It Doesn't Get Much More Korean Than Kimchi

One of the things we love about eating out in Korea are the free, all-you-can-eat  side dishes that come with your meal.  One could almost make an entire meal out of the side dishes.  It is pretty normal that 5-7 small dishes of sides will be brought to your table right before you are served your main dish. (Kindof like bread or chips and salsa in America) The sides vary from restaurant to restaurant depending on what is served but the one that is pretty much standard at all restaurants is kimchi.

These are all free and different side dishes that came with our meal.

As many of you know Russ and I lived in Korea before this experience back in 2000.  When we lived here the first time, Russ took a pretty much immediate liking to kimchi, but it took me quite a bit longer to enjoy it.  I tried it once or twice a week for about 6 months until I could actually say I liked it, but once we came back this past summer we both jumped right into loving it again.  The girls, not so much.  Someone made the mistake of telling them what it is and pretty much they didn't even give it a chance.  Hopefully before we leave here we can get them to the point of liking it as well.

By now, many of you are wondering what this kimchi I am writing about it is.  Here is a definition I found in the dictionary:

A Korean dish made of vegetables, such as cabbage or radishes, that are salted, seasoned, and stored in sealed containers to undergo lactic acid fermentation.

Basically it is spicy, fermented cabbage.  Knowing the definition you can understand why my girls aren't super excited about eating it.  But like I said, Russ and I love it.  You have to have an open mind and like spicy food in order to like it.  We both will eat it plain but love it mixed with a little bit of rice.  The rice acts as a buffer to take away some of the spiciness.  

When we received orders to come over here we both expressed an excitement to do very "Korean" things, so when we were given the opportunity to make kimchi for a day we both immediately jumped on it.  As luck would have it, Uncle Joe was with us that day and he was "lucky" enough to experience this adventure with us.   I talked about the Good Neighbor Program (GNP) before in a hike that we did.  This adventure was another GNP outing, therefore it was not only Americans but quite a few Koreans that participated as well.

We had to get up early and took a  bus about an hour and half outside of Seoul to a locally owned farming area.

In the Korean culture making kimchi is a woman's job.  Therefore, it was a very big deal that there were numerous Korean men there to help as well as they were very excited to see all the American men there to work.

Many of these men were retired Korean military officers.

There were a lot of people there to make kimchi.

My friend and I, before the fun began.  See how clean we are?

Mrs. Lee the ROK commandant's wife

Mrs. Regner and the girls

 Not being Korean, we had no idea what was involved with making kimchi.  Therefore, they had quite a few older Korean ladies there to "instruct" us.  When I say "instruct" I basically mean tell us we weren't doing it correctly.  

They had all the supplies there and ready for us to start when we arrived.

The cabbage is the main ingredient

They brought the cabbage in to us in wheelbarrows.

There are many types of kimchi and many different ways of making it.  The kimchi we made had some radishes mixed in with it.  These are sliced Korean radish.

This is the powdered spice.

Here they are mixing the spices with salt in massive buckets.

  They started with the men bringing in these huge bags of radish and spreading them all along the long table we were all standing at.

That is a lot of radish.

 Next they brought in the spices and spread them over the radish.

We had to mix it all together really good to get the spices all over the radish.

We assumed making kimchi would be messy so we wore old clothes, but we had no idea how messy it would be. We were all covered in kimchi spices from head to toe (literally I had it in my hair and on my shoes) by the end of the day.

The next step was to add some sort of greens to the radish.  I couldn't quite figure out what the green leaves were and no one could tell me in English.

 After it was all mixed together really good they brought the heads of cabbage in.

Because my hands were covered in kimchi spice I wasn't able to take a lot of pictures during the day.  Therefore, most of these pictures are ones I got from someone else which is why we aren't in most of them.

There was an exact science to putting the spicy radish in the cabbage.  You had to open each of the leaves on the cabbage head and rub the spices in each one then you had to put just a little bit of radish in between the leaves.  If you did to much or to little the Korean ladies would take your cabbage head and redo the whole thing.  I pretty much never got the ratio correct.  Thankfully, the ladies were very patient with us.  

Bending over the table for hours our backs all killed us.  Here we are almost done.  Just a few small piles remained.

  That day we made over 1000 heads of cabbage worth of kimchi.  That is a lot of kimchi.  They had cut each head in half in order to get the spices more evenly distributed so we ended up making almost 2500 half heads of kimchi to give out.  The kimchi we made that day was being given to families that are under privileged. 

The finished product.  Looks delicious, doesn't it?

We filled over 200 of these tubs with kimchi and there was still a ton left over. They were heading out to buy more tubs when we left.

