The wireless connection at the hotel was too weak to upload any more pictures, and what is a travel post without photos? Here’s the rest of that first day and day two.
Before we left for Korea I sat down with my Korean American friend Dara to get advice on good eats. One of the dishes she recommended was samgyetang. It’s a whole young chicken, stuffed with fresh rice and herbs, boiled in ginseng broth. There was a samgyetang restaurant in our guidebook, Goryeo Samgetang, but we asked the concierge if we could find one closer by. “I can’t recommend something better than there,” he answered, so he found directions for us and sent us on our way. I read that the restaurant was known for their black chicken samgyetang and for using wild ginseng. The guide book told me that black chickens not only had black skin, but the meat was darker than your average poultry. Yum.
After a quick subway trip to the City Hall we found it. The building is unassuming and we nearly walked past it, but the two windowed floors full of people eating convinced us that the Hangul sign was for the restaurant we wanted.
Fortune favors the brave, as Shakespeare and every bungee jump instructor ever said. Despite our trepidation and a confusing trek up to the second floor, we entered the restaurant and held up two fingers. The waitress was probably in her mid-forties and understood as much English as we spoke. We did use very simple phrases—two please, this one, water please—so there’s no telling how much more she understood, but the place was busy and she had the kind of attitude I remembered from diner scenes in 1950s movies. The surly waitress doesn’t bother to remove the cigarette from her mouth as she puts a hand on her hip and gestures at the young couple with a small notepad. “Whaddya want?” It was like that, but she brought us foods that we didn’t know how to eat.
As soon as a pair of Korean women sat to our left we started observing them. Okay, this thimble-sized cup of mystery liquid is a drink. Eat your rice with your spoon, not your chopsticks, and leave the bowl on the table. All these spicy kimchi dishes can be eaten separately or with the chicken soup. It’s okay to use spoon and chopsticks in the soup, and to eat directly from the bowl or spoon it into your small bowl. Bones go into the bucket.
Kim-Chi and I both ordered black chicken soup from the bilingual menu, hers with wild ginger and mine with what I assume was the garden variety root. After toasting each other with our thimbleful of drink (which turned out to be ginseng rice wine) we started on the side dishes. We didn’t have to wait long to get our clay pots of boiling fresh samgyetang. Kim-Chi regarded the contents with some wonder.
“Why is its skin black?” Kim-Chi asked. “Did they soak it sesame or something?”
“It’s born that way,” I replied, and anticipating a follow-up question I quickly added, “That’s a negro chicken.”
This struck us as hilarious, and we proceeded to cackle through that meal like the very birds we were shoving into our mouths. Aw, sad. But not really! Because those Silkies were delicious. The dark succulent meat practically melted from the bones. The blend of herbs and spices made for a savory broth, and the rice stuffed inside the fowl was nearly porridge in consistency. So goooooood.
Once we had waddled back to the hotel we changed for a night out. Kim-Chi and I have very different tastes when it comes to clubs and bars. I prefer a club that is made for dancers, that has a good DJ who mixes current pop and hip-hip hits, and that is big enough that I can get lost if somebody likes my moves too aggressively. Kim-Chi looks for spots described as “indie,” with live music and a relaxed atmosphere. In short, she’s looking for socialization with the option of dancing, and I’m looking for dance to be the only option. In a city as large as Seoul I reckoned it would be better to find a place that suited her description of a good club rather than mine. I don’t remember my reasoning behind that thought, but it made a lot of sense at the time.
Recounting the long process of finding the club is boring, so let it suffice to say that Time Out: Seoul is wrong about a lot of the subway exits. The half hour detour eventually led us to Club NB, a self-proclaimed hip-hop club. The music was good, the people were good-looking and knew how to dance, and the boys bought me drinks (I asked for bottled water, so they knew what they weren’t getting. Suckers). The best part of the night, however, was that the taxi ride home was only about 5 USD! In Kyoto it would have cost us three times that much.
On Sunday we got an understandably late start to the day, but first on our list was the Leeum Museum. I wrote in more depth about the features of the museum in this article on the Ganbatte Times website. In summary, we didn’t spend enough time there because the facility closed at 6. Seoul is known as the Design Capital of the World, and throughout the city we were hard pressed to find a clump of ugly buildings.
The Leeum Museum is a feat of architecture, before we even stepped through the doors we were marveling at the design and cool modern aesthetic. There are three distinct buildings: Museum 1, Museum 2, and the Samsung Child Education and Cultural Center.
Look to the right and see a familiar horror: Louise Bourgeoise’s Maman lurks outside with progeny and some eye chairs. Over a year ago I recall telling Kim-Chi that I wasn’t into a lot of modern art. I didn’t like the stuff that was supposed to shock, horrify, or disgust the viewer, and much of the contemporary stuff seemed intent on doing absolutely that. Abstract art I found boring—the drip paintings of what’s-his-fame did nothing for me. Kim-Chi’s response was, “Art is supposed to be evocative, so even if it evokes revulsion…” I interjected that I just didn’t like that. My second encounter with Maman was nothing if not evocative. The nightmarish image is juxtaposed with the frailty of her spindly legs and the protective nature of the eggs she carries and the spiderling “following” her. It brings to mind a giraffe guarding her newborn, man-eating calf.
- Art
On returning to Japan I did a little research on the artist. Her Wikipedia page reads like a senior thesis in Feminists of Modern Art 402. That being said, it’s worth noting that the spider is a loving representation of the artist’s mother, not a character from a Tim Burton horror film.
Unless you’re a fan of pottery, calligraphy, or metalworking, Museum 1 gets old pretty quickly. The pieces are beautiful, of course, and were I a greater history buff I would rave about the carefully preserved ewers and elegant poetry scrolls. Kim-Chi and I did notice another English-speaking foreigner who seemed invested in that portion of the museum. “Yeah, I know from making pottery that this shape is really hard,” he informed his Korean friend as they gazed on a large pot. “To get it just right; this is like, really good craftsmanship.” The pair moved on as Kim-Chi and I goofed off in what was the most interesting part for us—the stairwell.
That's me.
On the calligraphy floor the knowledgeable foreigner caught up to us again. “You can tell that it was influenced by western art,” he was saying, pointing at a painting of butterflies and flowers. “Look at how big it is. Older art is all small and detailed, but these kind of big, bold elements are obviously an influence from the West. When was this made, 19th century? Yeah, it’d definitely…” I didn’t hear the rest of it as K-C and I moved on, but just before we descended the stairs the two men strode past us. “I mean, I want to be respectful of the culture,” the foreigner said earnestly. The Korean man cut in. “Well, you don’t know. You just don’t—” And again that was all I heard. The pair didn’t blip on my radar after that.
Between leaving the museum and 1 a.m. on Monday night/Tuesday morning I took no pictures.
On leaving the museum we headed to Pho Hoa (accents not included) for the Korean chain restaurant take on pho. It was okay, not amazing. Our friend Trevor met us to show us around a boutique-lined shopping street, eat a little bulgolgi, and then head to a bar with a Korean friend of his. That was the end of our night, save for that we learned there was a diner that served American breakfast in town. That made my night. And the company. Totes luv ya, Trev!
