Heading for the airport

Leaving today. I have a lot left to post so I will leave this blog up for a while and update when I get over jet lag. For the next few days please ponder these and leave a comment on any post.

Range goat

why I should get a purple heart

Korean fast food

By the way, the answer to the first quiz was "empty containers of heating oil"

Range Dog

Aparently there is a range dog at every range around the world. Here is the one at the range here near Taean.


His name is "Jindo" and he is a Jindo Dog, which is the famous dog of Korea.

Ok, major update tonight (probably morning your time)

Lot of posts, clearing backlog, getting ready to head home.

What happens to all that dried fish

Well, it ends up in the back alley markets. At this stall you can have it al fresco or wrapped in plastic.

Here's more in another market stall. I don't know how you choose.

fishing fleet

Here's the fishing fleet in the little town where we come down for lunch. I am told that tides in the yellow sea are second only to the bay of fundy as far as swing and the ports have these really steep walls visible at low tide. From the radar we are installing this can really be seen over the course of a day and they are very extreme tides.I didn't ask about deep sea fishing expedition rates

Korean crab nets

...are bright green and round, at least on this coast.

Misleading Signs

According to the Koreans this sign, posted outside some of the restaurants in the area but not all, is not to be trusted. It was not outside the Chinese restaurant where we had the banquet.

Chinese Banquet in Korea

Here's the post of the food in the drunken banquet we had with our Korean customer last Thursday. This food reminded me of a Korean take on a Chinese multi-course wedding banquet I had had in Hell-A back in the 80's when Eric Bohley married Mary-Anne King.

Anyway the appetizer course was jellyfish salad, a slice of pickled pork, a prawn, and a slice of an aged duck egg usually called a "hundred year old" egg. The sauce in the top bowl was like a thin soy sauce, which is unusual in Korean restaurants, we had wooden chopsticks (Koreans almost always use stainless steel chopsticks, which in addition to being much slicker than wooden chopsticks are also not rotationally symmetric) and a typical chinese soup spoon. The jellyfish salad was on top of shredded cucumber that was not pickled, the only cucumber that hasn't been a pickle I've seen the whole trip so far.

The next course was shark fin 'soup' which was more of a noodle dish than a soup in this restaurant and only had two tiny bites of shark fin, it was mostly bamboo and noodles. I took this picture after I had eaten quite a bit of it. The koreans called it "shark flipper". The dish above it was sliced pieces of sirloin in a typical Korean spicy sauce. The only other beef I had in Korea was the shredded kind that is used in Bulgogi and even the butchers I've seen in the market places don't carry much beef (I later had beef bibimbap which was also shredded) and what they had doesn't resemble cuts I am used to seeing. Notice the green bottles of soju in the pictures.
The middle dish is fried shrimp in a korean sweet and sour sauce, very similar to what was in the beef dish but sweeter. To the right is a chicken thing, I think. Iwas beginning to loose track a little here. The clear glass at the top is the soju shot glass, the little white one is the scotch shot glass and the big cup was cold jasmine tea. The wooden cylinder next to the spoon rest has an egg drop soup with a surprise ingredient that I'll note in another picture, below. On the right edge is a cold wet napkin that they give you just before the meal starts in most of the restaurants around here.
The next one was something I never encountered before. On the right is a chinese bun, think of dim sum buns you might have had before, but this had nothing in it. It was like a dough-y chinese biscuit. I was supposed to pick off parts of it with chopsticks and eat it together with the sliced portk and vegetables dish to the left. I was having problems with the chopsticks by that point and didn't eat much of this. That might have been a mistake, because I still had to endure the line o' Koreans that I talk about in the soju post.
This is the final dish that came out, and I think something must of gone wrong because you usually get desert and/or fruit at the end of a chinese banquet, but then again the only desret course I've seen or heard of in Korea is something called cold noodles which I had the first night in Taean, but it wasn't sweet. Anyway back to this dish, it is noodles in typical chinese soup stock broth with more of the "surprise" I mentioned above. The bits in the soup (you might have to click and enlarge this picture to fully appreciate this) that look like mushrooms are not. They are sea slugs! Also known as sea cucumbers. They are poisonous! Well, anyway they were in this dish, plus the soup that came in the wooden cylinder at the top of this picture next to the soju glass. So I ate a good bit of sea slug. Because that soju glass is empty I think I took this picture just after I had dumped it into Burnsed's soup.
I don't really remember anything tasting objectionable and the sea slug apart from it's not being a mushroom wasn't really bad. It's just when you expect to chop down on a nice portobello and instead you bite into a sea slug the mouth feel and consitency gives one pause. The "hundred year old" egg was much more tasteless that it would have appeared. The jellyfish salad tasted just the same as it did at the wedding where I first had it and just like at the Japanese restaurant on Eglin Blvd back home.

