Things ain't what they used to be...

I was looking forward to being a student again. The thought of rising at 2pm on a Sunday, going to the shop for a tuna sandwich and 4 cans of Strongbow and then settling down on the sofa for a day of Pro Evolution Soccer seemed an attractive one, especially because at no stage in that process did I envisage taking off my dressing gown. The reality isn't quite matching up to the dream at the moment. Turns out that a 40 hour week and an MA is quite a lot of work.

Given the amount of work I did at undergraduate level, I feel reasonably sure that I could have managed a 60 hour week, my degree and still managed to establish Bolton as the dominant power in European football. However, my MA requires me to do things completely alien to me like order journal articles from Japan, keep proper bibliographic notes and read things outside of those which I'm expressly commanded to read by my tutors.

This Sunday morning I rose at 10am (after a luxury lie-in having stayed up to watch West Ham's annual charity drive for Bolton's ailing goal difference) and after a quick breakfast and shower set to work reading about the theories underpinning communicative language teaching (Canale & Swain 1980). I stopped at 12 and caught the bus to Gangneung to purchase some knee supports, dental flossers and a jar of olives. I read Jeremy Harmer's Practice of English Language Teaching (2007) on the bus here and back. Then I got home and went back to work until 5, when I stopped and spent a couple of hours cleaning my apartment, during which I even used two different hoover attachments. I felt a bit studenty using window cleaner in lieu of furniture polish, but not nearly as much as I felt simply old. I hadn't even finished work either; take me back to Exeter.

All this work doesn't leave much time for having fun, so I don't have much in the way of photos of exciting stuff in Korea. I would have some cool shots of penguins and Linda feeding an otter, if I'd remembered to take my camera to Sea World with me last weekend, but I didn't. It also doesn't leave much time for cooking, so in a new feature I present Cooking With Grev #1: 10 minute Mandu-guk.

Mandu is the Korean word for dumpling. They're not so different from either Japanese or Chinese dumplings really, though Korea tends to fry less and steam more (healthy). Guk is one of many seemingly interchangeable words for soup. Mandu-guk is the cheap and warming lunch that gets people through the Arctic winter in my part of Korea. If you want to know how to make it properly, I suggest looking at Maangchi's excellent Korean cooking site. Here though, is the ten minute "student" version.

You will need:

2 cups water

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tsp sesame oil

1 tbsp Korean beef stock powder

Salt & pepper

1 tbsp sesame seeds

6 largish frozen dumplings

Handful of sliced rice cakes

Handful of roughly chopped green / spring onions

1 egg

2 small sheets of seaweed

Steps

1. Add the water, sesame oil and soy sauce to a pan, and bring to a boil.

2. Add the beef stock, rice cakes and dumplings, plus a good slug of pepper. Boil for 5 minutes. While this is happening, chop the onions (if you haven't already) and beat the egg.

3. Add the sesame seeds and the onions, and boil for a further minute.

4. Take off the heat and then add the beaten egg. Stir gently otherwise it attaches itself to the bottom of the pan.

5. It should look something like this.

6. Pour into a large bowl, and crumble the seaweed over the top. That's it. Serve with kimchi and a saucer of soy sauce for mandu dipping.

There we go. I don't know whether there will ever be another cooking with Grev, but at least you know I'm not starving to death out here now.

Until next time...

A

Chuseok Diary Part 3

We left the Jjimjilbang just before 9 on Friday morning, on the second and final leg of our cycling mini-odyssey. As you'll see from the photos, we could barely have chosen a better day for it. The sun was out and there was barely a cloud in the sky, and fall had drained most of the humidity out of the days by now. We immediately headed South down the coast from Gyeongpo beach, past Anmok. We went slowly, looking for somewhere to have a bit of breakfast, but found most of the towns to consist solely of closed raw fish restaurants. Finally, as we headed over the quite spectacular bridge below Anmok and towards the military base, we finally found a restaurant open, and headed in.

As far as I can tell, Korean breakfast doesn't vary greatly from any other meal in Korea. I always get slightly strange looks from people when I tell them that I just had toast for breakfast. The idea of having what is really just a light snack to most Koreans seems to be alien, and people struggle to believe I can get through a whole morning on just bread and a bit of fruit. In the restaurant we go to, there's certainly no breakfast menu, so we opt for Seaweed soup (Emily, definitely not me) and Galbi Tang (Tom and I), which is pretty much beef stew. As usual, this is accompanied by an array of spicy side dishes. I'm actually pretty good with stomaching kimchi in the mornings these days, but really I don't think I'd want to do it every day.

With appetites satiated we set off once more, turning away from the coast to work our way around Gangneung's Fighter Wing base. The jets are flying, so we're treated to almost constant flypasts of jets coming and going from the base. Without really knowing where we're going, we actually manage to work our way out of Gangneung with not too much fuss and even work our way back onto the coast road to escape the major highways. Today's journey is a lot more up and down that yesterday's, which was simply just up and then down. Still, before too long we've sailed past the warship and submarine anf arrived in Jeongdongjin, where we brake for Powerade, shade and cereal bars.

Getting to the beach can sometimes be tricky here.

After Jeongdongjin we make our first mistake. Looking to follow the coast road we instead take a turn into the hills. We realise this after it's too late to turn back, and so face a gruelling climb up a steep hillside in the hottest part of the day. Still, at least going up hills qualifies you to come back down them again, which is always fun. We detour briefly to the beach to see if there's a quiet coast road to follow, but find our path blocked by the large cement factory below. Getting back on the road does eventually afford us a nice view of Korea's sandy shores though.

