Delicious street food... a typical dinner

Here, Ric and I ate a $12 oyster that was larger than a cantelope.

Leeum, the Samsung Museum of Art, designed by Koolhaus

Noraebang videos from the going away party for Ryan

Two new Noraebang videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzVJlyKw6qg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plxRyz9UK9E

Exercise!

Here are a couple of strange photos about exercise. The first shows some nice symmetry in the gym at our office. The second is a storefront with little baby exercise equipment. From left to right, the first two pieces are a baby treadmill and stationary bike. The third looks like something Chuck Norris might have sponsored when he was 8 years old.

Noraebang round 2

Ryan's going away party was off the heezy.

Free hugs from the happy morning people

Rachel got a free hug this morning!

Crispy Sandwich - Green Tea Ice-cream and Kuromitsu

crispy ice cream sandwich, originally uploaded by yileng.lee.

This is Ryan's favorite ice cream thing in Korea. It is green tea ice cream dipped in a caramel (is that the kuromitsu?) layer and then sandwiched between two crispy wafers--all packaged in a box-holder so you don't drip all over yourself. Mmm, its good. The other great thing about the ice cream is that you can find it easily -- like at the convenience store in the client's office building or in the hotel. The first time I ate this it was so good, I rationed out the entire sandwich over the course of a week (two bites a day).

Today we are eating it because one of our clients treated us. Note to those coming to Seoul, I think this is a good way to bribe Ryan into doing things. Like I'm going to see if I can bribe Ryan into making my powerpoint so I can spend my time blogging about mundane things.

Noraebang night - partying like rock stars

With only a few precious days left in Seoul, we started making a to-do list of things to do before we left...and noraebang (aka karaoke) topped the list. So last Friday, a group of us (Doblin + clients) started the night of with barbeque and soju.


The food was really really excellent. You get a plate of raw, sliced up pork bellies that gets thrown on a hot grill, which is fired by hot glowing pieces of charcoal. As the pork is cooking you also grill up some kimchi and garlic. When the pork is grilled, you take the pork and dip it in a salt-mixture and/or soy-sauce-garlic-green-onion sauce, and place it on a leaf (lettuce or sesame leaf). Then you pile on your choice/combination of grilled garlic, grilled kimchi, spicy bean paste sauce, raw mild-chili pepperes, marinated grass-like vegetable-thing...and roll all this up with the leaf and stuff it in your mouth. It's great. If it sounds confusing, it's just becaues I'm having a hard time describing it and you just have to come here and experience it yourself! Check out how much fun everyone had eating this...






All this eating and imbibing happened at turbo speed as we were trying to get to the Noraebang in time to get a room to ourselves. So after dinner we headed off to "the Louvre" for some singing.


The noraebang was a riot and everyone was singing classic/stupid karaoke songs like Sweet Child O Mine, It's Raining Men, One Way or Another, Bittersweet Symphony, Last Christmas, Can't Get No Satisfaction, Like A Virgin, Macarena and many more including some Korean songs by our friends. There were two microphones but pretty much everyone was singing at the top of our lungs if we knew the song and sometimes even if we didn't know the song we sang along anyway. No matter what song we were singing, the footage on the karaoke videos alternated between a few generic themes like polynesian dancing, ducks swimming, and cars racing.

I don't really know what else to say except that everyone joined in on the fun, we all made fools of ourselves and there are some really stupid photos and videos from this night. I'll leave the videos to Ryan-the-youTube-master and post some embarassing photos here:















p/s: All you other American-Idol-wannabes who were there, feel free to comment if there was something about this whole night that I left out.

Changdeukgung

The weekends are a great time to get out and see the sights of Seoul. This weekend our intrepid troop of innovators (I-Troop) set at to see Changdeukgung, or Changdeuk Plalace. We went on the English speaking tour, which was a help, but for me I couldn’t hear or understand the tour guide entirely well. No matter, it was quite an interesting experience. From what I could tell this palace was not the main palace but a kind of backup palace, or secondary palace. This is interesting because it’s in frozen kimchi throwing range of the main palace. (Well, you'd have to have a pretty good throwing arm, but you get the idea.)


This was the building where the king handled his business affairs.


The architecture was of a style used 600 years ago. I wondered if some of these buildings had been partly or entirely rebuilt. Korea has a long history being invaded and occupied by foreign powers and I imagine that they had done some serious damage to the buildings in that time. But many of the buildings looked like they were well cared for and were beautifully painted.


These figures, which were found on the corners of the roofs, had a kind of magical power of protecting the palace. The first figure, the one closest to the edge of the roof, is a Buddhist monk. The other figures are animals like a monkey and a snake. The guide pointed out that the magic must not of worked too well since the palace was invaded and taken over. However, I choose to believe that those little guys did their best and kept further destruction from happening.



