Festival Weekend

Yeongdeok Snow Crab Festival


March seems to be the kick off of the Korean festival season, and I decided to take advantage and visit a couple of them. On Saturday, I went to the Yeongdeok Snow Crab Festival in, of course, Yeongdeok. Yeongdeok is famous for their crabs, with restaurants all over the country advertising Yeongdeok snow crab. The whole town is one giant string of crab markets and crab restaurants. As you can see, they take their crab seriously here.

It was an interesting festival, with some activities that required a little bit of explanation. Unfortunately, they were not prepared for the onslaught of English speaking tourists, namely myself, and did not provide any explanation whatsoever. One of the first things they did was some sort of silent auction. They had boxes of crabs and people wrote down prices. They held up their bid and the auctioneers went around selecting the winning bids. I don't think it was based upon the highest bid, but rather the closest to some randomly chosen magic price. I never did quite figure out the whole process, which is unfortunate since the prices seemed to be quite on the cheap side.

The next major activity was fishing for crabs. For 10,000 Won, about $10, you could rent a pole and catch crabs out of a giant pool they had constructed. But again, the directions in English were a little lacking. I was in line early for a pole, but unfortunately, it was the wrong line. I was in the line for those with tickets. But first, I had to buy a ticket in a line 5 feet away. Of course, they wouldn't just take my 10,000 Won and give me a ticket then and there. They wanted me to wait in line. Which had grown considerably longer by this point in time. So I gave up my hopes of catching my lunch.

And what could a crab festival be without eating some crab? So I headed to the food stalls were I first had to buy the crab from a vendor. Two good size crabs cost 50,000 Won, or about $50. Which is supposedly about half the price you'd pay in a restaurant. They then had cookers who I had to pay 6,000 Won to cook my crab. As you can tell from the before and after pictures, the crabs were quite tasty. For another couple thousand won, they even took the bodies and mixed in some rice with the innards. So pretty much every last edible bit of those things was consumed.


Before


After



Cheongdo Bullfighting Festival
(official website in Korean)

From Yeongdeok, I headed to Daegu, where I spent Saturday night. On Sunday morning, I was off to Cheongdo for the bullfighting festival. You may remember that attended this festival last year as well.

The forecast was for rain, but it ended up being a beautiful day. The stands were crowded and the bullfights were as fascinating to watch as they were last year. There was even a woman trainer who won her match, which excited the the crowd, especially the women.

I was able to take some better video this year as well, but I still need to edit it down. So check back in a week or two for that.

Ansan

The weather is getting nice enough to start biking again. After a few days of getting warmed up in town, I decided to make an out of town trip this weekend. My destination was Ansan, which is home to a large Asian immigrant population. I've heard about the wide selection of foreign restaurants there, but the realities exceeded all of my desires. In a short stretch, there is almost every type of Asian food one could hope for. Thai, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Uzbek, Indian, Bangladeshi, Chinese, and more, are all represented. To someone from outside of Korea, this may seem like faint praise, but for anyone living in Korea, you will understand the importance of this find. Incheon, with its 3 million people, doesn't have a single Mexican restaurant (there is a little food stand in one of the department stores that sells "empanadas," but they look more like steamed rice buns than empanadas). As far as I know, there aren't any Thai or Indian restaurants in Incheon either. Outside of Korean food, the only mainstays are Chinese-Korean food, Japanese-Korean food, pizza places, and fast food restaurants.

I ended up selecting the Thai restaurant this time, as I haven't had Thai food in over a year. I'm not exactly sure what I had was called, pad something or another (reading English words in hangeul (Korean writing) is bad enough, there's no way I'm making out Thai in hangeul), but it was excellent. No Koreanization (like adding octopus to every pasta dish, or putting sweet pickles in everything) of the food here. Just pure, unadultured, Thai food. And reasonably priced, at W8,000 (around 8 US$).

The bike ride itself was pretty good. It's only about 23km (14 miles) each way. There are a lot of little towns along the way, so I had to contend with plenty of stop lights. But most of the roads either had good sidewalks or ample shoulder room. There were only a couple of small hills to conquer as well. It's definitely on the top of my return list.

Some of the restaurants in Ansan. In order, you have Uzbek, Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Indian, Thai, and Mongolian restaurants.

Restaurant Review: Amir Timur

Since it's winter, and I'm not up for taking any bike trips, there's not much to write about. So I present the latest addition to my blog. Restaurant reviews.

Saturday night, for my birthday, I headed to the Uzbek restaurant in town. It's located behind the Songdo Beach Ramada (which is neither in Songdo, nor near the beach). The owners are ethnic Russians (as opposed to ethnic Uzbeks) from Tashkent, but that's about all I could get out of them. It's a semi-up scale restaurant with a primarily Korean clientele.

