We are not in New York anymore

Click on photos to enlarge.

LO: We have continued exploring both the city and its surroundings. In the last two days we have discovered a whole new neighborhood of Wonju and climbed a mountain! Okay, we almost climbed a mountain.
The new area is actually right behind our apartment complex. The focal point of this part of the city is Wonju City Hall and the art center, Baegun Art Hall, attached to it. There are loads of great restaurants and shops, including the smallest coffee shop I have ever seen (pictured).

As for the mountain, we took a bus from outside our apartment complex for about 10 minutes, trekked through the countryside for a couple of miles to the mountain. It took us 40 minutes to hike up to the third base in the picture, before heading back down the way we came.

Why didn't we reach the summit? Did I mention I am scared of heights?

For the botanists out there - we know you are many - the trees with the yellow flowers are Japanese cornel dogwood, also known as Japanese cornelian cherry. In Korean, sansuyu. It's a food or medicinal plant.

No place like home

LO: It is four weeks since we left New York. We are slowly getting to know Wonju and what it has to offer. It reminds me of Sarajevo. In both cities the majority of people live in huge apartment complexes, where children play right in front of their buildings. Little green groceries, small butcher shops and bakeries are on the corner of each street, and every morning women air their bedding from their windows. There is an old market in both cities, located right next to the main walking/shopping district. There are beautiful mountains with ski slopes and resorts outside both Sarajevo and Wonju. And both have been savagely destroyed at some point in their history.

Punk puss in pink boots eases North Korean invasion jitters

We kid you not. Spotted in window of Wonju pet store.

Why, thank you

DC: Kam sa hamnee-dar. It means thank you. But it's formal, according to our young Korean pal who's been helping us with translation in various situations, including signing up for mobile phones, and ordering pizza, our reward to him last night for the phone business. "Kam sa ham-needar is too formal," he said with a big grin after we climbed out of a taxi, whose driver I'd accorded far too much respect. "You don't need to use it. It makes you sound like you are not from Korea." Apparently, you'd use it if, say, you wanted to be extremely nice to the Korean cop who'd just pulled you over for speeding on our big highway to Seoul. Or to a judge or a doctor. "Ko map sumnee-dar. Means thanks. It's better," said our friend. "More casual. It's cooler."

Let there be green

We knew there was real beauty out there, just beyond Wonju city limits. In them thar hills. We'd read about it, and several eager-to-impress locals and expats have told us about it. It's just that it appears to have been hiding beneath a lot of grey wintery cloud since we arrived a couple of weeks ago. Late afternoon today, however, the gods of those low but perfectly formed mountains to the south of us decided to stage a little spring shindig and throw the switch that produced the impressive light show you see here. Ta dah! Welcome washes of olive green finally daubed among the brownery that many associate with the rural Korean landscape. This is the view from our apartment, and pictured in the distance beyond Dongbo Nobility Block 102 (extreme left) and our neighboring complex are Mount Baegunsan and, behind it, Mount Keunbaramgolsan, part of the National Baegwoonsan Natural Rain Forest, their ravined and wooded slopes illuminated for us for the first time. Now we just have to climb the things.

Whatever will they think of next!

I know. Why didn't I think of that? A tube, um, squeezer.

Gee, it's that song again

We would hear this ridiculously infectious song in our Koreatown supermarket in New York. Now we're in the land where Girls Generation (SNSD) , a small army of up-and-coming showbiz poppets recruited specifically for a Spice Girls-like pop overthrow, is everywhere, and the Gee song is about to push us over the edge into insanity. Right now, howver, it could be the greatest song of all time. Gee gee gee gee baby baby baby!

Alphabet city

DC: I met the neighbour today. We were both waiting for the lift in our building. He's probably 4 years old. Huge saucer eyes, a pudding bowl haircut Dee Dee Ramone would have been proud of, and a back pack that sunk down to the back of his knees and seemed to fasten him to the spot. He gazed up .. and up and up at me, and I was forced to break the ice. Hi, you live here, what's your name? He didn't miss a beat, not a hint of shyness. "Hello. My English name is Edmund. My Korean name is ... " I didn't catch his Korean name. I was thinking of Black Adder. You just finished school? It was about 4.30 in the afternoon. "Yes." He's still staring up at the foreigner, he hasn't looked down yet. Where do you go to school? "I go to ABC hagwon." Hagwons are the schools many, maybe most, young Koreans attend after normal school each day to learn, in Edmond's case, obviously, to perfect, their English. We ride the lift together up to the fifth floor. He marches out ahead of me and takes a left. Doesn't look back. I go right. Have a nice day. "Have a nice day."

Culture clash

One of several small trucks that do the neighbourhood rounds selling fruit and vegetables to the numerous small restaurants. This one's flogging the spicy Korean staple radish. The trucks have loudspeakers mounted on their roofs, and a looping recorded sales pitch to lure the restaurateurs out for a look-see. This one sounded like Joe Strummer barking a Korean version of This is Radio Clash.

What is fish?

