Anthony in Korea, Day 18, Saturday, May 9, 2009

Well, another great day…this day was very interesting because I did such a wide variety of things…


I started the day with a walk around Deoksugung Palace, which is an oriental-style palace that’s been used by Korean kings for 500 years. I didn’t actually go inside the walls if the palace (check future posts for a description); rather, I literally walked around the old wall of the palace, and this pathway led to some interesting sights. Along the way I ran into the US Embassy, but I was warned by the Korean police officer that photos were forbidden. All I wanted to do was take a picture of the entrance! Don’t me started about what it means that a passer-by can’t take a simple photo of a gate and an eagle emblem; the New World Order is well on its way to taking away every last freedom—even the freedom to take a picture of a wall!!! Anyway, the walk was so nice otherwise and it led me to a great little budget restaurant called Gimbapgwamandusai, which specializes in Korean “sushi,” also known as gimbap. You may think that sushi is raw fish rolled in rice but that’s not correct. Actually, sushi is anything—meat, fish, vegetables—rolled in rice and seaweed (sometimes the seaweed is on the outside, sometimes the rice is on the outside). Sashimi is sushi with raw fish, what most people think of when they think of sushi. But gimpab is the Korean version of anything rolled in rice and seaweed. [Please take a look at the photos of what I ate and the lady preparing what I ate]. So I had ya-chae gimpbap (vegetable gimbap), and it was so delicious. And it only cost $2.00!!! And that includes a bowl of miso soup and two side dishes! I can’t believe how great it was—I would have paid quadruple the price for it. It was so good, in fact, that I bought some to go and ate it later on.


Next I headed to the Agriculture Museum. I won’t describe it too much because the description may be boring. But actually it was an extremely modern and beautiful (and free) museum that traced the history of agriculture (rice cultivation, in particular) in Korea over the past several thousand years. After that I headed to a huge statue in the downtown are called Hammering Man [see photo]. This statue, created by an American artist, depicts a man hammering away, moving continuously, all day and all night (it really does move; it’s not a regular immobile statue). Apparently, it’s supposed to represent the meanginglessness of labor unless it is labor done out of love for one’s job. Because of my disdain for meaningless labor I just had to see it. And it was pretty cool. Across the street from Hammering Man is a Gyeonghuigung, another oriental-style palace which, unfortunately, was largely destroyed by the Japanese during WWII. I took my picture in front of it but could not go all the way inside because it is still being renovated.


I capped off my night with a trip to Seoul’s most famous indoor-outdoor market, Nandaemun. If you’ve been following this blog, you may recall I went to another market called Dongdaemun two weeks ago to buy a jacket. Dongaemun was a typical indoor mall-type market with hundreds of stalls, and most products being sold were fashion-oriented. Namdaemun, however, was totally different. It was the stereotypical “Asian-style” flea-market, with vendors literally everywhere, all over the streets, on the sidewalks, and there were small shops as well. My goodness, I am not even sure how to describe Namdaemun. To give you a better idea of what it is I am going to create two posts tonight, the second of which will contain five photos just of Namdaemun. [Actually, I’m posting this special section of Namdaemun for my father, who sitting at home now watching Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, and Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern; so now he can see his son doing the same stuff they do, only I’m not brave enough to eat the weird foods they eat in those shows].


Namdaemun is really indescribable…do you want to have some fresh squid…so fresh that the woman takes it from the tank before your eyes and chops it up with a cleaver and deep-fries it in seconds and serves it up with some side dishes? Then go to Namdaemun. Do you want a new leather belt—made in Korea, not China—for under five bucks? The go to Namdaemun. Do you want to buy some Korean trinkets as some old ladies sit on the sidewalk behind you chopping up mackerel or selling fresh strawberries? Then go to Namdaemun. Because it’s all there, all the time (it’s a 24-hour market); and all of these vendors are literally elbow-to-elbow, lining dozens of narrow little streets mobbed with Koreans and tourists alike. And it’s truly amazing.