King Crab and Sea Cucumber

The school that I'm working at is very generous and really likes to take the staff out for dinner and even on day trips usually once a month. This month we did both!

A few weeks ago most of the teachers at my school took a trip with my director (Mr. Lee) and his wife to the costal town of Yungduk. The purpose of this trip was to go eat as much crab as we could. It was about a two hour drive to get there, so my director brought out the tv in his van and put in a movie - Freddy vs. Jason. I really hope that was just the only English movie he had with him at the time and if not, what a strange selection.

When we got there we were surrounded by restaurants, some having huge photos of crab on the outside, while others went to the extreme of having gigantic plastic crabs on the roof or for the entrance way. I don't know how we decided on a spot to eat, but we picked a restaurant where you got to choose your live crab outside and then they would steam it for you and serve it inside. While our crabs were being steamed we took a walk through the seafood market and along the boardwalk. One interesting thing we saw was people scuba diving. One of our Korean co-workers explained that they were women scuba diving and they were diving for sea weed. Sea weed is a huge part of the Korean diet, so I can see why they need a lot of divers. These divers are all women because it is the men that do all of the fishing.

We returned to our restaurant and ate and ate and ate. One thing that I missed though was the good ol' garlic butter for dipping that you get at home - none of that stuff here! I also experienced eating raw sea cucumber. I tried one piece and I will never try it again. We asked our director if he likes it and he replied saying that no, he didn't like it, but it was very healthy for you so that's why he ate it.

Later this month we were taken out to dinner at a buffet restaurant with a wide selection of sushi, other fish, meats and pasta. When we got there, our director explained that we were out for dinner to celebrate as the school had just won an award for being one of the top five English Academys in Daegu. I'm still not sure how they ranked the schools, none the less, that was pretty sweet to hear!

DMZ trip

One of the things I wanted to do while in Korea was visit the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. There are many tours offered by different companies, but we decided to try out another trip with Adventure Korea. The DMZ tour was on Sunday, so 5 of us decided to leave for Seoul early Saturday morning so that we could get the most out of our weekend in the big city.

When we got off the KTX in Seoul our first stop was Namdaemun Gate. I had very briefly seen Namdaemun the first time I was in Seoul, but about 3 weeks ago it was set ablaze by a 70 year old man angry at the government. Like a lot of Koreans and tourists, we wanted to see the aftermath of this event. Namdaemun is the South gate of the city and is Korea's #1 National Treasure. The city didn't waste any time and already had huge walls around the gate and were dong work on the inside. They did leave one little plastic window to peer inside, but most of what you could see was scaffolding. As you can see in the pictures, there has been paper put up all around the wall for people to write messages, and still weeks after the fire there were many visitors to the site.

The rest of the day was pretty much a blur of market shopping and touring the Seoul subway lines. We finally checked into our hostel and then went out again for the rest of the night. We met up with Marla and Rosie (two other Daeguites who decided to come into Seoul a little later) and Ryan and Allison for dinner. Ryan and Alli took us to a restaurant and introduced us to one of my new favourite Korean foods - 닭 갈비 (dak galbi). Dak galbi is chicken cooked in a spicy stirfry with cabbage, other greens, rice dough noodles and ramyen noodles. After that we checked out a few different bars, but decided to call the night semi-early as we had to get up for the tour the next day.

Sunday brought us to the DMZ and what Bill Clinton called "the scariest place on earth". Korea is the only divided country in the world and the DMZ marks the line of division and the 2 km on either side of the "truce line". To be allowed in the DMZ area you have to be with a tour group and must carry your passport or alien registration card with you. Every tour company visits different sites on the DMZ, which would definatley determine what kind of experience you have at the DMZ. Overall, I think that our tour was good, but not great. The first stop on the tour was the Freedom Bridge, which was an old train line also used to exchange prisoners after the Korean War. Next was lunch in Tongilchon, one of the only two villages in the DMZ. This village is famous for it's production of soybeans, especially the making of soybean paste which is used in many Korean food dishes. The third stop was the 3rd tunnel - discovered in 1978, this tunnel was dug from North Korea to come into the south and attack Seoul. The tunnel is 73 meters below the ground and only 2 meters in height, 2 meters in width and 1635 meters in length. We were allowed to walk the tunnel until approximately 150 or so meters away from North Korea - no pictures allowed! One of the crazy things about this tunnel is that the rocks were covered in charcoal so that if found the North Koreans could pass it off as an abandoned mine! In total, four tunnels have been found on the DMZ, but there is an estimated 20 more still out there.

After the tunnel we traveled to the Dora Observatory where we could actually get a view of Kesung City, the second largest city in North Korea. At the lookout platform we were allowed to take photos, but were restricted to taking photos only behind the yellow line. Two people on the tour (of course one of them was with us) forgot about the photo line and had their cameras taken by Korean soldiers and their photos searched. Luckily our tour leader was a cool guy and got the soldiers to give the cameras back very quickly. From this view point we could also see the world's tallest flag pole (160 meters) on the North Korean side which was built to top the South Korean's pole at 98 meters. The North Korean "propaganda village" can also be seen, which was designed with extremely tall buldings to give the impression that the North was a prosperous nation. It is said that these buildings are not even functional after the first floors and that they do not even have windows!

Finally, or last stop was the Dorasan station, a train station that will eventually be the gateway to North Korea, the rest of Asia and Europe. Currently they have a few trains a day running from Seoul to Dorasan and then into the North. These trains are only for cargo thus far. At the station we got to stamp our passports with unofficial stamps to say that we had been to this station (I don't know if we are technically even supposed to put stamps like this in our passport). After the tour we headed straight back to Daegu to get some much needed rest.