Soju, or, if you ain't cheating you ain't trying.

Last Thursday we had the traditional dinner that we do with our Korean customers during a successful installation. This usually consists of a feast at a restaurant nearby to the range paid for and hosted by my company but directed and chosen by the Koreans.

This installation we went to a Chinese restaurant, mostly because one of the guys is quite old and the Koreans wanted to find a place with tables and chairs. The feast was great and I'll have a separate post on the food (which you may have already seen), but this is about the drinking, which is an integral part to a Korean dinner.

Dinner drinking starts with one of the engineers breaking out the two bottles of Johnny Walker Black that one of my engineers bought in duty-free and toasts all around. Then begins the low level individual drinking.

In this phase there are shot glasses placed on the table, but fewer glasses than people. These are strategically placed along with a couple of bottles of soju in the midst of about 6 people. There are about 3 shot glasses and the rule at this point is that you never pour your own drink, you can only poor a drink for someone else. So someone pours you a shot and you down it. But then you have to pass the glass to someone else in your local group and then they take a shot. The only real requirement is that just about everyone gets a shot at this point and the senior people from my company make sure and toast the senior Korean. He is only drinking scotch at this point and when you exchange a toast with him you just pour him a sliver.

So of course I am participating at this point, but I'm getting a little more attention than everyone else at my group. This is because I am the "target", the new project manager, and my 'staff' and the Koreans are conspiring to make this my worst nightmare. But they are backing off and as the food comes the pouring slows down and it is only between course that more shots are foisted on me. Also the rules begin to change. Now when someone brings you a glass, you have to down it and immediately pour them a shot and they down it. It looks like this:
Random Korean staff pours me a shot of soju. I am bound to accept gracefully from the Koreans, but at the end of the dinner (and I'm not sure we got to the end because the last course was noodles, when I think it should have been fruit).
Once I've taken the shot, I hand him the glass and pour for him. I have to pur with my right hand only and only with my left hand over my heart as in the picture.

Nice custom, unless you are the target and there are 13 Koreans trying to exchange shots with you and only one of me. As the courses wound down they were lining up and Koreans I hadn't even met were insisting on pouring me a shot. At this point I made them tell me their name and what system they were working on in English before I would let the pour. Here's what the table looked like near me before the serious drinking started. All the bottles in this picture are empty, brown is beer bottle, green is soju bottle and tupperware is tea.
The dishes in the bottle line are the typical korean meal accompaniements; kimshee, raw onions and garlic, more kimshee made of stuff other than cabbage and the really hot kimshee.

I don't know how much I drank, more than 30 shots. But I cheated. I did drink every one of the shots poured for me, but one (I put that one in Burnsed's soup), but I made sure that I would walk out under my own power without ralphing. I did manage to carry that off as I walked the 6 or 7 blocks back to the hotel under my own power to the amazement of all. I didn't barf until after I got back to my room (probably saved me from alcohol poisoning) and tried to drink a bottle of gatorade. I hate to say it, but as I've gotten older I have to resort to tricks that I would never have tried when I was younger if I want to keep up with foolish drinking. Extra points to anyone who can guess what tricks I used.

ready to post

OK just finished watch Battlestar Galactica Razor, got Radio Margaritaville playing. It's time to start clearing the backlog of posts.