Kimchi has to sit a few weeks and ferment before it is good to be eaten, so we couldn't eat any of our finished kimchi that day.  But they did feed us a good Korean lunch.

Uncle Joe had no idea what he was getting himself into when he told us he was coming to stay at our house for a few days.  Thankfully he is a wonderful house guest and just goes with the flow.

 Overall, this was a great experience for our family.  This is something they do every year and we all said on the way home we were looking forward to going back next year.

Snow in Seoul

I was just talking to my parents in Pennsylvania yesterday...they told me there are record breaking highs in that area right now.  They were telling me how beautiful it is in the mid 60's.  Unfortunately, I couldn't relate because as I looked out my window this is what I saw...

We got about 5 inches of snow today.  Since we moved to Seoul from nice, warm and sunny North Carolina we are not at all prepared for the snow or cold weather.  Taylor was sleeping over at a friends house since school was out, but Lucy wanted to go outside and play in the snow.  We put did our best to put the warmest clothing on she owned and she played outside for about an hour.

The coat is great, but the rain boots and jeans not so warm.

We live at the top of a hill here and they did a terrible job of getting the roads on base cleared off, so the mom of Taylor's friend could not get to our house.  We had to walk down the hill to pick her up.

Busy Seoul does not stop for a couple inches of snow.

Gyeongbokgung Palace

Things You Would Only Find in Korea-Part 3:

 Entire shopping malls that are open from 10:30 am until 4:30 am.  The area that this shopping mall is located mainly caters to night shoppers, so many of the stores do not open until late in the afternoon and stay open till the very early hours of the morning.  It is popular with the military wives over here to go to this area for "Midnight Shopping". (The actual active duty member has a 1 am curfew but that does not apply to the spouses.)  I went midnight shopping not long after I got here with some ladies.  It was crazy.  We left the base around 10:30 pm and got home around 2 am.  The craziest part-there were literally thousands of Koreans shopping while we were there.  Some people say you can get better deals if you go to late night shopping.  If you know me you know 2 things for sure:
1.  I LOVE to shop.
2.  I LOVE a good deal
But even I don't love shopping or deals enough to get them at 2 am.  It was a fun experience...once and maybe I will do it again when my mom comes to visit (she loves deals and shopping as much as I do), but there is pretty much nothing that I need that I have to buy after midnight.  It can wait until the next day and I will pay the $1.00 more.
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 That's a mouthful isn't it?  The name means "Palace Greatly Blessed by Heaven"

As I said in my last post, Uncle Joe came to visit us for about a week over Thanksgiving and we were able to do quite a bit of sightseeing.  We choose to visit this palace one day while the girls were in school.  There are numerous palaces all around Seoul, but this is one of the biggest.

It was originally constructed in 1395, but it was destroyed by the Japanese in the 1590's.  It was constructed for a second time in the 1860's on a much larger scale but once again destroyed and sat in ruins until 1990 when an effort to rebuild it to it's former glory has been ongoing to the present day.

One of the things we immediately noticed was how the mountains were just beyond the palace walls.  It made for a beautiful background.

 We decided to take the free English guided tour around the palace so that we would more about the history.

Trying to figure out how to build one of these palaces while we waited for our tour to start.

Our tour guide.  This palace is right in the middle of the city.

 This is the main palace building, where kings were crowned, met with foreign officials and conducted daily business.

The animals on the posts were there to protect the king.

His throne.

The ceiling in the throne room.

Notice the 3 aisles of stones...the center was for the king or royalty one side was for scholars and the other was for military.

This was a banquet hall.

One of the inner palace walls.

This was how they heated the buildings.  They would burn coals under the  buildings and heat the floors.  Many Korean homes still have heated floors as their primary source of heat.

We went and grabbed a quick sandwich for lunch then hurried back to see the changing of the guard.  That was my favorite part of the tour.

The guards standing right outside the main palace gate right before the new guards come to take their place.

The new guards marching in.

They hit this drum numerous times and it was so loud you could hear it all over the palace. 

The new guards standing in place.

It was cold and windy, but they didn't move.   It was so tempting to poke him to see if he would move, but I thought that was probably a bit immature of me.  So I kept my hands to myself.

It was a cold day to be walking around outside but I learned a lot of very awesome history.  I could fill this post with a ton of facts about this palace.  But you will just have to come over and visit us in order to hear them all for yourself. :)

Our on the way home picture on a very crowded subway.

As a side note, I'm having some trouble with the blog right now.  I don't know why it is sending out emails from old posts.  I had to delete all the old pictures, but I'm in the process of getting them all reloaded and put back in the posts.  I'm sorry for any extra emails you are getting.   I don't send out the emails, the blog website does and so I have no control over it.  Hopefully it will all be resolved soon.