Back to Thanksgiving (or, Two-seok)

Now, it's been quite a while, a few weeks in fact, since we celebrated the Korean holiday of Chuseok, but due to a number of obstacles and obligations (see the post below) the second half of the Thanksgiving roundup had to wait until I had enough free time to write it. It was also just recently that I finally figured out how to download videos and images from my phone, which I think will make this post a bit more interesting, particularly the seafood bit.

Now, following the Teddy Bear Museum, we did do a bit more touring of Seogwipo, the resort town to the south of the island. I was rather shocked to see that directly across the street from the museum was a Hooters, a restaurant chain whose uninteresting food and only marginally "attractive" waitstaff seems to have an international appeal exceeding my understanding. I cannot say, however, that we will not make a journey out to this restaurant during our stay here, nor will we be alone when we do; all those we have told about our discovery are understandably curious about how such a restaurant can live up to its name yet draw employees from the local Asian population.

Seogwipo has a number of other sights, such as the hexagonal pillars of volcanic rock called jusangjeollidae, formed when smoldering lava collided with the ocean. The sight is rather surreal, and in the summer there is a sky-blue mist that hangs all about the place, but upon our visit it was still quite overcast. We were here for around 5 minutes, as Alicia's co-teacher, Tae I, had become rather worn out and was thus waiting for us in the car. It is one of the many places we will need to visit in the prettier months next year.




Our final destination in Seogwipo was the Hyatt hotel, overlooking the island's most famous beach, Jungmun. The beach is much more impressive in fair weather, as we had a chance to learn the very next day when we came back down with some friends. Jungmun beach is considered one of the best beaches in Asia, with clear water and white sand surrounded by tropical vegetation. As I said, we returned the next day, and I spent several hours laying out on the beach, working on my sunburn. I did swim a bit, until my beach phobia was reignited upon seeing a jellyfish the size of a hubcap. For those of you not so well acquainted with my history, I was stung by a Portuguese manowar when I was around six years old, and still bear scars all over my body, with my left hand being completely covered with them (the long one on my left wrist that looks like Japan is how I learned to tell 'right' from 'left' when I was younger, and I still use it for reference in the matter). Thus quite despite myself I still jump at shadows under the waves and panic when seaweed brushes by me, and will certainly not get back in the damn water when I can see for certain that there is danger. I don't even think a jelly fish sting is as painful as I think it would be, and it's pretty significantly different than the creature which I encountered, but this kind of logic does very little to actually change my emotional reaction. I was told that the jelly fish are at their worst this time of year, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised, or let it scare me off from going out again when the weather warms up. I don't suppose that it will, yet now that I know there are jelly fish in Asia (and really I should have known, they are on the menu at Mai's) it'll always be in the back of my mind.

After leaving the beach on our second trip to Seogwipo, we snuck up a set of cliff-side stair into the pool area of the Hyatt resort. We used their showers and restrooms while attentive Korean staff enthusiastically waited on us, assuming that our race somehow confirmed that we were in fact guests of the resort. We went for a swim in a pool area complete with waterfalls, palm trees, and a swim-up bar (closed for the off-season), then ventured off to try to celebrate Chuseok at a decent hotel buffet in the area.

What we in fact found was that hotel buffets in this tourist town are $60 a person, and that all other restaurants are closed on Chuseok, including, to our dismay, Hooters, which the men in the group had been holding on to as a last-resort option. We ended up eating dinner on Korean Thanksgiving in front of a convenience store, eating seaweed rice rolls and pre-made sandwiches. By the time we had settled on this course of action, we had been walking around for more than 45 minutes, so we all sat quietly, a bit dejected, drinking our cheap beer and wondering if a 60 dollar buffet was so unreasonable after all.

Jungmun Beach





Our misappropriated swimming pool at the Hyatt.


The Seafood Odyssey
Long ago, I ended an entry with the statement that I was looking forward to eating sannakji, a term which I did not elaborate on. I was able to try sannakji over the course of the Chuseok break, as it seems that expressing one's interest in the stranger foods of Korea to the Korean people is a great way to get taken out to try them. All I had to do was mention sannakji, and within a few hours we were eating it. But our first adventure began on the night of our first trip to Seogwipo with Alicia's co-teacher Tae-I.

We had been told earlier in the day that we would be going out for raw fish at the end of the trip, but as I was at the time in between waves of bar-sausage nausea, I hardly relished the thought. It was only right as the day was ending that I began to get excited over the prospect of real Korean hue, a dish distinctly different, and cheaper, than the Japanese sushi we had eaten here earlier in our stay. It is in essence a multi-course sashimi dinner. The restaurant we came to was quite modest, but it had the many varieties of fish we would be consuming swimming in tanks out front. We were brought course after course of raw fish, from small bits of salmon to full snappers, sliced and laid out on a platter. The importance of soju and garlic in these kind of meals is stressed repeatedly by the Koreans, as they believe both to kill bacteria potentially living in the fish. I thus needed to drink a few shots of grain alcohol despite my weak stomach.

Tae I had heard that I wanted to try sannakji, and asked if it was available. We found out that they instead had hanchi, which in a sense is very similar. So, what are these mystery dishes? Well, sannakji is a small live octopus, cut up and covered in sesame oil, and served while it is still moving. Hanchi is cuttlefish served in the same way, though without sesame oil. The tentacles are still very active, and will grab onto your tongue while you try to chew them. It can be quite dangerous to fail to chew them adequately, as they have been known to stick to the inside of a person's throat if they get a chance. I found them to both be quite tasty, though hanchi is both me and Alicia's favorite, and hanchi was much more of a fighter than sannakji. Unfortunately, the only video I have up right now is the sannakji, which is below:


When I get the hanchi video, which is truly my first time I tried live seafood, I will post it too. Over the break, we had a chance to attend a few other seafood restaurants, once more with Tae I and her family, and then again with a group of young Koreans that we met in the Led Zeppelin bar (we also went to Loveland with them). Below are a few images from the trips, the first being sora, a small conch which is twisted out of its shell with a toothpick, and has a dark green tail with a crumbly texture.


The sannakji is the purple platter, and the hanchi, of which there was much more provided, is the white one to the right.


If that was shocking, we were still in no way prepared for the sea life dance party that was haemultang. We encountered this dish after going to Loveland, which, for those who have not yet guessed it or looked it up, is a sex amusement park meant to break the ice for the island's many honeymooning couples. The Koreans we went with took us to a restaurant afterwards for "seafood soup", a boring name which belies the complexity of the dish. A number of live shellfish are dumped into a broth, including mussels and scallops, and on top of these a live, full grown octopus is flipped on his head, presumably so he can't escape, and living, wriggling abalone is placed on top. I have to say that watching the abalone squirm around after a night at Loveland brought about a few giggles around the table. Anyway, so the animals are essentially boiled to death, then chopped up and eaten. I must say, it's cruel but delicious.

Those are the abalone on top. No comment.



This is hardly the end of my food adventures, as for every new food I had the chance to try, I learned of at least two more. Pheasant shabu-shabu, malgogi hue, boshingtang, and many many more. There's even a smaller sannakji that is eaten whole, not chopped up. I'm looking forward to learning enough Korean to find these places on my own, or just start dropping the hint around the Koreans. That always seems to work.