The Food Chain

I suppose that my blog entries have been getting progressively longer and longer, so to avoid becoming a JK Rowling, here's a short(er), but hopefully interesting, entry on a couple of Korean... um, experiences I have had in the last two weeks. In terms of trying diverse and exotic foods, I've been doing my best, trying a couple undeniably Korean foods. Here we go.

Up The Hill
On the Wednesday after I arrived back from Daegu, I was taken with the entirety of the school's teachers to climb an oreum, the parasitic volcanic hills that litter the island. According to my students, this particular oreum was a piece of cake, and I should have no trouble. It turns out that my students were a bit more generous in appraising my level of physical fitness than they should have been. After a short walk in the woods, the trail shot up at a dramatically steeper angle, and for the next 2 miles I found myself climbing up stone steps and rubber matting. None of this would have been much of a problem if 1.) I was in better shape, and 2.) my shoes didn't have a hard-plastic sheet in the middle of the sole, causing me to slip of the slick stone stairs and the folded rebar holding down the matting. This stumbling happened enough times for me to eventually sprain my kneee, an injury which didn't truly manifest itself until the next day. Making it to the top after around 45 minutes of climbing, I met up with the teachers who had beat me to the top (only about half made it, in the end), and saw that the view was wonderful, though the crown of the ill was exposed enough to force me back into the sweater I had removed during the climb.

Walking the crest of the hill. The entire island is covered in this eulalia grass.


The view from the top (yes, I know I need to pull up my pants, and get a haircut).


The descent was much easier, and it was after a seemingly short amount of time that we were hiking out of the forest that skirted the mountain. While crossing the plains back to the bus we ran into a band of horses blocking the roadway. My co-teacher was afraid of it, and warned me to be careful as I approached it to pet it's nose. These were the same short-legged Jeju horses I had seen at the racetrack weeks before, and looking into their sad eyes as they gazed at us while we passed, I almost got the impression that they knew what the teachers and I were doing next, where we were eating dinner.

The rogue horses.


The Famous Mr Ed-ible
The horse, quite aside from being a sturdy work animal and an excellent means of transportation for cowboys, Mongolians and the like, is in fact one tasty animal. I have to say, malgogi (horse meat) is one of the better meats I have had on the island so far, if only for the diversity of preparation showcased in the meal that night. That night, the main course was maltang, which literally means horse soup, a clear broth with leeks and a nice amount of horse meat, which in this dish tasted very much like pork, with a tasty thin layer of horse fat lining the bigger pieces. Horse soup was in no way the star of the show, in my opinion. The first course served was steamed horse slices, something alone the lines of a tenderloin, which was good, though it too tasted like gamey pork. I had the opportunity to try a piece of the more expensive horse tripe (it was only brought out to the prinicipal, who offered me a piece). It was one of the better types of tripe I've had, chewy and thankfully lacking the awful sewage flavor found in chitterlings.

Malgogi kui, or horse barbeque, is among the top three most tasty things I have eaten in Korea. It was cut into tiny morsels, and marinated excellently, the end result tasting very close to beef fajitas from Goode Company Taqueria back in Houston. If there was one thing that sold me on eating horse again, it was this; with malgogi kui, horse went from being a novelty to a legitimately tasty meal.

The Horse Restaurant. I don't know what it's name is, though if I owned one, I would name it "HorseShack".


Horse tenderloin, maybe, and one piece of horse tripe left on the plate behind.


Horse barbeque, or malgogi kui. Tasty.


