Seomun Market and Daegu Arboretum

Ah routine, what a love/hate relationship. I find myself plodding along to the subway station, developing muscle memory when it comes to my morning routine of roll-off-bed-into-kitchen, fix coffee and oatmeal, sit at computer and check Facebook, etc.

Even tasks that were at one point a novelty (ex.- leaving maggot-filled food bucket on street at night to discover it miraculously emptied the next morning) have become mundane. I am quick to be bored. So, I was looking forward to this weekend as an opportunity to strike out and explore all the hidden gems of Daegu. Unfortunately, Shaina's immune system trifled with my plans. For the past week she has been hacking up a lung. For a while I caught the funk, but it quickly passed, and it seems to be lingering for Shaina and some of the other TaLK people... so I am waiting to do any serious traveling until everyone gets healthy again.

Saturday morning I knocked out some sorely needed chores, went running and piddled around cooking an extravagant lunch (tofu scramble with corn, mushrooms and broccoli) to burn time until noon rolled around and all of my normal 20 year-old friends began waking up. The tentative plan was to meet at Daegudong subway station to celebrate a friend's 20th birthday. However, the communication was poor, so by the time we met, everyone was flustered and annoyed at the lack of a formal plan. I did what I am good at doing: abandoning ship and doing my own thing. Yes, I pulled a "Snell", snatched Eunice and Shaina from impending boredom and whisked them away to downtown Daegu to explore some more.... and of course use Eunice's translation capabilities for my own gain.

A while back, my Ipod decided to up and die. Oddly enough, Apple is not very popular in Korea, (which Eunice explained is because Ipods are too big and do not appeal to Koreans who prefer microscopic computers, mp3 players, etc.) so finding an Apple service store was difficult. And pointless as it turned out: I was quoted $135 just to send my Ipod in to an Apple service center in the states. Looks like I know what I want for Christmas!
Eunice wanted me to take a picture of this girl's outfit. This is typical Korean fashion...

After the trek to Apple, we decided to visit Seomun Market. It's exactly the type of market you are envisioning: squawking, caged chickens flapping about in cages, coating the fish monger and his fly-covered catch with a thin layer of wispy down... nameless roots and leaves piled high on old newspapers with 70+ year-old women squatting among the leaves, haggling with locals and ignoring foreigners. Fabric stores, fake-designer shoes, "authentic" Korean antiques.... Seomun Market was a poppin' place on a Saturday.
This is the freshest fish you can get in Korea... and it's on display way underground at the entrance of the subway. Advertising is comical here.

Traversing through a marketplace is more for spectacle than it is for shopping. The Koreans selling food/clothing/God-knows-what know better than to waste their time on a foreigner who probably doesn't speak the language and who has no use for 20 pounds of fermented soybean paste. I was content to snap a few pictures until I saw a cart piled high with these perfect pine-tree green watermelons. Dad, as you read this, know that you have passed the "watermelon hound" gene down to your daughter. Every summer in Florida as well as on road trips, Dad would always track down a lone fruit stand on the side of the road and would stop to buy some of the local fare. Some of my happier memories are of eating watermelon on the deck with dad, juice running down our forearms and a pile of seeds littering the grass and deck railing. So, with an immense jolt of nostalgia, I stopped and pointed to one of the biggest melons the guy had to offer. 3,000 KRW (Like $2.90).
This is an art form in Korea: sweet rice balls/cakes. They are made from sweet rice flour and usually filled with sesame oil. The rice is formed into any shape you can imagine from sushi rolls and Disney characters to entire replicas of octopus. All edible!
Cramped quarters. Not to mention that scooters/motorcycles are allowed to drive on the sidewalk pavement in Korea, too.
Here's that 20 pounds of fermented soybean paste I mentioned earlier :o)
Chicken.... stages 1 and 2.

The first kittens and puppies I see in Korea.... and they are caged right next to the food. I wanted to save them all..
A puppy among some very fat rabbits. Nothing was pinning these rabbits here; I thought it was strange that they weren't constantly trying to escape.
But no oatmeal..
A Korean specialty: caterpillar larvae. It has the most repugnant odor you can imagine. Like putrid, fried mothballs....
Annnnd I made Shaina eat one. The little Korean ladies frying the larvae in a wok said that they cured all illness, so I was only trying to help..hehe.
The fruit of my labor. GET IT!?!? I love puns :)

While the rest of the group bickered about dinner, the Trinity (Eunice, Shaina and I) decided to go off and have dinner on our own. Shaina was feeling very poor at that point, so we rushed her to the nearest subway stop so we could ride back to my place for dinner. I proposed sashimi/sushi because there is a restaurant directly beside my apartment. Once there, Eunice got a call from her boyfriend, so she switched on a video chat application on her phone! I was amazed!--
The sashimi was just decent... it doesn't make sense to me that a country that is a peninsula could be so clueless as to how to do sushi right. What made the meal worthwhile are all the exotic side dishes the server brought out. A Korean meal is synonymous with a meal of maaaaany dishes. So there were the staples: kimchi, sesame-marinated spinach, fermented spicy roots.... and then there was a newbie on the table: abalone.

