Play ball! Seoul baseball game

One of the best things about making our own travel arrangements is the flexibility to find and jump on an opportunity for an adventure. On Sunday, Phillip and I were "toured out" after the Hwasseong fortress trek, so we decided to just ride the subway into Seoul, a trial run for Monday when we'd have our suitcases and be changing hotels from Suwon to our final stop, Seoul.

This is Gwangjang Market, famous for its food vendors, and where we had lunch with a few hundred of our friends. We had kim bap and tteokbokki, total price: 5000 won (less than $5). After walking around this market and another, we wanted an activity where we could sit. I'd looked up Korean baseball on the internet when I had research Shin Soo Choo, so I knew there was a game scheduled for Sunday.

A subway ride, and we arrived at Jamsil Stadium (which like Osan AFB, isn't in the town for which it's named, just like the Dallas Cowboys' stadium is in Arlington). The Doosan Bears playing the Hanwha Eagles. 8000 won for each ticket, outfield seats, but as you can tell from the picture, not bad at all. This class of ticket is general seating, not reserved, so we were 8 rows up from the fence. 

Our seats were close to the big mass of Hanwha Eagle fans, an area with a platform for the cheerleaders and mascot. The enthusiasm of the fans was wonderful! They stood and sang, they yelled and cheered, and they waved and beat their orange sticks.

All the real fans had a set of these inflatable sticks, orange for the Eagles, white with blue letters for the Bears. When a couple thousand people whacked their sticks against each other, it did make a big noise. It was also, especially on the Eagles side, colorful as the fans held them aloft to smack them together. 

The scoreboard shows the 12 innings that were to be played for the game. The seventh batter for Doosan was at the plate, with an 1-0 count, 2 outs already in the inning. We arrived in the top of the 2nd inning and Doosan was already ahead 3-0. I wish I'd seen the first inning, because Doosan got their runs on only 1 hit but 3 errors by Hanwha. Poor Hanwha, they did go thru several pitchers.

And speaking of pitchers, beer wasn't sold by the pitcher or glass. It was sold by the one liter bottle. 3500 won for a liter of beer (over 32 ounces) and two cups. That works out to about $1.60 US for a 16-ounce cup of beer. I can't think of any US major league ballparks where beer is that cheap... And it's just as good as Miller or Bud (but not as good as Shiner!)

The stadium has 22,000 seats and lighting and a structure just like any MLB stadium in the USA. The fan experience reminded me of when I was in Durham, NC and attended a Durham Bulls game, i.e., more fun and with an involved crowd. At one point, the lights on the Doosan Bears side of the stadium dimmed and the fans knew it was time to hold up their flashlights and sway to the music (FYI, Doosan was the home team in this game). Everyone had a flashlight because they used their cellphones. And everyone under 70 and over 10 in Korea has a smartphone - I do not think that is an exaggeration!

And here we are at the game... Jackets because this picture was after dark and a breeze was blowing across the outfield seats. We left at the top of the eighth inning. Doosan Bears were ahead 7-0. Even though the Eagles were trailing quite a bit, the Eagles fans still smacked their air bats and yelled just as loud in the 8th inning as they did in the 2nd when we arrived. On our way out of the stadium, we stopped and bought ourselves Doosan Bears jerseys. We loved our spur of the moment adventure of the Korean baseball game...

Suwon: Folk Village, Fortress, AFB, and more

Phillip and I have been in Suwon since Wednesday, arriving by train from Daegu on April 20th. That train was not a high speed train, although it did go faster than the cars on the highway that we paralleled for a part of the ride.

It almost looks like we were near water in this view out the rail car window, but these are fields of hoop greenhouses. The terrain had larger flat land areas between the mountains and many collections of these greenhouses. It was the biggest collection of greenhouses that we've seen and puts my little 10 foot by 12 foot greenhouse to shame, but then I'm not raising vegetables for millions of people!