Catholic Camp
The very next day following the hike up the oreum, I went away with my 6th grade students and teachers to an overnight sleep-away camp, run by the Catholic church through a handful of Korean nuns. Now, being so used to the utter division of church and state in America, I found it quite strange that they would choose a Catholic center to have a camp for a public school, but it was justified to me by the teachers, who said it was meant to teach them about ethics and such, and that it didn't involve religion. I can only imagine the uproar that a plan like this back home would cause. The ACLU would form a human wall to prevent it. Not that it mattered to me either way, but it was, in the end, a seemingly secular affair (though not knowing the words for salvation or transubstantiation in Korean, I can't be sure). The camp for me, as well as the rest of the teachers, involved sitting in a break room, reading or watching TV. I finished about half of the Harry Potter book I was reading. The night ended with the kids performing dance routines to Korean pop songs, which was cute, though around the end of the first of two hours, I was sick to death of K-pop. That night was my first time to ever sleep on a Korean yeo, or floor-bed, which did little to help my sprained leg. I woke up the next morning to another first- it was the only time I had ever been around Koreans this early in the morning, and thus was the first time I had had a real Korean breakfast of fish and rice. I just don't know how I've lived so long without experiencing the appetizing wonder that is scraping flesh off of a soggy fish at 7 am. Ugh.

My favorite dance skit. Look at that kid dance!


The next week, after a brief weekend trip to Seogwipo for a pub crawl, I again settled back into my job, where each week has been getting progressively busier. Sometime in between the construction of powerpoint presentations on Halloween (a week late) and various bodily ailments, I found time to research a plan that me and friend had been discussing for a few weeks at that point. Everytime we had seen each other, we had proposed that we should go and get a certain meal, yet after half a month of inactivity, it was time to make it happen.

Man Bites Dog (or, Oh, Kae!)
A Korean-speaking friend of ours polled her office coworkers for their suggestions of a good restaurant to get boyangtang, a (somehow) euphemistic name adopted around the 1988 Seoul Olympics for bosintang, though both terms mean exactly the same thing: "invigorating soup". Bosintang is itself a euphemism for kae jang, which literally means "dog stew". We were given directions to a restaurant named Giwachon, which we found to be little more than a converted house sitting in the shadow of a massive apartment highrise building. A family both lived and worked in the restaurant, with the spare bedrooms being used as dining areas. Both Alicia and my friend's girlfriend had accompanied us, and were relieved to see that the restaurant also served samgyetang, a whole boiled chicken filled with rice and ginseng.

The kids serving us were a bit shocked when two westerners ordered bosintang, and came back to double-check with us a minute later. After what seemed like mere minutes, our soups arrived, still boiling in their black pots. We were provided with a number of seasoning ingredients including ginger and pepper oil, which I decided to wait to add until I had tasted the actual dog meat as it was. It turns out that it is not too different from beef, tasting very similar to a good pot roast. The meat was actually incredibly tender, if occasionally stringy, and had just a bit of fat left around the edges of some pieces (in lesser amounts than the horse meat). The really suprising thing was the sheer amount of the dog meat that they added to the soup; I had eaten all of the large pieces floating in the broth, and scraped the bowl's bottom with my spoon to find a whole trasure trove of kaegogi still waiting for me.

I must say I was lucky. My friend Gabe got a lot of meat, but he also got a bit of bone, and a bluish, tough patch that looked like skin or ear. Though he was perhaps less enthusiastic about his meal, we agreed that it was good enough to try the steamed dog meat we had heard of, but been unable to find on the island (I have since been informed of its whereabouts). For such a rarely-eaten delicacy food, it was surprisingly cheap, at only 7,000 won (roughly $7) a bowl. I managed to get Alicia to try a small piece, though as she put it into her mouth and chewed it she nearly choked. She said she kept imagining a wet dog smell as she ate it.

Perhaps the greatest part of this was returning to class the next day and telling my students that I had eaten "mongmongijjigae", which translated to "bark bark soup", but comes across as "puppy soup". They either found it hilarious or horrifying, and while some kids have in fact tried it, giving me a thumbs up and shouting "very good!", the bulk of the class had not, especially the girls, who in some cases looked as if they might throw something at me.

The converted bedroom/restaurant at the Dog House.


Testing the waters...


My first time eating dog.


There was a whole lot of meat. It was great.


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Oddly enough, this was not the strangest thing that we did that week; the upcoming weekend held many strange surprises. We found out, for instance, that though Jeju Island is a pretty small place, only 15 X 30 kilometers, it has not one but two Crocodile Parks. And whatever we might have thought a "Crocodile Park" would be, there was nothing that could prepare us for the truth. All this and more, next time I can get a break from my classes.