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| This is a photo of my school/apartment building. Copyright me. |
I should explain some terminology here first so you'll understand what I'm talking about.
Municipal areas in South Korea are split up into many different administrative levels. The ones I want to talk to you about are gu (pronounced just like it's spelled) and dong (don't snicker).
Gu are roughly equivalent to districts or boroughs in Western countries. Dong are the individual neighborhoods which comprise those districts.
I live in the city of Bucheon, sandwiched between Incheon and Seoul (about 25 kilometers west of the latter), in Wonmi-gu, Jung-dong.
It's this neighborhood of Jung-dong that I'd like to focus on here.
Bucheon is no small city, but my coworkers were quick to point out that the district of Jung-dong is one of the best and busiest. Everything can be found here, and most of Bucheon's residents wend their way to Jung-dong whenever they need to shop or carouse.
As you might expect, I'm beginning to like this neighborhood.
Last Thursday night my teachers-in-arms went out for late-night dinner of ddok samgyeopsal at a restaurant a few blocks from my hotel. Samgyeopsal, well may you ask, is pork belly, cut into strips and fried with kimchi and bean sprouts. You eat it the way you eat most grilled meat in Korea: wrap it up in some lettuce with onions, ssamjang (meat sauce), and whatever else your little heart desires, and bolt the whole thing at a gulp. It's delicious. Ddok is rice cake—rice ground into a paste and molded into various shapes. In this case, the ddok takes the form of flat rectangles which are laid beside the samgyeopsal and fried, and then wrapped up in the lettuce and eaten with the meat. We had a feast—beer, soju, side dishes, and two portions of samgyeopsal (enough for eight people) for only 13,000 won a head. That's about $11.60 at the current exchange rate. Peanuts. Now I remember why I love Korea. You can get the most delicious food (and all the booze you can drink) for absurdly reasonable prices.
Following that we went to the Park—a pub one block west of the restaurant. We crossed some brilliantly-lit streets, passed neon storefronts and laughing crowds and disjointed snatches of pop music, traversed a frigid staircase and two smudged glass doors. We were standing inside a strangely-shaped, darkish sort of room filled with wraparound wall benches, oddly-contoured metal-and-plastic chairs and spindly tables, American hip-hop oozing out of the speakers, and a comprehensive list of cocktails (written in English!) inscribed behind the bar. The owner is Korean-American and speaks perfect unaccented English. He owns a stubby bulldog who greets patrons by trying to boulder his way up their legs. Joe, a fellow American who's been with Avalon four months, summed it up appropriately. It's like having your own private party room: you can request specific songs on the stereo, beers and drinks are incredibly low-priced, pool and foosball are free to play and—as this was Thursday night—we had the place entirely to ourselves. We took full advantage of the situation.
Even just a superficial glance of the streets and alleys in the vicinity of my hotel reveals a treasure trove of shops, cafés, eateries, stores, and other gold mines of comestibles and consumer products rarely seen outside of an American super mall.
There's a wonderful lunch room in Apartment 807 in Eczema...no, Enema...no, Enigma...no, Estima, my future apartment building. Between the hours of 3-5 they serve free lunch to Avalon teachers, and they also put together trays of snacks which they send over to us in the afternoons. Wednesday they had ddokpokki (rice cakes in a spicy red sauce), and Thursday they had these sort of rice dumpling things, which were absolutely killer. And on Friday they had peeled, boiled potatoes, served whole with sugar on top. And yesterday, on my first day of real teaching (which I'll tell you about in a few hours, or possibly a couple of days) they had sweet sandwiches. Yes, sweet. Sugared sammies. It's Korea. Don't look at me like that.
Just down the stairs and around the corner from my school is an excellent gimbap shop. Gimbap is basically Korean sushi, only instead of raw fish, the rice and seaweed are wrapped around a filling of vegetables, ham, and egg. It's quite intoxicating. This grub joint serves a variety of foods, including donkaseu (fried pork cutlet in sauce) and my personal favorite, bebimbap. Take a stone bowl, heat it, pour a wad of sticky rice into it, pile some gochujang (hot pepper paste) on top with six varieties of vegetables and a fried egg, and serve it. That's bebimbap. You mash it all up with a spoon until the rice is smeared with red gochujang, and devour the concoction while it's hot. It is AMAZING, and beats anything I've ever been served in a Chinese restaurant. (And I'm not just saying that because I'm against Communism.)
One hundred yards away is a tiny shop across from a police station, which sells street food: ddokpokki, hot dogs on sticks, and deep-fried vegetables. Everything is cheap and all of it is delicious. And you don't even need to talk to order: just jab an emphatic finger at what you want, and the lithe, brisk, bright-eyed proprietor will snatch it up and prepare it for you.
Across the street from the school—right next to the 7-11—is a franchise called Paris Baguette. Koreans have a sadly skewed idea of what pizza and burritos are composed of, and which ingredients are involved in their manufacture. Nonetheless, Paris Baguette has managed to copy the finer points of bread-baking and streusel production tolerably well, and the muffins, rolls, and pastries are beyond reproach. The food is pricy but satisfying.
And this is just what I've discovered in three days. Can you imagine what will come to light in a calendar year?
Much more awaits, even within this single square mile of turf which marks the limits of my experience in Bucheon, the immediate vicinity of my school and my apartment building. I've caught the merest glimpse of the basement of the Hyundai Department Store, an enormous fortress-like edifice directly across the street from Avalon. There's a food court down there which would knock the Mall of America into a cocked hat. Several other food shops have been recommended to me: pizza parlors, fried chicken kitchens, gimbap places, and other miscellaneous grub joints.