Our hotel room is the best one we've had so far, large and with a sitting area after we walk in the second door. Two doors, like we had in Jeju and in Busan, because after entering the first door off of the hallway, we're in a small alcove where we are expected to remove and leave our shoes. Unlike the Jeju room, this floor is not heated nor is it raised, but the flooring is different in the alcove and the hotel provides slippers to wear in the room. The room is nice. The mattress on the bed, however, is extremely firm, almost as firm as the floor we slept on in Jeju.

Thursday morning, we awoke to a steady rain outside. We decided to take the free shuttle bus to the traditional folk village anyway. We had umbrellas and figured there'd be museums and it might not be crowded. The umbrellas did work well, there were museums, but there were also busloads of children. The rain didn't keep them from coming for a field day. The kids were as much fun to watch as the exhibits were to see. We knew when a class made it to the exhibit with the live hogs, as we could hear the shouts of excitement from the kids.

Folk villages of the Joseon dynasty have been recreated on this 245-acre complex. Unlike the traditional houses we saw on Jeju, these have woodent walls and tile roofs instead of rock walls and thatched roofs. The houses were built as small compounds, with rooms opening into the center courtyard.

Except for the meat, the food served in the restaurants is grown or made at the folk village. We came aross their kim chee pots, actually in use as they were labeled with the date the kim chee fermentation began.

And every place has food vendors - we bought some rice candy from this one and he posed with Phillip for a picture. They are holding the scissors with which he cut the candy into smaller pieces for us. The rain had stopped for the day by this time. Some of the traditional performances were canceled because of the rain and mud, but we were able to see two - a percusion musical and a trick horse show. 

I've got to have another flower picture. This isn't from the folk village, it's from a crosswalk island in the middle of Suwon. After we returned to town, we walked from the subway station in search of another market and found an intersection - not a special intersection, just an intersection with crosswalk islands - where the landscape was magnificent. All the tulips and pansies, different varieties, were in fill bloom. The intersection had no markers or anything that said a private company planted them, so I guess the City of Suwon planted them. 

On Friday, we planned to go to Osan Air Base in the afternoon, so I got on TripAdvisor to find a morning activity. The Samsung Innovations Museum was ranked in the top 10 sights, so using the Trip Advisor location, we headed out. I learned a lesson: don't trust the TripAdvisor map. It was about 1/2 a mile off. Not a big distance in a car, but we were walking. I turned on my phone and found the location and eventually navigated us to it. Samsung is headquartered in Suwon and has a huge facility with secure access - and a museum that is by reservation only. We managed to talk the nice lady at the desk into letting us go thru it - a private tour of the three story museum basically. The displays were technically fascinating, as the projection and "special effects" were top notch as one would expect from an electronics leader.

The museum focused on electricity, its discovery and uses over history to improve people's quality of life. Phillip and I found televisions we watched as children and phones we used ten years ago in the historic displays. Yes, we felt old...our childhood and even adult electronics are now museum relics.

After Samsung, we caught to subway and headed for Osan Air Base, which is actually 5 miles outside of Osan, in the town of Songtan which is two subway stops farther than Osan. Fortunately, I knew that from Lonely Planet, a more accurate source than TripAdvisor (I still like TripAdvisor, I just won't trust their maps).  Phillip had been stationed at Osan AFB thirty-eight years ago. Songtan today is nothing like it was then. It had been a small village with shacks, no buildings over two stories, and dirt roads a few blocks outside the Air Base gates. 

Today, tailor shops and clothing stores are still there, but the bars have been replaced with restaurants, including a McDonald's and a Popeye's. All the businesses are in sturdy, real buildings, not shacks. Phillip said this pedestrian street is five times wider than the road was when he was there. The subway didn't exist in 1977, so the entire part of the town near the subway was new to Phillip. We spoke with several service members assigned to Osan AFB who were shopping in this market area. The deployment to the base is still a one-year assignment and the servicemen were generally pleased with the assignment and with Korea. Phillip couldn't get over his amazement at how much the main gate area had changed since he'd been there. He was still talking about it when we headed for the subway back to Suwon.

