when I saw the pile of red beans sat on top of ice shavings, but it was actually pretty good, sweeter than most Korean deserts but not sickly and definitely not trying to be Italian!

Kimchi, the taste (and smell) of Korea

aOne of the first things I notice when traveling to a different country are the different smells in the air. In Dubrovnik, Croatia the air is fresh and smells of the sea, in Marrakesh, Morocco the air is a heady mix of mint tea, spices, and the stink of tanneries but in Korea one smell stands out above all the others. Permeating everything three times a day is the unique garlicy odor of Korea's ubiquitous kimchi.
















A plate of cabbage kimchi (from wikipedia, not taken by me)

Koreans LOVE kimchi, I mean really love it. If they had a choice between eating only kimchi or eating everything else in the world except kimchi for the rest of their lives I suspect most of them would choose kimchi. But most people in the UK have never heard of kimchi let alone tried it, so what is it?

Kimchi or 김치 in Hangul is a mixture of fermented vegetables, (usually cabbage but sometimes radish, cucumber, or spring onions) with salt, chilli paste, garlic and fish sauce.

The main smell of kimchi is the smell of garlic and fermented cabbage and it's this smell which fills the air three times a day. The Koreans eat kimchi for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Kimchi really is at the heart of Korean life, not only is it eaten with almost every meal, it has been taken into space with the first Korean astronaut, there is a kimchi field museum, it has been at the centre of a Japanese-Korean trade dispute, and it has featured in a verse from Korea's premier English hiphop group- the EV-boys


The EV-boys - "Kickin' it in Geumchon" or what might have happened if the Beastie Boys were English teachers in Korea

Koreans even have a special fridge dedicated just to kimchi (no really they do!) I'm not sure if its because they have so much of it, because it needs special storage or just because it would make everything else in the fridge stink of kimchi, but you can get dedicated kimchi fridges in Korea and most Koreans have one.

For the record I think kimchi is pretty good even though it smells bad, but given the kimchi or all the other food in the world choice I wouldn't be restricting myself to just kimchi.

The Wonders of E-Mart

An E-Mart was opened in Gwangju shortly before we arrived. E-Mart is kind of like a Walmart style store and although it is evil it does raise our little town up in status from being a one horse town to being a one horse town with a bloody great shop in it - apparently. It's good for cheap clothes and getting Western style foods but not as cheap as our beloved Mega Mart. Also, whenever we go there we seem to spend so long inside that it is always dark when we get out again.

Gwangju's recently opened E-Mart. Bringing civilisation and cheap trainers to the masses.

Rowan and Dean descend into the E-Mart underworld...

'Adult Sunday School Ministry' - just one of the many exciting Konglish (Korean English) t-shirts available for purchase in E-Mart.

Spam is very popular in Korea. Here's Dean with a tin of bacon spam - mmmmm...

Silkworm Pupae also seems to be a popular snack!

Octopus tentacle anyone?

You can get pets at E-Mart too. This is one of the most expensive. It's a miniature hedgehog and was really tiny.I really want one but not at that price.

Don't mix your drinks, especially if one of them is Gorangju, Chinese Fire Water (only 52%).

Fly like paper, get high like, (Peppero) planes! (Peppero is a Korean Chocolate coated biscuit stick snack so popular that Korea has a national Peppero day!)

A Korean style picnic set of Japanese sushi, Kimbap (Korean sushi) and...ham sandwiches.

Our first couple of days in Gwangju

We arrived in Korea on a Friday afternoon and went to bed fairly early that night as we were sooo tired after the journey. By Friday evening I kept feeling like I was about to fall over even though I was just standing still in our apartment - definitely time to get some rest! We both felt much better on Saturday morning and surprisingly didn't seem to have suffered much jetlag which was

cool. We spent the weekend getting to grips with our apartment, exploring Gwangju our new home town, and we even took a trip out to Bundang on Sunday which is a wealthy district close to Seoul and about 30 mins away from Gwangju by public transport (on a good day).

Firstly, our apartment - we love it! It's bigger than our place in London was and it's on the 15th Floor (though actually it's the 14th Floor by UK standards but the Koreans count the ground floor as the 1st floor). We have great views from the windows out over Gwangju city and to the hills beyond.

View from our front window out over the stadium

Apparently we wouldn't get this if we lived in a bigger city as there would be too many other high rise buildings in the way so that's one good reason to live in the rural backwater that Gwangju apparently is (it's not rural by UK standards with a population of about 230,000 but my colleagues at school say it is by Korean standards). Our apartment has a Western bathroom with real bath which is apparently unusual and a study room and a totally pointless spare bedroom - it's pointless because it doesn't have any furniture in so we just use it as a suitcase storeroom!

Rowan hunts for an internet connection in our apartment on our first day, hence the open, as yet unpacked suitcase in the foreground.

We also have a big enclosed balcony which is really cool but which Rowan is slightly scared of due to the 14 floor drop!

Don't look down!

Our friend Dean came over on Saturday afternoon and we explored Gwangju together. He has been living and teaching in Korea for more than 2 years so he was a great guide. The fact that he can speak and read Korean really helped too! Gwangju is a fairly small city, in fact it feels more like a big town.


Rowan and Dean walking to the Mega Mart - our local shop which we seem to visit with alarming frequency

One of Gwangju's many churches. At night the crosses are lit up with red neon. We can see at least 15 from our window.

See the picture of a man and a lady playing chess - apparently that is a sign for a place where a gentleman might go to get a little female company...

Giant public juicer for use by Gwangju's citizens! No actually it's a war memorial for the defeat of the Japanese.

Korean citizens celebrating the defeat of the Imperialist Armies.

The main reason Rowan came to Korea - to eat Tornado Potato. A whole potato cut into a spiral, deep fried and dipped in cheese powder.

Gwangju's recently opened E-Mart. Bringing civilisation and cheap trainers to the masses.

One of Gwangju's many genuine foreign restaurants run by real foreigners and everything. This one is Indian obviously. Gwangju is unusually cosmopolitan by Korean standards as it has a lot of migrant workers from SE Asia living there.

The mighty World Mart, home of all sorts of exciting foreign produce and the place to go to get your pay-as-you-go phone sorted out.

Chillies growing by the side of the road, every spare bit of ground here is farmed for something, tiny patches of chillies and lettuce are dotted round everywhere.

On Saturday night, Dean took us out for dinner. We had sam-gyop-sal (a barbequed bacon-type pork), which is a traditional Korean meal where you get to sit around a table with a barbeque on it and cook your own meat and vegetables - DIY eating out Korean stylee! The bacon was really tasty and the kimchi was much nicer cooked than raw (more on Korea's favourite dish later).

On Sunday, we went to wealthy shopping Mecca Bundang. It was a world away from our little Gwangju what with its expensive shopping malls, high rise buildings and big, planned parks.

Shops on the road between Bundang station and the park, one of the few pedestrian areas we've seen although its still open to scooters and motorbikes.

Korean balls in the park, if you look closely to the left of the bronze cow you will see a small bronze poo!