kkul tarea club

We’ve spent the last three days in Seoul after an eight-hour travel day bracketing a two-hour flight, and before what will probably be a ten-hour travel day bracketing a four-hour flight tomorrow to Hong Kong.

We’ve been staying in a honak, a traditional Korean house in a neighborhood which is restoring as many of them as possible.  It’s set up as a guesthouse.  It seems Chinese in its exterior (the same roof style) and Japanese in its interior (sliding doors).  When we arrived, and asked the owner for a good nearby Korean restaurant, he put a leash on his dog, and walked us to one (which had no English or picture menu), ordered something, and left.  We were served several plates of banchan and some nice soup.

It’s been hot and muggy (someone said the hottest two days this year, but they always say that) and there was one brief rain shower.  We’ve toured two palaces where the king lived (one was built as a backup to the other) which were largely destroyed by the Japanese in 1592 and 1911, but which are undergoing renovation.  We visited the Leeum Samsung Art Museum, a very modern building presenting some historical Korean art, and some modern art.  We went on a walk on a hillside with Buddhist and Shamanic shrines, and some nice sandstone formations.  But in between, we’ve been eating.

This neighborhood is packed with art galleries and coffee places.  We also ran into some fancy restaurants, one of which was on someone’s top-50-in-the-world list.  We went back to it, and they served us many things we’d never seen before.  The next night, we went back to a fancy Buddhist vegetarian restaurant we’d seen, and they served us many other things we’d never seen before.  Unlike the one in Kamakura a couple years ago, which fashioned bean curd into every conceivable form, this place used mostly vegetables and rice gluten for their creations.  Today for lunch we had another assortment of small plates, featuring some kind of pickled flower, some white soup, some root, etc., all pretty much unknown to us.

Two other memorable food experiences were in markets.  At the fish market, we browsed around several stalls, and picked out a few things at a stall that seemed particularly lively:  a squid, a couple lampreys, and another creature I couldn’t name.  It looked like an oak gall on Jabba the Hutt.  The vendor put them in a plastic bag, and led us to a restaurant at the edge, which chopped them up, and served the lampreys and the creature raw.  We tasted them, and decided that the creature slices were a little bitter — they were much improved after several seconds of cooking.  The squid took awhile for some reason, but was perfectly tasty when it finally arrived.

Today on the street, we had a kkul tarea, a snack made from spinning hardened fermented honey coated with cornstarch into strands, and then wrapping them around some nut paste.  Mmm…  dessert.  As the guy made it, he counted the strands as powers of 2, up to 16384.  A little later we passed a noodle shop where a blob of dough became a plate of hand-pulled linguini-thickness noodles without any extrusion devices, only with tossing, twisting, and applying water and starch.  We’d just had lunch, and were too full to sample those.

We probably would have eaten a little more authentically if we knew someone here, but I’ve had a good time — a pleasant break from Chinese food, which we will resume for the next week, in its most sweet delicate Cantonese fancy form, in Macau and Hong Kong.  Or maybe Macau has its own style — we’ll see.