Yesterday (Saturday), we spent the entire day at what turned out to be one of my favorite attractions in Korea - the Hwaseong Fortress. The original fortress was completed in 1796 (much of what we saw was reconstruction, as the fortress was extensively damaged by the Japanese in the early 1900s and by bombing during the Korean War). We walked the entire fortress wall. Only one section of it was up (then down) a mountain. 

Signage in Korean, English, and Chinese was placed at each point of significance to describe what what there. The fortress had four gates and numerous other military spots like this sentry post.

At one of the secret gates (built where the terrain allowed it to be covered with dirt and rocks if needed) I stepped outside the fortress and took a picture there. Notice that the ground slopes away. When the enemy (usually the Japanese, but could have been folks not loyal to the Joseon Dynasty) approached, the fortress seemed even more imposing to them.

This was a command platform. The military leaders met here to decide the strategy. The smaller rock structure to the left of the building is a crossbow platform. The fortress had a command platform on the east and on the west sides. From this west command post, which was on the mountain, the view was as far as 50 km (about 30 miles). It was overcast yesterday, so we could only see about 10 miles away. As I am writing this post, I found that I told Phillip something that wasn't entirely accurate. I told him the trek around the wall would be 5.7 km (a little over 3 miles). Actually, the distance from the South Gate directly to the North Gate is 5.7 km. The fortress is a circle. If the diameter was 5.7, the circumference, i.e., what we walked, was actually 17 km.... more like 10 miles. I guess that's why it took us almost 5 hours to make the circuit! (FYI, we walked from our hotel to the fortress, about 2 km, before we started the tour.)

After the fortress walk, we had a fried chicken lunch, Korean style - a whole (small) butterflied chicken, skin-on, no breading or batter, deep fried in an iron cauldron of boiling oil. It was really good, crispy skin, and bowls of sauce to dip the meat in. Then, we walked thru Hwasong Haenggung, the palace inside the fortress. This was not the main palace of the Joseon dynasty, but it was one they used. The most fun part of this was that visitors could rent traditional clothes to wear as they strolled about. This couple was trying to take a selfie without a selfie stick, so we took their picture with their camera to get the entire outfits in the photo and they posed for us to take a picture of them. 

This girl is weaing the hanbok (traditional dress). As we were leaving, I noticed that the "guards" had been posted at the entrance. Their main purpose wasn't guarding, it was for tourist pictures.

You can see some of the palace buildings thru the gate past the guards. I took this quick picture when the opening was empty of tourists, and there were plenty of them on this beautiful April day.

Phillip and I find it hard to believe that we only have four more days in Korea. It has been wonderful and the people have been, without exception, friendly and helpful. We've still got another Suwon day and three days in Seoul, so we'll have more fun before we leave...

Saving Cinderella and other stories of Daegu

Phillip and I have almost finished our visit to Daegu, the 4th largest city in South Korea. We again commend the friendliness of the people of Korea and the beauty of the country.

Cherry blossom season is over. The pink and whte blossoms have given way to green leaves; however, we see other blooms now. These are maroon tulips. I've never seen tulips this color before. On our first full day in Daegu, Sunday the 17th, we walked to Duryu Park, about five blocks from our hotel. The amusement park, called E-World, across the street from the park had a beautifully landscaped entrance and I took this picture there of the maroon tulips. (We didn't go into E-World because the entrance fee was 37,000 won each. It appeared to be the Korean version of Six Flags Over Texas).

We walked around Duryu Park, which appeared from the map to be the largest public park in Daegu. It was a windy day and we had our jackets on.

As we walked, we noticed a kite stuck in a tree. A young family, including a girl of about 4, was trying to get the kite out of the tree.

Here's a close-up of the kite - a Cinderella kite. She's on her side with her head on the left of her blue dress. The father and mother tugged and released the kite string, trying to get the gusty wind to catch the kite to get it off the branch.