By this time we're getting more than a little saddle sore, having been at it for 4 or 5 hours already. We power on for one more hour and reach the outskirts of Donghae, the next major city down the coast. We grab some lunch, Manduguk, which is basically dumpling stew and is very, very good. Then we make another big mistake (due to none of us having anything more than a tourist map) and proceed to take the main highway out of Donghae down to Samcheok. This proves to be a terrifying experience, with huge intersections to negotiate, including one expressway interchange, and enormous earth-moving trucks flying past us about every 30 seconds. Not really what you need after spending a full day in the saddle. It's mercifully short, though seemed longer at the time, and we soon pass a sign that tells us 4km to Samcheok. It's at this point we pick up a proper pavement, and so can get ourselves out of the road finally (Korean cycling laws being somewhat more lax).

We get to Samcheok and are treated to an excellent beach barbecue by our host Huy. His Vietnamese chicken recipe is a superb end to a very, very long day. Everyone's pleased to have made it, and made it in one piece. We stay Friday night, and then haul our bikes onto the bus a head back to Jinbu the easy way.

What's drinking in Korea like?

This weekend I finally spent my first night away from my little safe haven of a town, where I now know pretty much every shop on every street, and headed for the bright lights of the big city. I went to visit an ex-student of mine from Guatemala, who has been awarded a scholarship to study for his masters here. This was a friend who I thought I may never see again, so it was nice to be reunited after just a few months. Such a reunion, combined with a couple of birthdays, inevitably led to drink being taken, and led me to today's topic.

On Sunday morning, around 5am, I woke up fully clothed on top of my bed in a "love-motel" in Suwon. This perhaps is not as bad as it sounds. I had chosen to stay there, as they are cheaper than normal hotels, and this one was less seedy and more smart. There was even a guy staying there with his kids; at least I sincerely, sincerely hope they were his kids. Anyway, the reason for my unbecoming state is named soju (소주).

Soju is almost the only Korean spirit. At least it is all I see drunk out here in the country. Just as almost every meal that you eat is served with kimchi in some form or another, so no group of Koreans in a bar or restaurant is without a, or more usually several, bottles of soju. It is a strong rice wine, usually about 20% alcohol by volume and sold by the half litre.

The price is the first indicator that what you're getting into may not be the best for you. A half litre bottle in a grocery store retails for just less than a dollar, which means you're buying more or less a bottle of wine in terms of units for around 60 pence. Go to your nearest store and try to buy a bottle of wine for that. You can't, of course, so buy the cheapest one you can find. Taste it and you'll begin to see what we're dealing with here, and you're drinking wine which costs about four times the price.

In terms of taste, soju is not really too bad. The closest thing I can relate it to is when in one of my much, much younger days I mixed vodka with water. It's not unpleasant, but it is entirely unremarkable. Where it really kicks, or at least it really kicks me, is the following morning. I have hardly drunk the stuff since I have been here, but each time I have it has left me with a disproportionately large hangover. The Sunday morning in question was no different. It left with me with a bastard behind the eyes and a general sense of confusion. Almost exactly what you don't want faced with a four hour bus journey in a country where you lack the ability to construct all but the most basic sentences. I blame soju for the fact that I read my seat number as the platform number at Suwon bus station, thus missing my bus and adding another hour on to an already near unbearable journey.

So, as you may have guessed, I am not the biggest soju fan. I am definitely in the minority here. Soju is everywhere you go. There is even a bottle in the fridge in the teachers' room at my school. Korean socialising simply would not happen without soju. Koreans can be a little awkward (hence the reason I feel fairly at home here) and so it seems to help them a lot if they get drunk. Binge drinking is definitely acceptable here. At the beginning of work dinners that I have been to a huge amount of bottles will be placed on the table and the men start furiously gulping down shots. People are drunk within half an hour, but seemingly having a wonderful time. I get more English spoken to me at teacher dinners than I ever do at the school, so I guess in this way it's a positive thing that everyone's hammered. Anyway, it's quite an interesting cultural difference between here and the UK. Most of the professional events I have been to at least try to seem as if it's not just an excuse for everyone to get shitfaced.

At a personal level I haven't really done that much drinking in Korea. Being out in a quiet town and surrounded by people who don't drink has mostly killed my desire to drink anything. Hence there's been a bottle of wine in my cupboard for almost a month and a bottle of soju in the door of the fridge for just about the whole time I have been here. Previously, this would have been unheard of in one of my residences. Still, I think it does me good - once again weight seems to be dropping off me quite nicely and I feel pretty energetic all week for not boozing the whole time. Could it be I'm growing up? Not if last Saturday is anything to go by.

I think that's about it from me for now. I'll leave you with a few photos courtesy of Quique's Facebook, as my camera is out of action. Until next time...

A

What are you doing here?

I moved my blog here from it's previous home on Tumblr. If you haven't already, you can read my previous writings here. I've also changed the title as the previous one was rather snide and I remembered that I am (most of the time) a nice person. I do still think that using kimchi in the title of anything to do with Korea suggests a slight lack of effort in creating your blog title, but that's ok. I'm doing a fairly similar thing with my blog now anyway.

So what is my blog title about? Who is Park Ji Sung? The wikipedia link back there will tell you everything you need to know about him. He is a huge star over here, and my blog title is the first question that 90% of people ask me after finding out that I am from England. One of my major teaching ambitions in Korea is to get my students to use the question "Have you heard of...?" rather than "Do you know...?", or at least to bung a preposition in there for a bit more sense. Still for now I just smile and answer yes, and tell them that I know Lee Chung-Yong too for good measure.

I hope that you enjoy the blog in its new home. I'm always surprised by how many people tell me that they read it. Thanks. I hope you continue to do so.

A