Worked and went to Osan this past weekend

Now it is Monday evening and the weekend did not yield any post worthy material. That said, I have quite a backlog and I'm heading back on Wednesday. So late tonight I will be posting the mother of all blog updates. Hang on.

weirdest thing about Korea so far

I have come to Taean from Seoul 4 times now, given the latest trip today (to the Incheon FEDEX, pretty weird all by itself) and this is the landmark I see that lets me know I am at the exit for Taean

there is some kind of Karmic joke being played her, but darned if I can understand it

More outdoor drying stuff

This seems to be a popular method of food preparation here. I've seen drying rice, peppers, but mostly fish.

Here's drying cuttlefish outside a seafood shop on the side of the road. When I stopped to take this picture there were thousands on these poles and they were putting up more. The stench can't even be imagined, but now I know why the oriental stores in FWB smell the way they do.
and fish drying next to a restaurantmore fish drying next to a different restaurant
and fish drying in the middle of a tourist little park by the fishing fleet

Quiz Answer

It was rice from the harvest. They put it on black plastic tarps and spread it in the middle of the road.

New Quiz

OK, I got some good guesses to the last quiz. But unlike that one, I actually know the answer to this.

What is this in the road that I nearly ran over yesterday? The only hint I will give is that it is common in this part of Korea at this time of year. Ice, please don't answer.

Where I am

GPS Coordinates are N36degrees 42.035minutes, E126degrees 10.010minutes, I think you can zoom and scroll this map from google

View Larger Map

The view from the radar we are installing is
The coast line is doted with islands and the shore has lots of beaches and a very ragged and interesting coastline. In the middle of the above picture (you may have to click on the picture to enlarge it in order to see this) in the water are some squares that are just slightly differently colored from the rest of the ocean. Those are seaweed farms. When the tide is low you can see the poles and boundaries of each individual patch of seaweed. I don't know anything about the aqua culture of seaweed, but I have had seaweed salad a couple of times here and it tastes just like the seaweed salad at all the Japanese restaurants in Fort Walton.

Also, 100 miles in the direction of that photo above is Mainland China, if you zoom out on the map you can see the part of China that points this way across the yellow sea, which is called yellow because it is shallow and parts of it look brown. It looks very blue to me on Sunny days.

A little south of due west is the end of the peninsula we are on and a small island where we usually go for lunch. It is the Destin of this part of Korea and I will post more about this little town and the stuff I see when I go to lunch there. We usually eat at a Chinese Restaurant there (/irony) but one day that was closed so we got food at a 7-11 type store. I had Bennigans Seafood Alfredo (it had a mussel, some squid and a tiny shrimp) and it came with a Starbucks Iced Carmel Latte. Anyway click on th picture to blow it up and you can see the circular harbor and the hotels in the Korean Destin.


Here is the sun setting on China.

That's enough posting for one night. Later I'll put the map and GPS coordinates on the side bar.

Missed Opportunity

I was going to plug an internet phone service here, but they blew it

Korean Chicken Soup

My Korean host wanted to go get Korean Chicken soup, so rather than letting him eat alone (he lives in Seoul and the whole week he is down here he is away from his home and usually eats in the company cafeteria where he gets a ball of rice and some kimshee).
Here is the restaurant. We were the only customers at 7 PM. Hardwood and low tables as is usual. My hips hurt almost continuously now.Here's what we hadThe center bowl has a whole chicken in it (well, a small one) and a ball of rice along with ginger, green onions and a little bit of garlic. It tastes like chicken with rice soup from Campbells, more or less. From left to right are our accompaniments, raw garlic and green chilies that put jalapenos in the shade (Koreans dip both of these into the rep pepper paste in the small bowl next to it and eat them raw), kimshee, a bowl of salt (this is pretty much the only restaurant that I've seen salt in), a fermented soup that was very good but Mr. Ye couldn't tell me what it was only that fermentation was part of the process of making it, turnip kimshee and a small glass of water round out the meal. Koreans drink very little during dinner or lunch, unless it is beer or soju.

I'm hoping Korean chicken soup works like the jewish version.

Excuses, Excuses

Haven't been feeling well since Ole Miss lost to Auburn so haven't blogged. Problem is bloggable stuff keeps piling up. Plus, I'm not sure some folks got notified that the blog is here so I need to send out some more e-mails. I'm very behind. I'll try to post a few things tonight.

Sunday Morning in Korea

In pajamas.