And only 25 kilometers away lies Seoul, with its museums, monuments, fine dining and shops.
But I'll get to that later.
Bucheon is no small city, but my coworkers were quick to point out that the district of Jung-dong is one of the best and busiest. Everything can be found here, and most of Bucheon's residents wend their way to Jung-dong whenever they need to shop or carouse.
As you might expect, I'm beginning to like this neighborhood.
Last Thursday night my teachers-in-arms went out for late-night dinner of ddok samgyeopsal at a restaurant a few blocks from my hotel. Samgyeopsal, well may you ask, is pork belly, cut into strips and fried with kimchi and bean sprouts. You eat it the way you eat most grilled meat in Korea: wrap it up in some lettuce with onions, ssamjang (meat sauce), and whatever else your little heart desires, and bolt the whole thing at a gulp. It's delicious. Ddok is rice cake—rice ground into a paste and molded into various shapes. In this case, the ddok takes the form of flat rectangles which are laid beside the samgyeopsal and fried, and then wrapped up in the lettuce and eaten with the meat. We had a feast—beer, soju, side dishes, and two portions of samgyeopsal (enough for eight people) for only 13,000 won a head. That's about $11.60 at the current exchange rate. Peanuts. Now I remember why I love Korea. You can get the most delicious food (and all the booze you can drink) for absurdly reasonable prices.
Following that we went to the Park—a pub one block west of the restaurant. We crossed some brilliantly-lit streets, passed neon storefronts and laughing crowds and disjointed snatches of pop music, traversed a frigid staircase and two smudged glass doors. We were standing inside a strangely-shaped, darkish sort of room filled with wraparound wall benches, oddly-contoured metal-and-plastic chairs and spindly tables, American hip-hop oozing out of the speakers, and a comprehensive list of cocktails (written in English!) inscribed behind the bar. The owner is Korean-American and speaks perfect unaccented English. He owns a stubby bulldog who greets patrons by trying to boulder his way up their legs. Joe, a fellow American who's been with Avalon four months, summed it up appropriately. It's like having your own private party room: you can request specific songs on the stereo, beers and drinks are incredibly low-priced, pool and foosball are free to play and—as this was Thursday night—we had the place entirely to ourselves. We took full advantage of the situation.
Even just a superficial glance of the streets and alleys in the vicinity of my hotel reveals a treasure trove of shops, cafés, eateries, stores, and other gold mines of comestibles and consumer products rarely seen outside of an American super mall.
There's a wonderful lunch room in Apartment 807 in Eczema...no, Enema...no, Enigma...no, Estima, my future apartment building. Between the hours of 3-5 they serve free lunch to Avalon teachers, and they also put together trays of snacks which they send over to us in the afternoons. Wednesday they had ddokpokki (rice cakes in a spicy red sauce), and Thursday they had these sort of rice dumpling things, which were absolutely killer. And on Friday they had peeled, boiled potatoes, served whole with sugar on top. And yesterday, on my first day of real teaching (which I'll tell you about in a few hours, or possibly a couple of days) they had sweet sandwiches. Yes, sweet. Sugared sammies. It's Korea. Don't look at me like that.
Just down the stairs and around the corner from my school is an excellent gimbap shop. Gimbap is basically Korean sushi, only instead of raw fish, the rice and seaweed are wrapped around a filling of vegetables, ham, and egg. It's quite intoxicating. This grub joint serves a variety of foods, including donkaseu (fried pork cutlet in sauce) and my personal favorite, bebimbap. Take a stone bowl, heat it, pour a wad of sticky rice into it, pile some gochujang (hot pepper paste) on top with six varieties of vegetables and a fried egg, and serve it. That's bebimbap. You mash it all up with a spoon until the rice is smeared with red gochujang, and devour the concoction while it's hot. It is AMAZING, and beats anything I've ever been served in a Chinese restaurant. (And I'm not just saying that because I'm against Communism.)
One hundred yards away is a tiny shop across from a police station, which sells street food: ddokpokki, hot dogs on sticks, and deep-fried vegetables. Everything is cheap and all of it is delicious. And you don't even need to talk to order: just jab an emphatic finger at what you want, and the lithe, brisk, bright-eyed proprietor will snatch it up and prepare it for you.
Across the street from the school—right next to the 7-11—is a franchise called Paris Baguette. Koreans have a sadly skewed idea of what pizza and burritos are composed of, and which ingredients are involved in their manufacture. Nonetheless, Paris Baguette has managed to copy the finer points of bread-baking and streusel production tolerably well, and the muffins, rolls, and pastries are beyond reproach. The food is pricy but satisfying.
And this is just what I've discovered in three days. Can you imagine what will come to light in a calendar year?
Much more awaits, even within this single square mile of turf which marks the limits of my experience in Bucheon, the immediate vicinity of my school and my apartment building. I've caught the merest glimpse of the basement of the Hyundai Department Store, an enormous fortress-like edifice directly across the street from Avalon. There's a food court down there which would knock the Mall of America into a cocked hat. Several other food shops have been recommended to me: pizza parlors, fried chicken kitchens, gimbap places, and other miscellaneous grub joints.
And only 25 kilometers away lies Seoul, with its museums, monuments, fine dining and shops.
But I'll get to that later.
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