Some items from the menu (prices in Korean Won, 935 to the US$):

Lagman W6,500
Uzbek Salad W7,000
Plov W6,000
Samsa W3,000
Shashlik W13,000-21,000 (two skewers, includes non and a cup of tea)

I had the plov and Uzbek Lamb Shashlik (W15,000). The shashlik was okay, but it didn't have the pizzazz of real Uzbek shashlik. Which is traditionally meat-fat-meat-fat-meat-fat. Instead, it was just meat-meat-meat-meat-meat. Which is okay I guess, but not authentic. The non was fresh out of the tandoor, and was much lighter and fluffier than the traditional Uzbek non. The plov also differed slightly from traditional Uzbek plov. The rice was not quite as dark as what I'm used to. I'm not sure what gives it that color, but it was missing. Finally, the tea brought at the end was stronger than what I experienced in Uzbekistan, and it didn't have the floating bits of tea leaves I'd grown accustomed to.

Overall, the meal was decent. It was a little more upscale Uzbek for Korean tastebuds. I've found an Uzbek cafe in Seoul which caters more to Uzbeks, and the dishes there are more authentic. Unfortunately, it's also 1.5-2 hours away by subway. Price wise, the Uzbek place in Seoul is a little cheaper. The meal in Incheon was W21,000, while I can get a salad, plov, non, shashlik, and a Baltika in Seoul for around W15,000. I've heard that there are some Uzbek restaurants in Ansan, which is fairly close to Incheon. I'll search for those when the weather starts to warm a little.

Final rating: Acceptable

T-Day

On my way home from work on Thursday, I realized it was Thanksgiving. So I stopped by one of the local chicken places and bought myself a chicken dinner. Unfortunately, they tend to sell family sizes, as in whole chickens. On the plus side, the do have a wide variety of flavors and breadings available. I settled with some sort of spicy chicken, which turned out to be a little too spicy and messy to truly enjoy. Nevertheless, I stuffed myself on chicken for Thanksgiving.

On Friday, the other foreign teacher at my school invited me to a Thanksgiving dinner that her husband's co-workers were having. They're all consultants for a pharmaceutical company here in Korea, and make a few more won than your average teacher. The person who hosted the party (high up on the food chain, so I hear) had one of the nicest apartments I've ever seen. A penthouse apartment with a roof top terrace. And the food was even better. Almost all of it was imported, via Costco (which they have in Seoul). Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, salad. And no sweet pickles on the side. And that alone qualifies it as one of the best meals I've had in Korea (Note: sweet pickles some on the side of everything here. Even the Uzbek restaurant in Seoul serves sweet pickles on the side. Although, chicken is usually served with a side of pickled radishes.)

Recipes

My favorite recipes. As opposed to having scraps of paper floating around my kitchen, I thought I'd put them here. Sources of recipes are available in the links.


Pancakes

I use a half recipe.

* 1 cup flour
* 1 1/4 tsp baking powder
* 1/4 tsp salt
* 1/2 egg, slightly beaten
* 3/4 cup milk
* 1 Tbsp melted butter

Combine dry ingredients, then add milk, egg, and butter. Mix and cook.


French Toast

I use a quarter of the given recipe.

* 1 egg
* 1/4 tsp sugar
* 1/4 tsp salt
* 1/4 c milk
* 3 slices of bread

Mix ingredients in a shallow pan. Coat bread with mixture. Cook.


Ice Cream

I simplify this recipe a bit and don't use eggs.

* 1 1/2 c cream
* 1 1/2 c milk (I like to use the flavored milk they sell here)
* 3/4 c sugar

Mix ingredients and put them in a container. Put in freezer. Stir every hour for several hours.


Plov

Ok, so I haven't made any plov (aka osh, the National Food of Uzbekistan) yet. But soon. I went to an Uzbek cafe in Seoul a few weeks ago with one of my Peace Corps alums. And the plov was a delightful alternative to the daily white rice staple they serve here.

The Search is Over

After a two week intensive search, I've finally found a stick of deodorant. At the grocery store three blocks from my house. While searching in Seoul a couple of weeks ago, I found a few places that carried deodorant. But the sticks were all quite small and ran $5 or $6. I finally resigned myself to paying this price but couldn't find any deodorant today when I went to Seoul. But there I was in the grocery store by my house when I finally spotted some deodorant and broke down and bought it. Same size and same price, but at least there's a nearby supply.

More importantly, I got a bike that actually fits. I bought a bike a few weeks ago which was a bit too small. I planned on getting the seat post modified to fit me better. But two days later it was swiped from the garage downstairs. I went back out bike shopping last week, but the biggest bikes I could find were still too small for me. After resigning myself to a bike free fall and winter, I found a bike listed for sale on one of the teacher's forums and I was able to snag it. It may be a couple of inches to small for me, but it's close enough.

My other major find today was a Sbarro's. The mall I went to had a Pizzeria Uno as well, but they wanted $15 for an individual pizza. Instead, I was able to get two good size slices of pizza from the Sbarro's for just over $7. Pepperoni and stuffed supreme. Very good. There are actually a lot of pizza places around me. Some have cheap $5-7 basic pizzas. They're not too bad, and I usually get one for for Friday dinner / Saturday breakfast. There are also the more expensive pizza joints (such as Domino's and Pizza Hut) which charge $20+ for a pizza. I've never tried them though. So to actually get western style pizza (i.e. no corn, lots of pepperoni) was a treat.