Listening to Ole Miss-Auburn game via a station in Natchez, thanks KISS 97.3. Ugly as rkw predicted.

Eating Kelloggs cereal that looks an awful lot like cocoa puffs.

Traditional Korean Dinner (Restaurant)

We went again to a traditional Korean restaurant with one of the Koreans from the test range. Just a note, we don't go to real Korean restaurants without a Korean escort. This sign had all the English we would see of restaurant materials.Here is our food. They put it on the floor next to the grates that will be over the heaters for us to cook our pork ribs. Of course we sit on the floor (on very thin pillows) with our legs crossed under us. Hard duty for old men like me. Also there are no rest rooms, so I tried not to drink too quickly.

These are the side dishes. Apparently for most big Korean meals, eaten at a long table by a relatively big group (more than 4 based on what I've seen, a limited sample to say the least), there are always a variety of side dishes. The fish there in the middle is cold and has the skin on, but is cooked. Squid and shrimp (both cooked, in the restaurant last Sunday night was thin strips of raw beef, but tonight everything was cooked) to the right, middle forward is apples in mayonnaise (I think this is at every Korean dinner), left corner is some gelatinous thing I couldn't identify even after tasting. Above the apples in mayonnaise is crab in kimchee seasonings, they said it was soft shell, but it was hard shell. It is shrimp and crab season now and next week I will be hosting a crab and shrimp boil. Mushrooms and gralic got grilled next to the pork ribs.
The waitress cuts the meat into smaller slices (except for the part near the bones) and turns the meat for you. Our Korean escort was impatient (and had the hots for the waitress) and cut the meat himself sometimes. He used scissors just like her.
One of the side dishes was a hot seafood soup that had this in it. After eating it I don't know what it was. It looked like a small brain, but tasted like a clam or a mussel. The engineer from California wouldn't eat it and he's eaten everything so far. I ate a couple. I'll post and let ya'll know if it kills me.

The waitress let me take her picture. She was working like six of these tables and had almost no help, although a 12 or 13 year old girl did start helping her later, but she kept up with our food all night without complaining (well, no complaints I could understand).
Here's the stuff that is most likely to kill me. This is soju, originally a rice based liquor, but now more based on sweet potatoes. It is the Korean form of Vodka and not bad. I am using a few old man tricks so I don't drink too much or get two wasted. I doubt I'll be able to avoid it for the whole trip though because the engineers have in their minds that one night (probably next Thursday) I will be the target. If my tricks work that night I will brag about it.
The restaurant is a family one. In spite of the fact that a lot of the adults in the rooms were drinking heavily the kids seemed to be having a good time, too. They seem amazed to see non-Koreans, but mostly friendly. These two girls were at the table behind me and kept trying to dodge my camera.
As we were leaving the grandma of this family was nice and bowed to us. I asked in English if I could take the picture of the entire family, but the grandfather said no, although in a very friendly way. In the end he made a big "X" by crossing his forearms in front of him. It was funny.
This is the entrance/exit where you leave/get your shoes. These kids were teasing one of my engineers when I came out. As we left the building they were singing some phrase over and over. I hope it wasn't naughty.

Toto, I don't think we are in Kansas anymore

Saw this today coming back from lunch. My Korean host was showing me around a castle compound from 1600's that had been destroyed in 19th century civil rebellion and we were passing peasant houses now behind the gates and I saw thisfish drying on the line next to the family's laundry. I'm pretty sure the plant in the background is kudzu.

Ill let everybody assimilate that previous post

then I'll post again on dinner at a "traditional" Korean restaurant (you sit on the floor), Mak-ju, So-Ju and the Korean problem with illegal immigration

But before I go to bed here's a typical picture from my days here in lovely TaeAn

Rick warned me

Here is the first thing I saw when I gotto my room in the Thema Motel, Thema Hotel, ot Thematel (the literature varies)Yes, that is velvet for the duvet cover and satin pillow covers (with a sanitary linen coverlet). Big screen TV in right corner of picture. Channel 2 has 24 hours of soft-core movies that might be on Skinemax late night, only all in Korean. There are 3 boxes of tissues in this room and a 4 pack box of foil covered latex items (only 3 in the pack, I found the missing latex item in the bedside trash just before I tried to go to sleep) along with various oils, scents and lubricants.