The father spoke with a maintenance man and then went after a ladder. While the dad was gone, another man decided to climb the tree to help the mother who was still trying to work the kite free. Unfortunately for the family, this tree-climber guy got it loose from one branch just as a gust of wind took it and wrapped it around another branch.

The father came back with the ladder and was able to grab the tail of the kite and pull it down enough to untie Cinderella from the string. Can you see someone in a blue jacket holding the ladder steady?

And this is Phillip on the lower rungs of the ladder, helping Cinderella thru the branches and handing her to the little girl's mother, waiting below. I knew he would end up helping the family save Cinderella! By the way, the parents rolled the string and kite up, as the winds were gusting too much and I don't think they wanted to save Cinderella a second time. The little girl wasn't upset when the kite was put away. She seemed happy that she still had Cinderella to fly another day.

After the park experience, we walked a few kilometers to eat the gopchang, the grilled pork tripe I described in my previous post. Then, subway time as we wanted to go to a market. We made our way to Bangcheon Market, a fairly small market. Unknown to me when I chose Bancheon, it is bordered by Kim Kwang-Seouk Street. Phillip and I followed the crowds thru the market and everyone ended up on one street with a wall covered in murals.

 This street is dedicated to a popular Korean folk singer, Kim Kwang-Seouk, who grew up near the market and who died in 1996. Kinda like a Korean version of Elvis Presley. Murals covered the wall panels and statues and wooden guitars lined the other side of the alley. Many of the visitors stopped to take selfies next to the statues.

On Monday, we visited Seomun Market, one of the three largest markets in the country. We arrived fairly early and I took the above picture of one of the hallways. Trust me, by lunchtime this hall was wall-to-wall with people. The market has many of these hallways and four levels of shopping in the buildings you can see on the sides of the hallways. Clothes, purses, housewares, food, shoes.

This is looking into the sack of cookies we bought from a cookie vendor. Those wafers in the upper left of the picture were the best, buttery and sweet, but not too sweet. We ate this small selection as we walked around the market and we went back and purchased an even bigger bag before we left for the day. The cookie vendor spoke a little English and when we said we were from America, Texas, he knew about Shin Soo Choo. We've only had one person say "cowboy" when we say Texas, and they meant the cattle-type cowboy, not the football team. More people have talked about baseball when we say Texas. They are very proud of their Korean MLB players.

I mentioned the housewares. This is an example of a table that was for sale. A beautiful black lacquer table inlayed with mother of pearl to illustrate a peacock. My camera flash took out some of the purple coloring in the tail, but it was as beautiful as those we saw in the museum. It was the size of an end table, and selling for 360,000 won, about $325 US, but we would pay much more than that if we buy it at home. No, we didn't buy it, but we were certainly tempted.

Today we took the Daegu City Tour Bus. What moves Daegu down on our favorite places list is that the interesting locations are difficult to access. With only three subway lines that intersect downtown, this large city is not traveler-friendly. I do say the City, as the people definitely are traveler-friendly. The Daegu City Tour is an operation that tries to connect visitors with sights. For 5000 won each, we rode a hop on-hop off double-decker bus that stopped at 14 locations around the city. The above picture is of Suseongmot Lake. 

The lake had a small island in it with trees that served a nesting places for the huge lake birds, some type of heron. This one tree had about twenty nests with herons flying to and from the island.

Our second stop on the City Tour was at Pyeonghwa Market, not for the market as it was quite small, but for dakdongjib - chicken gizzards. You may have noticed that specialty restaurants set up shop on one street in a city and that street becomes famous. This was indeed chicken gizzard alley. And these were the best chicken gizzards that I've ever eaten (I do order chicken gizzards when I can). The batter was a tempura-type coating and they were cooked to order for us. We had the plain fried and the fried and sauced ones.