There were some great details like this carved lion's head and this copper thingy.


Yi Leng gives us a sense of scale for one end of a courtyard. Notice the "ancient" fire hydrant poetically placed that gives us a sense of... well... safety.


Our tour guide elucidates an aspect of Changdeukgung.


We probably picked out one of the coldest days of the whole year to make our tour. The cold air was exhilarating at first but then turned into a reminder of just how fragile life can really be. Ryan was smart to bring a hat and Marta and Yi Leng had gloves, but none of us was really prepared.


We were so cold by the time we got out of there we practically ran to the nearest restaurant we could find.


We thought we were real smart to order some hot tea, but when it came it was tea for one in a ceramic container that cost about $5. Are you kidding me?. We decided not to drink it but rather to pass it around the table and take turns holding it in our hands. I kind of think the restaurant turned off the heat the minute we got seated. Fortunately Yi Leng spoke up and they turned the heat back on.


When the food finally came we dug right in. The hand warming tea pot is sitting at the right edge of the photograph.



On the way back to the hotel we came upon a dance/drumming group wearing traditional costumes. We stayed for a few minutes, but I was so ready for a nap that I just had to get back to the hotel.

Happy Birthday Yi Leng!

One of the nice things about working in Seoul is how ready our client organization is to have a party. And birthday celebrations are very much welcome as a great reason to stop, celebrate and eat! Ah the excitement, though not a surprise, when folks ran around to prepare a party for our very own Yi Leng, who, by casual glance, appears to have just turned 13. Seriously, someone in Seoul asked if she was 12 years old. Well... out came all the delicious foods one might expect when celebrating (in Korea). They aren't big on sweets here and much prefer a savory bit of transformed vegetable (usually cabbage) saturated in some sort of hot pepper sauce. Yummy! Somehow, someone went out and got a strawberry tart and put a couple of candles in it (well done!). The plates of fresh kiwi were a nice treat too. The tart was wonderful, but was left unfinished as it was apparently less desirable than the rice globs with bean paste and other more traditional fare. Well it was good fun and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, which is quite normal at these things.

After work, our little gang of innovation experts went to Baskin Robbins for our own (un-Korean) type of celebration, a chocolate fondue. Now we're talking! Of course the cherry tomatoes were a nice touch on the fondue plate so it wasn't all ice-cream and cake. There was a tricky bit of stabbing the ice-cream balls with the fondue forks as it took approximately 3, 820 foot/pounds of presser to skewer the super frozen substance. Well, we persevered like pros and collectively tidied up the plate of delectables. Poor Richard had just flown in from Chicago, er… well… New York and had been awake for something like 52 hours in row (including a 4 hour nap). Yet he hung in there and helped spread the good cheer.

All in all it was a fun time. And I personally can't wait till Yi Leng has her next birthday so we can have another blow-out like this one.

Happy Birthday Yi Leng!!!

A Trip to the DMZ/Wildlife Sanctuary

Today Marta, Yi Leng, Ryan and I ventured north to the 38th parallel, otherwise known as the Korean DMZ (or de-militarized zone). This is the division between North and South Korea and has a very strong military presence.

What we didn't know was that The heavily guarded strip of land that is about 4 kilometers in width functions fairly effectively as a wildlife preserve. We are told that there are even some animals that were thought to be extinct that are alive and well here. There is a bit of a problem however, there are many hundereds of land mines buried in this area. We were told that the animals could smell them or somehow avoid tripping them off, well, at least most of the time. Man's relation to nature continues to prove, um, interesting.

We saw many things today. We saw a railway bridge that connects South Korea to it's Northern counterpart. It's called Freedom bridge. We got the sense that The South Korean's were very sincere about reconnecting with the North, but also very cautious. There is even a very ambitious plan to run passenger rail service from South Korea through North Korea, Russia and all the way into Europe, even London (but Ryan and I couldn't figure out how they were going to handle the English channel). We also saw an inspiring sculpture about the desire for reunification and a memorial from the 5 million or so North Koreans that fled their homeland south in fear of the U.S.S.R. that took control after WWII. They miss their country and their families and pray for reunion one day and that is what this memorial represents.

We went deep into a tunnel (not shown) that was dug by North Korean prisoners as slave laborers in order to provide a secret passageway to the south. We were told that it was possible to move many thousands of solders in a single hour for the purpose of a surprise invasion. However, the tunnel was discovered before it's completion. Apparently the North Koreans have tried this tunnel thing several times, at least 4 of their tunnels have been discovered between 1974 and 1990.

The DMZ seemed like a schizophrenic place to me. One that acknowledges the brutalities of the past, the nervous guarding of the present and the hope for the future. The South Koreans are flourishing like the wildlife at the DMZ, but they are under constant threat.

(I apologize that the photos aren't in the correct order; I'm still not very good at blogging yet.)