The bathroom floor was wet when I walked in. Apparently that is how the maid service cleans the bathroom, they just hose everything down with the hose from the bathtub, which (in case you didn't guess) is a full sized hot tub with Jacuzzi jets and a full scratched up bottom. The glass enclosure on the right of the picture is the shower. It looks like this those dispensers have shampoo and a skin softener. That is a bar of soap in the soap dish. I made the mistake of lifting it to examine it. Of course there was a hair. Short. Dark.

And there is my pink towel I am told that in the DongMun, the old hotel they used to use here, this was all the towel you got. Of course there are hairs in this as well.

I couldn't unpack because there are no dressers, no drawers, no wardrobes, nothing that might indicate the occupiers of the room intended to stay more than an hour or so. There are two hooks for hanging jackets and shirts, and a shoe horn to put your shoes back on (you took them off and left then between the inner an outer doors.

So I am getting ready to go to bed in this STD factory when I go to throw away an old bookmark in the trashcan under the bed stand when I find the aforementioned latex item, which was in a condition that showed my room had been occupied earlier in the day and utilized for its apparent main purpose (not housing engineering managers in town to install radars, apparently). Probably it was no more than 1 to 2 hours before I got here.

There were no sweet dreams that night.

Surpise!

When friends had previously worked in this part of Korea, they had made certain exaggerated (I thought) claims about an old hotel called the Dong Mun. But the new hotel we are staying in is supposed to be light years better. Well, I guess I misunderestimated Korean Culture. The "towel" pictured below was only one of the surprises I received when I checked into the Thema Hotel TaeAn. Strap in and hide the kids, the next post is going to be PG rated and delve into some seriously alien stuff (to me anyway).

OK this is different

The drive from Seoul to Tae'An took about 4 hours. It is "interstate" all the way and Korean Highways have the same type of signs and numbers as the US, a blue shield with a red toop and the road number inside of it.

We missed one of our turns but were able to recover. Overall it was like any interstate in the US. Crowded (but maybe 10 times worse) in and around the city of Seoul, and then plesaent in between. Saw lots of factories and farms and country side. Korea is basically a bunch of hills and mountains and valleys. All the valleys have towns or farmlands and most of the hills are lush and green even at the end of October.

Here is the rest area where we stopped. Yes, they call it a resort and there were about a million people in there on a Sunday afternoon. The bathroom may be the biggest men's room on the planet. I mean it. If you took all of the men's rooms in the Superdome and put them all together they wouldn't have the area or numbers of toilets and sinks as this men's room has. I doubt that all the Stuckey's on the planet toether don't have that many toilets. The rest of the resort was taken up with food stalls. Hundreds of individual foodstalls. I had sweet and sour chicken and sweet potato sticks. Those were just like potato sticks, but made from sweet potatos.

The reason the rest are is there is because it is at the base of this:
The second longest bridge in Asia. 7 Kilometers and more. The exit to this rest area is a sprial corkscrew down to the parking area.

On to TaeAn and the surprise I should have been prepared for, but wasn't.

Day 2 in Seoul

Breakfast was bacon, eggs, fried rice, black sesame flakes, smoked duck, smoked salmon, 2 different kinds of caviar (black is much better than red), bamboo leaf dumbling rice thing, japanese seaweed soup, potatoes and some purple thing that looked like a potato but wasn't. I could imagine Morimoto whipping that up on Iron Chef Battle Turnip or something.

Then we were off to Itaewon before heading out of town. Itaewon is sort of the international seedy clubbing and shopping area where American GI's hang out after hours. We went in the day time so we didn't see any barfights or have to dodge the working girls on "hooker hill". When you are shopping there it helps to be the first (or last, I'm told) customer because it makes bargaining easier. Take your time, negotiate, walk away several times, pay in cash.

After about noon it got kinda crowded, but unlike yesterday there were lots of different types of faces, black, white, arab, Chinese, you name it. There was even a guy with an Alabama golf hat. Tourists were definately here as was Outback, MacDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks. It was a relief to see something that was non-Korean. Also all the shop keepers spoke english and they had a little bit of everything, even Shawerma.