The restaurant owner here didn't speak a lick of English, so we just pointed. There were two prices on the menu for the gizzards and we weren't sure what she was going to charge. We were prepared to pay the higher price (20,000 won) and Phillip gave her the 20,000 won, but she gave us 6,000 won in change. This was repated for dinner tonight when we went to a nearby restaurant and had mandu, steamed dumplings, an order of five of them. The price could have 14,000 won as the only English on the menu was that "a box" was 14,000. Phillip held out 14,000 won, but the lady only pulled out 4000 and then gave us 500 won in change. We had actually ordered the cheapest item on her menu and she was not going to take advantage of us. 

Two other stories of friendly, helpful people: on the first segment of our Daegu City Tour, the bus was staffed with a middle-aged female tour guide who spoke English. Phillip and I were the only passengers as it was the first tour run of the day. Before we got to our stop, twenty minutes after we boarded, she and Phillip were singing Korean songs together!  And my final story... tomorrow we leave Daegu and head for Suwon. I know we will take the train, so I looked up the schedule on my tablet and decided to go ahead and book our tickets because only four KTX trains from here stop at Suwon (most are express to Seoul). The website indicated that I must print and show the voucher when I book on-line. So, we went to the hotel lobby and asked about using their printer. The clerk got on-line on her computer for us, and when she saw that we could only get tickets with a Korean credit card, she got the manager involved. I'm pretty sure he used his personal credit card (we paid him in cash the price of the ticket) and finished making the reservation that the clerk had started. She printed out our voucher and we are ready to go tomorrow. They were so helpful, going beyond what we had asked for or expected from them. Every city, every day, Phillip and I are grateful for the honest, helpful people of this country. And every day, we see something new and beautiful here.

Food: Korean chicken wings to pig intestines

Phillip and I haven't just been walking and climbing stairs and traveling on trains, we've been eating. Time to show what delicious, and not quite delicious, food we've come across.

These are chicken wings. The entire wing in one piece, including the tip end. Phillip ordered 10 wings, not realizing that they meant "wing" not just a piece of a wing like in the US. He liked the sauce on them but they weren't as crispy as they look in the picture so he wasn't too crazy about these.

This is chicken galbi, a chicken dish that was served piping hot at our table. The boneless chicken chunks were cooked with kim chee and onions and a particular sauce. It is not grilled, more like stir-fried, but with the sauce it was almost like stewed chicken. A bit spicier than some of the other dishes we ate, but not too spicy.

Kim chee stew with tofu and beef. Again, not too spicy. When kim chee is cooked, its flavor changes a bit and it is certainly less pungent. Kim chee stew comes with the sides, so we get uncooked kim chee of different varieties.

And of course the snacks. This is ice cream, chocolate in one end and vanilla in the other. It looks likes he's snorkeling with his ice cream cone.

I put a picture of a sugar pancake, my favorite snack, already in a post, but it was of the entire pancake. You've got to see the melted brown sugar and cinnamon on the inside! 

Sandwiches are sold in Korea. This is a bacon and egg sandwich with bacon sauce. Yep, bacon sauce! It was a sweet sauce that probably used bacon fat for flavor. I found this on Jeju and just had to try it. Probably not too healthy, but quite tasty.

I've seen this back at home, green tea ice cream, but it is a flavor choice at every ice cream vendor, very popular here.

This is my favorite entre - bibimbap. I especially love it served in these hot storeware pots. The lower layer (you can't see it) is rice. Then all manner of veggies are arranged in piles on top. This would include bean sprouts, some type of kim chee, nori pieces (dried seaweed, sheets of which are used to wrap sushi rolls), maybe lettuce, maybe bul go gi meat. Bibimbap is always topped with an egg. If it's served in a hot pot like this, the egg is raw. If in a plain bowl, the egg is already cooked. And the sauce- it always has a gochuchang sauce. Gochuchang is a particular savory and spicy fermented paste made of red chilis, soybeans, glutinous rice and salt. It is definitely on my grocery list when I get back home. More about this picture - it is in the hot, really hot, pot, so when you mix up the ingredients (with a spoon), the egg cooks. Also, you end the meal with crispy rice bits to scrape off the bottom of the pot.