LO: So far we have eaten out a lot, but in the last couple of days we've done grocery shopping and started to cook at home a bit more. Shopping for food has actually been quite exciting not only because of the language barrier but also the different kinds of foods that we didn't encounter in U.S. supermarkets. Yesterday we bought what looked like American or European leeks, but once we got home we read the small-print label: "green onions". They are about 3 feet long! Each market also has huge kimchi sections where one can buy either pre-packaged kimchi, radishes, green beans, and other vegetables in hot pepper paste, or buy it at the special counters that resemble salad bars. Their hot pepper ko ch'i is incredibly good and we have been eating a lot of it.

There is loads of fish and seafood that at times seems to be almost too fresh. In fact, today we decided to fry up some fish without even knowing what kind of fish it is or the right way to prepare it. But hey, it's all a big adventure, so if you recognize the fish in the pictures, please let us know what we had for lunch.
We have decided to use just local Korean ingredients and not continue cooking only our Euro-American meals (chicken and potatoes now on the back burner, so to speak). Tonight, Dave has figured out how to make an excellent man doo guk (dumpling soup) with some frozen dumplings, those gigantic green onions and hot peppers, with green beans in hot pepper paste as a side dish. We cheated a little bit by using some Made in Israel Kosher Telma chicken stock (thanks Mom for sending it!). It was incredible!

How to put your foot in it in South Korea on day one

LO: It's exactly one week since we left NYC. We have been so busy exploring the area and walking around that we have had little time to write about our arrival. So here it is..... It took us 14 hours to reach South Korea on a Korean Air 747, and after 3 movies, 2 documentaries and 3 sitcoms, we finally landed at Incheon Airport at 4.30 on Monday afternoon. University staff assistant Taek-gun welcomed us outside the baggage claim and got us and our 6 suitcases into a van. We bypassed Seoul and continued on Highway 50 straight to Wonju. What caught our attention, and surprised us, as the night fell were the red neon lit crosses adorning churches between hundreds of high-rise apartment complexes all the way to our new city. Two hours later we arrived at Dongbo Nobility, a luxury high-rise we are going to be calling home. The apartment has three bedrooms, a living room the size of our entire NYC apartment, two bathrooms, dining room/kitchen, laundry room and a balcony. Oh, and two hallways ... one where you leave your shoes, per Korean custom, and one where you actually enter the apartment. We didn't know the footwear protocol, so we strode into the apartment in our shoes, dragging our suitcases along the beautiful wooden floor, only to be politely but firmly pulled up by Taek-gun (Teckan), who diplomatically explained that entering one's home, or anyone's home in South Korea, wearing shoes is inappropriate and rude. OOPS! I get it....but we were so tired and shoes or not, we wanted to see our new home.

Luggage dropped off, Taek-gun flagged down a taxi outside our new apartment complex to take us for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in a new downtown (there is also an old one). Over soup, Taek-gun let it slip that he had missed a blind date to pick us up. We felt bad and insisted we'd be fine, that he should leave us to make our own way home. We'd find a cab. Hey, we were in town for about an hour and we were already taking cabs!

Next day, we took another one, shyly succeeding in getting the driver to take us to E-Mart, a Korean version of Costco, just a bit posher. One of my new colleagues and his wife came over that afternoon to take us shopping for basics, and could not believe when they found out that Dave and I had already ventured out by ourselves. I guess living in rough, tough ol Noo Yawk City has prepared us, so we didn't even blink at the idea of going out without understanding a word of Korean. A week later, we are already reading Korean letters!



Wonju is a modern city with loads of restaurants, bars, coffee shops and small stores. Dave's height and my curly hair are not very common here so little children like to stare at us and shout "HELLO"! We live about 15-20 minutes walk from that new downtown. It's very easy to get around the city with buses that cost about 75 cents a ride and cabs that cost less than $2 to go just about anywhere. We have already discovered a couple of great Korean soup restaurants and an old traditional food market called Nambu, housed in a single large building where numerous room-sized restaurants are crammed next to each other on the ground floor. At the entrance to each is a crate on which sits the carvings from a pig's head, including an upturned snout and porky ears. Okay, not quite for the faint of heart. Like Dave! In each of these little open-plan dining rooms is just one lady cooking and serving food from a large wok. She prepares your food from scratch. We opted for bowls of black bean sauce noodles, which included small chunks of pork...and we watched the lady actually make the noodles. The food was not only amazing but we paid just $3 for both of our meals.

Talking about food has got me hungry ... off to make dinner.

It's a little bit alien

DC: There but for the grace of god go we, here in the land where we know all of two and a half phrases in Korean: Checking out the jobs on Craigslist Seoul, and finding a writing job posting that promises 'salary comiserate with experience.' We're trying to learn at least a word a day. So far, we've had hang gung (airport), and kopi han jan (a cup of coffee), among others. Today's word is pang (bread). Lana uses her right hand to indicate the vowel sounds in Korean writing, reminding me of Francois Truffaut's hand signals to demonstrate the aliens' musical tones in Close Encounters.