Abalone is the stuff on the left, and that is the creature's shell that it is resting on. If you are a fan of the Travel Channel and have ever watched No Reservations or Bizarre Foods, I can guarantee you have seen abalone. It's some sort of very thick-shelled sea creature that is considered a seafood delicacy because it must be cooked for hours to become edible. It's slimy, coated in a white mucous-like substance and smells like briny seawater. It tastes exactly like the aforementioned description. All 3 of us discreetly spit the abalone into napkins and hid the wads in our purses because we did not want to offend the server.
This is how they serve fish in Korea. I feel like I am eating fried bait because not only is it tiny, it's just a crappy species of fish. To eat it, you spear both chopsticks into the belly of the fish and rip him apart. You cannot avoid the bones because they are hair-thin, and all the organs, scales and eyes are supposed to be eaten too. I will never shun the seafood counter at Publix again.

Eunice put a hurtin on that fish. She ate every little morsel using her chopsticks!

After dinner, we headed to my apartment for movie night using my computer. Unfortunately, you can never visit as long as you would like to because the subway stop running at around 11:30, and we live over an hour away from each other.

On Sunday, the plan was to go to Daegu Arboretum (the 3 of us) and to spend the day reading on park benches but Shaina texted me early on in the morning to say she still felt like death, so I decided to just go alone. Getting lost on my way to a park is loads better than going stir-crazy in my apartment.

So I packed an extra large carrot in my camera bag, wrote down my address in Korean (if I ever get lost, I can at least hail a cab and just hand him my address) and struck out to find Daegu Arboretum. I had to ride the subway to the very last stop on the line, and when I first emerged from the tunnel I was disoriented because I was suddenly in the country! Stifling the first inklings of panic, I searched for English anything... and luckily found a sign with a picture of lots of trees and the word "Arbo." on it, pointing down a street, reading 150m.

I walked for a half hour, winding through side streets and growing more nervous by the minute. I was just about to use break down and use the 5 Korean words know with the owner of a vegetable cart when I spotted a sight for sore eyes: an aajima! (hajima/aajima- the ladies with the massive visors) and she was dressed to the nines for hiking!
When in doubt, always follow the hajima (and her offspring in hajima-training). Especially when she's decked out head to toe in Northern Face hiking gear. Koreans like to go to extremes when it comes to their hiking clothing. It's still well above 90 degrees right now, but Koreans still don long sleeved, cold-weather hiking jackets and thick, fur-lined hiking boots just for a casual walk in the park.

Sure enough, I was led straight to the arboretum, which turned out to be a lovely day. The park was packed full of families on Sunday outings enjoying the cloudless, perfect weather. For some history in the arboretum: it's a free park that was built over a landfill. It extends over several hundred acres and is part of a tree-planting initiative that the Republic of Korea has begun to be competitive in the new green/eco-friendly trend.
A hothouse filed with different types of cacti.
These metal coils were heating the room, keeping the temperature roasting!
I had no one to take pictures of me, so I contented myself by taking pictures of posing Korean people. This culture has a love affair with photography, and everywhere you looked there were parents setting up tripods to photograph their children, young girls snapping photos that are sure to be their next Facebook pictures and couples trying to take the most cutesy kissing poses in pics possible.

Another thing Koreans love: dipping their feet in water. A few posts back I put up a picture of a stream built straight through the heart of metropolitan Seoul. This concept of an open stream that you can wade into is all over Korea. On this particular Sunday with all the families at the park, the kids were having a ball splashing around in the water.

I found a praying mantis in the grass! When the kids saw me squatting down to take a picture of something, they all started crowding around me, trying to poke the mantis with a stick. This was the only shot I could get without any little hands in it :)

It was a pleasant break from city life. No honking horns or flashing neon lights. No fruit vendors shouting about their prices through a garbled speakerphone like it's a Communist China national rally at 4 in the morning. The only mar on the day were the stares I was getting, not so much because I was the only foreigner for miles, but because of two conspicuously placed lime green band aids on my chest. I'm sure it looked like I was hiding a chemotherapy port or something, when really the band aids are covering a very nasty burn from a hard boiled egg incident.

I have never cooked with gas before, so I must have turned the heat up too high because 3 eggs that I was boiling became 3 temperamental bombs, which exploded and coated my ceiling, windows, pots, pans, sink, fridge, floor and ME with scalding egg fragments. In fact, it was like having eggshell shrapnel lodged into my skin! I had to pull off a particularly large sliver of yolk off my chest, which melted off a huge tract of Katy-flesh: thus the band aids. So, when I come home and reflect back on my myriad of injuries and illnesses that I suffered through in Korea, I can always have a laugh that, no, I never caught Swine Flu... but I did have second degree burns from explosive eggs.