While in Jeju, we went to Noodle Street for noodle soup. The noodles are cooked separately, I'm sure, because the broth they are served in isn't starchy. It has a very clean taste. The vegetables (you can see the carrots and green onions) are sliced smaller than matchstick size and cook when the boiling broth is poured over them. The dark topping you see is more crushed nori. It adds a savory taste, not really a fishy taste.

This is not food. When I saw it, I thought it was breath mints. Nope, when water is added, this expands and becomes a washcloth to clean your hands. I'm glad Phillip knew this, and told me, before I popped one in my mouth or I would've had a mouthful of damp paper towel!

Remember the dolharubang? the grandfather rock in Jeju? The market sold cookies baked in dolharubang-shaped molds. They tasted like fortune cookies, sweet, unspiced and crunchy.

Korea's climate is not tropical, but they do have fruit. This is an Asian pear, a huge Asian pear. It tasted fresher and less sweet, more crunchy and juicy than the ones we can buy in the USA. 

Street vendors also sell corn on the cob. This isn't roasted corn, nor is it sweet corn. It is closer to the mote we had in Ecuador, slightly sweet but more starchy with huge kernels. When I was growing up on a farm in Kentucky, we grew field corn for the cows. The taste of this corn reminded me of young field corn which still had a bit of sweetness if you sneak an ear before it gets mature.

This is a dessert Phillip found in Busan. It's a waffle on which they spread whipped cream, making sure it went into the waffle squares. Next goes sweetend cream cheese across it. Then, they fold it in half. The challenge is to eat it without the whipped cream oozing out and dropping on your shirt! We could have had it filled with ice cream, but we figured that would have been even messier. Tasty, but messy.

A specialty of Busan was egg pancakes. This is another recipe that I will try. A small amount of an egg batter is put on the griddle. A handful of thin green onions are laid across the eggs. More egg batter, then other ingredients, in this case, seafood including octupus. Then even more egg batter. By now the pancake is as big as a dinner plate. We watched the lady cook these. She used a shovel-type spatula and a regular spatula to turn it. Each time she turned it, she added a little more egg batter. When she served it, it was cooked thru, even the green onions had gotten limp and cooked. One pancake fed both of us. This was the only octupus that Phillip liked, probably because it did not end up rubbery.

We kept passing steamed dumpling vendors in the market, but Phillip said he wanted "yuki mandu," which is fried dumplings, so we never stopped. One evening, when we decided to just eat vendor food, I stopped at a steamed dumpling vendor who was doing a brisk business (that means the locals like his food) and got a mandu (this steamed dumpling) filled with veggies (mainly cooked onions and green onions) and meat for 1000 won (less than a dollar). By the time Phillip settled on kim bap for his dinner, I'd eaten my mandu so I had him go past this vendor again for me to get a second mandu. I won't be passing these by again!

On the KTX train from Busan to Daegu, a hostess came thru the railcar selling coffee and snacks. It was past lunchtime and I was hungry, so I just pointed to one of her packaged breads. It was quite good as it was a sweet bread filled with red bean paste. The filling was not too sweet and it did taste like red beans. Don't think Cajun red beans and rice - it didn't taste anything like that. There's very little I can compare it to as most of our Texas fillings are much sweeter than this, or much fruitier than this. I liked it so much that when we saw a vendor today with cookies that appeared to be filled with the red bean paste, we bought some (They were!).

And my final picture is from lunch today. This is gopchang. It is pig intestine. Cleaned well, of course, then grilled with a red chili sauce. It was excellent. Phillip and I are not really menudo fans, so we weren't sure about gopchang. Daegu has an entire street dedicated to gopchang restaurants and the hotel clerk said it was good and recommended we try it. The flavor reminded me of bacon, but not smoky bacon. It was just a little bit chewy, but the more it charred on the table grill, the less chewy and the more flavorful it got. This isn't something that I will try at home, but it was pretty darn good - a hit not a miss.